Simplify Cloud DR with Dell EMC

With the growing transition to cloud computing, many organizations are looking to leverage the value of cloud to enhance their disaster recovery (DR) plans. In the past, organizations have spent an enormous amount of money on DR sites (servers, backup and systems). And though they often felt that the ROI wasn’t great, options to reduce the cost were limited. In fact, DR testing and recoverability were often delayed and manual — a routine checklist choreographed as a pre-planned activity. Can disaster happen at an arranged time with defined events? Of course not. In fact, most organizations are not confident of recovering in a timely manner when disaster strikes anyway.

For organizations exploring the cloud as a disaster recovery option, Dell EMC offers the Cloud as a deployment choice that can be fundamental to customers’ IT, Digital, Workforce, and Security Transformation journeys. Whether your data and applications reside on-premises or are moving into the public cloud, Dell EMC enables cloud protection across the entire protection portfolio while creating a new class of data protection cloud solutions and services – including backup to the cloud, backup in the cloud, long-term retention to cloud and DR to the cloud. Whether your data and applications reside on-premises or are moving to the cloud, Dell EMC’s cloud protection fits your use case.

GEI Consultants Simplifies Disaster Recovery

Here’s a look at GEI Consultants, Inc. (GEI), one of the nation’s leading engineering and science consulting firms, which is leveraging Dell EMC Cloud DR to back up applications running on 140 VMware virtual machines (VMs) across 33 offices to Dell EMC Data Domain backup appliances in a data center.

Cloud DR and Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) eliminated the need for a second physical data center for replicating backups and has saved GEI the cost of physical data center expenses (rent, power, Internet, security, etc.). “Cloud DR is well aligned with GEI’s focus on the environment,” says Adam Schmitt, Network Operations Supervisor at GEI.

“Cloud DR’s efficient orchestration of resources is magnificent,” Schmitt continues. “It automatically chooses the lowest-cost resource option for restores in Amazon EC2. Alternatively, we can select the type and networking of each instance.”

Simple. Fast. Scalable.

Cloud DR is also simple. GEI uses Dell EMC Data Protection Software to manage backups to the central data center and the cloud.

Explains Schmitt, “With a few clicks, we can create and define our Cloud DR backup and restore jobs for our VMware environment using Data Protection Software. Failback is just as simple. We found there is minimal expertise needed to use Cloud DR.”

“We have ten-terabyte servers that back up in in a few hours,” said Schmitt. “It used to take several days when we used Veeam just to seed the initial backup to the cloud. Now, we get it done in four hours or less. It’s like night and day.”

Dell EMC Supports Disaster Recovery to Microsoft Azure

Dell EMC recently introduced support for DR to Microsoft Azure. Using the same UI and practices that Cloud DR leverages with AWS, customers can now protect, test, and failover from their on-premises VMware environment to Azure, and have an orchestrated failback into their on-premises VMware environment. Cloud DR supports orchestration of a single VM as well as multiple VMs using DR plans – similar to how it’s done for AWS.

Integration with Cloud Snapshot Manager

The latest release of Cloud DR also provides integration with Dell EMC’s Cloud Snapshot Manager (CSM) for in-cloud protection of customers’ workloads during the time they have recovered workloads within the public cloud. Customers can now specify tags in Cloud DR (including specifying them in advance within pre-created DR plans) that will be automatically set as AWS/Azure tags during a VM recovery.  CSM customers can then discover the failed over VMs and use these tags to automatically protect the workloads with an appropriate CSM tag based protection plan. Customers can also use these tags for any other scripting/automation they’d like in the cloud.

Data Protection for VMware Cloud
With Dell EMC for VMware Cloud™ on AWS, users are able to expand on-premises environments to the cloud. Just as VMware Cloud on AWS enables vAdmins to manage cloud resources with familiar VMware tools, Dell EMC seamlessly integrates cloud and on-premises data protection. This allows users to use the same data protection tools in the cloud that they already use on-premises, without needing to upskill.

Data Protection for VMware Cloud™ on AWS

The latest enhancement to Dell EMC’s data protection for VMware Cloud adds disaster recovery to VMware Cloud on AWS. With this capability, organizations can failover on-demand to VMware Cloud on AWS in case of a disaster event – spin off and run VMs in their own VMware Cloud on AWS environment and vMotion the VMs back to on premises when the disaster event is resolved.

Summary

Cloud-based DR offers simplicity, faster recovery and lower costs, both in terms of infrastructure and administrative overhead. Leveraging the cloud as a deployment choice can provide a better value than traditional methods and provides a simplified, fully orchestrated DR solution for organizations of all sizes. With Dell EMC, you can transform your data center to enable greater operational efficiency, resiliency and scalability in both AWS and Azure. Whether you want to leverage cloud computing now or in the near future, only Dell EMC can help you transform your environment for the future, laying the technical foundation for the data center while modernizing your data protection for the cloud right along with it.

Additional Resources:

Learn more: www.dellemc.com/cloudprotection

About the Author: Danielle Coady

Danielle Coady is a motivated and passionate marketing leader responsible for driving marketing alignment across ISG with our strategic partners (VMware, MSFT, NVIDIA, and AMD) focused on our innovative and industry-leading solutions. As a marketing leader with 20+ years of professional experience within the technology industry, her experience is best applied to GTM strategies, messaging, market positioning, partner strategies, and thought leadership. With a proven track record of leading and executing complex marketing programs and teams that accelerate growth and marketing impact, she enjoys rolling up her sleeves, as much as empowering a team. Prior to Dell Technologies, she worked at Hitachi Data Systems, Red Hat, and Double-Take Software. In addition to her corporate experience, Danielle has a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit and has served as a trusted advisor for many small businesses. In 2012, she was also a proud recipient of the Boston 40 Under Forty honor. Outside of work, Danielle enjoys spending time with her family, watching her sons play sports, hiking in New Hampshire and catching up with friends and family. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.