Disasters are as unpredictable as they are frequent.  Customers are no longer wondering if they’ll experience a disaster, they’re now wondering if their business (and reputation) will recover from a disaster.

Recent estimates¹ show global catastrophies causing $85 Billion USD in economic losses in 2015.  DRaaS can help ensure that you aren’t part of this alarming statistic.

The State of Global Disaster Recovery 2014 Annual Report² revealed some disturbing survey results:

• More than 60% of the respondents said they don’t have a fully documented DR plan.
• Most companies in the survey had experienced downtime of critical applications – ranging from hours to weeks.
• One in four had lost entire datacenters for hours, to days.
• 70% of the firms surveyed had experience losses due to outages over the previous year ranging from just a few thousand to millions of dollars lost.

Disaster preparation requires proactive actions.

The ScerIS Disaster Recovery Service leverages constant data protection (CDP) technology to provide that extra layer of protection for on-premise servers, or those running in ScerIS cloud service datacenters.  CDP maintains full backup of identified servers constantly.  This service enables enhanced peace of mind and the ability for customers to mitigate natural and man-made disasters

DRaaS provides protection for servers to ensure that in the event a server becomes inaccessible at the primary datacenter, the servers can be recovered and made accessible while the primary datacenter or server is off line.  ScerIS DRaaS uses storage device (block/disk/LUN) backup technologies, highly available hardware platforms, and Tier 3 datacenters to ensure that recovery of your server services can be accomplished at any time.  ScerIS DRaaS enables customers to protect their server operations without the need to duplicate hardware, software, licenses or develop skills for disaster recovery configuration or management.  ScerIS DRaaS configures, maintains and monitors the DRaaS 24×7 to ensure it is ready for recovery at any time.

ScerIS DRaaS delivers 4 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and can provide Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) as short as 15 minutes depending on the network connectivity selected between the primary datacenter and the chosen ScerIS datacenter.  Since the service is a constant data protection service during each day, changes are constantly and automatically processed and enable the ScerIS DRaaS to provide a full recovery point that is no older than 15 minutes for ON Cloud customers and for OFF Cloud customers a 15 minute RPO using a private network connection from their datacenter to the ScerIS datacenter.

The ScerIS clouds are located in datacenters hosted by Equinix, one of the most respected operators in the industry.  This Cloud POD builds on the availability features of these datacenters that support the ScerIS promise of 99.99% availability.  The ScerIS computing platform extends the focus on availability utilizing redundant power, network and management technologies as well as the highest quality hardware available in the industry to ensure your recovery site is always ready to take over and maintain your business computing needs.  ScerIS makes it easy to protect your business and will protect your virtual servers and physical servers with an intuitive and uniform process you can depend on.

ScerIS will install the a DRaaS agent on each of your servers.  Once this is completed we will setup a VPN connection and verify network connectivity.  Operations sets up each company’s specific solution with recovery technology that automates failover and failback operations that allow ScerIS administrators to create jobs to manage the recovery process for multiple host machines for rapid recovery of files, databases, systems, and entire sites.  We achieve this by mapping servers, applications, storage, and failover procedures from source sites to recovery sites, and automating the logistics involved in resuming business operations at the recovery site.  These processes mean that you don’t need the skills or expertise to build a reliable disaster recovery solution.

Testing ensures that the basic connectivity and parameters for DRaaS are setup.  Following this test, ScerIS will perform the initial synchronization of data and verify the recovery point has been created successfully.  Once verified, ScerIS will perform a complete end-to-end test verifying that the protection of your servers is operational and in turn notify you that you have business continuity protection.  The system continues to constantly monitor your DRaaS solution verifying communications with the agent on your servers, confirming that recovery points satisfy the desired RPO specifications.

Why ScerIS Managed DRaaS?

• Simplicity:  DR configuration and support has to be simple to be successful.  With our intuitive drag-and-drop capabilities we specify which of your servers require protection and soon thereafter your servers are protected from impending disasters.
• Flexibility:  You get to choose where the primary (source) site is located.  DR peace of mind is provided for your virtual and/or physical servers whether located on premise or in the ScerIS data center.
• Reliability & Efficiency:  Recovery sites are geographically dispersed to help ensure availability even if a disaster is widespread.  Combining Tier 3 datacenter reliability features with redundant and highly available hardware ensures we meet our 99.99% SLA promise.  Constant Data Protection technology provides near synchronous updating of recovery point datasets to ensure RPO targets as frequent as 15 minutes can be met.

Service Description

ScerIS DRaaS will automatically manage recovery point retention, helping customers to optimize their protection service and minimize costs.  Location of the recovery data is also selectable from the list of ScerIS datacenters worldwide.  Charges are based on the total monthly allocated storage volume in Gigabytes assigned to a protected server(s).  In the event of a recovery to the ScerIS datacenter, standard server charges will commence for any servers operating in the ScerIS Cloud for the duration that they are active in the ScerIS Cloud.  Recovery points capture all data contained in the block volume/disk/LUN for the server(s) selected for protection.

ScerIS DRaaS can be used for recovery of servers located in a private, “On-Premise” datacenter (Off Cloud), or for customers with computing solutions already in the ScerIS datacenter, or between ScerIS datacenters (On Cloud).  DRaaS includes 24×7 support using the ScerIS support ticketing system or phone support.

In the event of a situation that interrupts access to your primary computing platform services, you will notify ScerIS operations that a recovery is required and authorized.  Once the recovery request is confirmed the ScerIS team initiates the automated recovery software, builds a VMDK for each server with virtual compute resources as the target and identifies the physical compute resource server profile for servers with physical compute resources as a target and then provisions the server(s).  All servers in the recovery site are deployed on virtual compute resources or physical compute resources specified by the customer during setup to match the production server compute resource specifications for processor, memory, network/connectivity and storage.  Once the recovery server is a booted server and operating system console access is verified, ScerIS notifies the customer that the server has been recovered—this is completion of the Recovery Time Objective.

Standard charges are started for processor and memory used by the recovered servers.  The server(s) are ready for ScerIS to load applications and validate the computing environment (these services are outside the recovery services and charged at standard rates).  ScerIS and/or the customer, depending on the DRaaS provided, validate the recovery environment with applications and that DNS modifications have been deployed to redirect users to the recovery platform.

There are no limits on the amount of time the ScerIS recovery site can be used as the “new” primary datacenter, however, since there may be capabilities in the primary datacenter that are not available in the recovery datacenter (network performance, storage capabilities/capacities), it is expected that the recovery site will be “failed back” to the primary site as soon as reasonably possible.  ScerIS provides support for the customer failback processes.