IT infrastructure professionals have many DR options to ensure that they can meet or exceed the RTO and RPO requirements. Infrastructure architectures have rapidly evolved over the years, and DR solutions have been developed to exploit those innovations. Early traditional architectures relied almost exclusively on backup and restore software that copied data to tape, which presented numerous challenges in client/server environments. Eventually came storage area networks (SANs), which used powerful external storage arrays and embedded snapshot and replication capabilities that vastly improved DR. Then, virtualization platforms introduced backup and replication options at the VM level.  

Today, customers are consolidating, refreshing, and modernizing their aging virtualization platforms with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HCI architectures help customers achieve a highly automated and orchestrated cloud operations experience. The architectures are designed to deliver high levels of performance and scalability with software-defined compute, storage, and networking. HCI solutions are also designed to simplify the implementation of high availability and DR for workloads running in VMs and containers.