Modern infrastructure is more resilient than ever. Virtualization, storage technologies, and even containers reduce the chances of a crippling IT disaster that could bring the organization to a full stop. However, a DR plan is still essential. It is still commonplace to hear stories of woe and despair when an organization is hit by a ransomware attack. Such attacks can require rummaging through countless recovery points to find one that is not infected. Even mundane events like cutting an important network uplink or experiencing a power outage in the data center can necessitate implementation of a DR plan.

A few decades ago, the answer to DR was tape—a slow and bulky approach to protecting workloads. This was replaced by replication technology, which allowed near real-time copies of data to be transmitted to one or more separate sites. This enabled many organizations to achieve a much quicker recovery time objective (RTO). However, it was still typically a manual and error-prone process to find and retrieve the correct recovery point and then to restore all the virtual machines in the right order to reinstate the end-to-end business processes. It was also necessary to have sufficient, compatible hardware to support the recovery of all critical workloads in a DR environment. Most of the time, that hardware would sit idle until required. This approach allowed for a relatively quick recovery but required a significant investment of time and IT resources to maintain. It also proved financially impractical for smaller organizations that could not justify the additional cost to duplicate, patch, and maintain their IT environment in order to preserve, protect, and resume using their data. Additionally, even if failover worked, failback was often an even bigger nightmare.

Today there are better tools to facilitate DR, reducing the time and resources IT needs to invest for recovery. A modern DR strategy uses cloud resources for DR. Organizations can take advantage of cloud economics for DR instead of enduring all the capital expenses needed to achieve the same level of DR preparedness.

This paper analyzes the advantages of implementing Dell EMC VxRail with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Service to achieve a highly reliable, fast, and consistent DR solution that leverages cloud economics. This solution harnesses VMware’s technology to replicate data to a highly resilient cloud service, where it can be easily recovered. DR is made easier through the implementation of VxRail, which provides a high level of consistency, making it easier to expand an environment. It also allows IT to focus on making the organization successful instead of trying to remember how to deploy a host. 

In this paper, we define the unique advantages that VxRail brings to modern disaster recovery. We consider VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery—how it works, and how it modernizes DR. Finally, we explore the benefits that leveraging VxRail and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery together can bring to the organization.