Nutanix : Xi Leap a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

We all wish to avoid disasters, but unfortunately, they do occur. Today statistics indicate that even a very short amount of downtime can have significant adverse effects on a company. Revenues are impacted. Customers are impacted. Company reputation is affected.

So, do you need a disaster recovery plan?

Hardware fails, people do mistakes, and having a solution with no downtime it’s just impossible. How can you guarantee no downtime at all?
The requirements, the size, the complexity, and the level of details vary dramatically from customer to customer, and most of the time, not all applications are mission-critical and require to be part of a disaster recovery plan.
We recommend you to start by doing a BIA (Business impact analysis) bia.vinception.fr, in order to understand what’s the impact of application’s downtime and data loss, which will help you to identify your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) (how much data you can afford to lose) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) (how long the application can be down without impacting your business) on an application-by-application. 
As with most plans, it is important to identify what you really need, the objectives and goals, and then build a plan. Once you set your objectives, then you can begin to choose the technology to meet those objectives.  Another important piece is to test your plan; how can you be sure your disaster recovery plan will work the day you need it if you have never tested it before? Operational processes and testing your disaster recovery plan is critical.

Must the DR site be a physical?

This is not typically true. It usually depends on your requirements, current facilities, number of sites and connectivity, how much money you are willing to spend, etc..
If you are a Nutanix customer, you have the choice between an on-site DR or just a DR as a service. This service is a cloud-based disaster recovery built on Xi Leap Cloud services by Nutanix. The replication is based on the Async-DR replication, with a minimum of 1 hour as RPO.

Let’s take a quick look

Aren’t disaster recovery plans extremely expensive?

Too often the budget is spent on the very latest technologies at the expense of protecting the critical data. Having a site, an infrastructure and human resources all sitting idle waiting for a failure would not be a good use of resources. With Xi Leap you can pay-as-you-go while reducing CapEx and OpEx.

Long story short, not all customers have multiple sites they can rely on to keep their business running. This is why you can subscribe to a DRaaS with Nutanix XI Leap and consume it for your mission-critical applications which is a good compromise between cost, complexity, and achieving your availability and recoverability requirements. 

You can find more information about Xi-Leap here.

What’s the next step? 

From the following link, you can sign up on Nutanix Test Drive and start testing the new DRaaS Nutanix solution module.

In summary, the business can most likely operate without a DR. Disaster Recovery is somewhat similar to life/car insurance, you invest your money today, to overcome a possible disaster in the future.

Enjoy!