TwinStrata introduces On-Demand Disaster Recovery as a Service for VMware users

TwinStrata, an innovator in cloud-integrated storage solutions, today announced CloudArray® Disaster Recovery as a Service (CloudArray DRaaS), a new component of TwinStrata’s flagship CloudArray offering that delivers seamless disaster recovery (DR) for VMware users on-demand without requiring continuous investment in secondary infrastructure or sites.

Traditional disaster recovery alternatives have required massive investments in offsite infrastructure and resources, such as maintaining an off-site data center, replicated storage systems and even standby servers. Meanwhile, cloud-based DR alternatives for VMware environments have been limited by incompatibility and difficult administration, often requiring third-party conversion, migration and/or backup tools – which TwinStrata’s service makes obsolete. CloudArray DRaaS eliminates cost and infrastructure expansion typically associated with such redundancy, while still providing an effective and speedy mechanism for recovering both data and applications in the event of a disaster.

With the new CloudArray DRaaS, TwinStrata enables mid-market and small enterprise organizations to implement an enterprise-class disaster recovery strategy at less than a tenth the cost of either hosted offsite options or secondary site infrastructure. Organizations using CloudArray DRaaS can expect spin-up times of servers in two to four hours – and near-immediate restores under ideal conditions – for typical environments ranging in increments of 50 VMs or more.

“Today, we use a combination of TwinStrata, cloud storage and an always-on cloud compute environment to drive our disaster recovery strategy,” said Vernon Jackson, senior systems engineer, SEPA Laboratories. “While it works well, it's pretty costly to keep secondary infrastructure up and running in the cloud just so we can run DR tests once a quarter. With this new CloudArray DRaaS offering, we can eliminate eight months worth of cloud compute costs, while still maintaining a quarterly DR test schedule. That's a huge savings.”

Brief Facts about TwinStrata Cloud DRaaS
· On-demand disaster recovery of applications and data
· 20X cost savings over hosted DR
· Specifically designed for VMware environments
· No dedicated hardware or infrastructure
· No conversion scripting, complex, risky orchestrations or third party tools
· 2-4 hours spin-up of application servers, immediate data availability
· DR configuration and recovery plan stored securely in TwinStrata Portal
· DR infrastructure enabled by SoftLayer’s VMware-based cloud compute environment
· 24/7/365 support

“IT organizations are moving to the cloud to gain agility, reduce IT costs, and increase both service and utilization while taking advantage of the cloud's pay-for-what-you-use model,” said Dan Iacono, Cloud Storage Systems, IDC. “TwinStrata's DRaaS can help IT organizations realize those cloud benefits, and it can also help enable an improved disaster recovery strategy, while providing flexibility and cloud choice.”

“Before this service, we found that ‘cloud DR’ options were not particularly viable for fully virtualized IT environments, and those few that were integrated for VMware came at prohibitively high costs,” said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata. “Our cloud disaster recovery service enables VMware users to recovery data and applications seamlessly at a fraction of the cost, making disaster recovery, business continuity and compliance with recovery objectives and regulations attainable for nearly any organization.”

TwinStrata’s CloudArray DRaaS offering is enabled by TwinStrata CloudArray software and SoftLayer’s VMware-based CloudLayer Computing infrastructure, making it particularly well suited for VMware-based environments. In addition, the CloudArray DRaaS can work with or without backup software. Customers can choose to have data and VMs stored directly on CloudArray, which eliminates the need for backup software and enables immediate recovery of a live copy of data from a selection of snapshots in the cloud. Customers with existing or preferred backup software can use CloudArray DRaaS in conjunction with such software.

TwinStrata’s CloudArray DRaaS currently supports the following cloud storage providers: SoftLayer Cloud Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Google Durable Reduced Availability (DRA), Amazon S3, Amazon RRS and Nirvanix SDN. Expanded support for other providers is expected in the future.