Disaster Recovery as a Service

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

In an increasingly digital world, data availability and protection are crucial. Because of this reliance on IT, even a short interruption can have major consequences. Interruptions can have infrastructural causes (such as hardware failure, power outages, or fire), but more often they are the result of cyberattacks (such as ransomware and hacks) or simply human error. To protect your cloud against all scenarios, Fundaments offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a service that protects your infrastructure, applications, and data by storing them at a separate location.

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The disaster recovery environment

Disaster Recovery as a Service is based on creating an exact copy of your company's business-critical application landscape. Should the primary environment become unreachable due to a disaster, you can easily fall back on the failover environment to continue working as usual. This makes DRaaS from Fundaments an essential part of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

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Data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO)

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) determine the extent of data loss and the speed of service restoration, respectively, following an incident: the 'disaster'.

The amount of data loss is determined by the point to which you can revert, calculated back from the moment of the incident. With Fundaments DRaaS solutions, this can be set to anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to several days. The technology used ensures that the production environment writes changes to the failover environment using a log (called a journal). This principle can be applied for up to two weeks. If longer retention is required, we recommend our Backup as a Service (BaaS) service. Regarding RTO, Fundaments DRaaS solutions provide a ready-to-start environment. All data is synchronized with the failover site, and compute capacity is available to launch the data. Workloads and applications are brought online in the failover environment within minutes of the incident once the failover is activated.

Fundaments offers two different DRaaS solutions, which can also be used in combination. The specific configuration depends on your RTO and RPO requirements.

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Fundaments' disaster recovery services

Fundaments offers two disaster recovery services: Zerto Virtual Replication and VMware Cloud Director Availability. Both DRaaS solutions are fully integrated with Fundaments' IaaS services. This means that environment recovery, whether for testing or an actual failover, can be performed fully automatically. By pressing the 'red button,' any environment can be failed over to the most recent point in time: from there, the software handles configuring the workloads to the correct network, renumbering IP addresses, and starting them in the correct sequence. Due to this high level of integration, the service is also very easy to configure and use.

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Zerto Virtual Replication

Zerto is a highly reputable player in the DRaaS market. With years of experience in providing a cloud-agnostic solution, Zerto Virtual Replication is the most versatile option for disaster recovery: it supports both Hyper-V and VMware vSphere in private clouds, as well as migration to public clouds like Azure and AWS.

Failover management is handled via an online portal, accessible through the Fundaments Customer Portal. In this portal, you can configure workloads and view the current RPO. You can also initiate a failover from here, either in test mode or for an actual failover. The simplicity of the portal ensures both clear visibility into the current status and easy management.

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VMware Cloud Director Availability

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a DRaaS solution focused on providing disaster recovery for the VMware vSphere platform. The product is deeply integrated into the Cloud Director management portal, making it simple to use. This solution offers an RPO of 1 minute, meaning data loss is limited to 1 minute. It is also frequently used to migrate from an existing vSphere platform to Fundaments IaaS.

Just like with Zerto Virtual Replication, you can set up DR protection for each virtual server. You can configure the RPO and add retention, allowing you to fall back on earlier recovery points. This option is often used to recover in the event of a ransomware scenario.

Additionally, you can add a configuration for a test scenario, allowing you to fully test the setup without impacting your services. This functionality is available as standard. Thanks to its seamless integration with Fundaments IaaS, VMware Cloud Director Availability offers an accessible solution for implementing DRaaS, especially when RPO requirements are measured in minutes rather than seconds.

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Zerto Virtual Replication or VMware Cloud Director Availability?

Fundaments advises on which DRaaS solution best fits your implementation. As a rule of thumb, Zerto Virtual Replication is the choice when RPO requirements are less than a minute, or when there is a difference in virtualization technology between the source and failover platforms. Zerto Virtual Replication is also the preferred choice when failover to hyperscalers like AWS and Azure is required.

VMware Cloud Director Availability is best suited for standard disaster recovery needs based on VMware vSphere. If an RPO of 5 minutes is acceptable, this solution is a great fit.

The DRaaS service can be applied in several scenarios: the most common is Cloud to Cloud DRaaS, where both the source and failover environments are hosted within Fundaments IaaS. Another widely used scenario is failover from an office location to Fundaments IaaS: this is on-premises to Cloud DRaaS. This provides a disaster recovery service without the need for large investments in your own hardware.

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High-quality data center locations

Fundaments DRaaS is provided from a fully Dutch platform, distributed across seven locations in the East, Central, and West of the Netherlands. All production data center locations are Tier 3+ facilities, the highest achievable class for a Dutch data center today. Tier 3+ data centers are equipped with comprehensive security, including guaranteed power supply, intrusion protection, water and fire detection, and climate control.