Christopher Corti
Cloud Engineer

Disaster-Proof IT: Recovery with Nutanix Solutions

Suddenly, your business comes to a halt! Not with us! Anyone who knows that IT is now a core function of their company has a plan in place and is prepared for attacks and malfunctions.

What is the problem?

Since the invention of the first computer, IT has evolved continuously, digitizing more and more repetitive, large-scale, and administrative tasks. Today, there are hardly any processes that function without networks and computers. That’s why every company must be prepared to answer the question: “What if my data centre suddenly and unexpectedly fails?” The answer is simple — Disaster Recovery.

Even systems designed for high availability can fail. This can be due to undetected software bugs, external factors such as fires, water damage from leaks, or flooding. To restore normal operations as quickly as possible after such a disaster, you need a solid plan and strategy. Damaged hardware often cannot be restored within a reasonable timeframe. Ordering and receiving new infrastructure takes longer than a business, more precisely, your business can afford to be offline.

Which technology provides a solution?

Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure gives you the perfect combination of high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. The Nutanix platform is designed for high availability, meaning that one or even two servers in the platform can fail at the same time, and all virtual machines will automatically restart on the remaining resources. However, this protection does not cover larger disasters, which is why Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is the perfect complement to the platform.

How do we solve your problem?

Operating two physically separate data centres is a good start. But as you’ll see, there’s also a simple solution if you don’t have two data centres. With two data centres, you can run part of your systems in one and the rest in the other. Ideally, backup copies are also stored in the other or even in a third data centre, so the data remains accessible in the event of a disaster. However, restoring from a backup often takes several hours and requires many manual configurations before services are operational again. To reduce the manual work of recovering virtual machines from backups, Nutanix DRaaS can automatically synchronize all VMs or only the most important ones, to the second data centre. If the same IP addresses cannot be made available in both data centres, DRaaS can automatically adjust them during a failover. But that’s not all , the created synchronizations can be automatically validated and tested, ensuring that the VMs will start without issues during a real disaster failover.

Is this also available as a hybrid cloud solution?

Not every company has the budget to operate two data centres and keep the hardware only 50% utilized to cover such scenarios. Nutanix has a solution for that too. Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2) brings the hyperconverged Nutanix infrastructure as a service from the public cloud. It can be seamlessly connected to your on-premises infrastructure and used as a disaster recovery target. There are two main approaches to implementing DRaaS:

The first option with fast Disaster Recovery runs an NC2 environment in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud in parallel with your on-premises cluster. Just like with two data centres, part of the services run on NC2 and the rest locally, with both sides synchronizing to each other. In case of a failure, failover can be performed immediately on the remaining environment.
The second, cost optimized option, is to continuously back up your VMs to temporary cloud storage. If your local data centre fails, an NC2 cluster is dynamically created and started, the VM data is uploaded to NC2, and then the VMs are launched.

Both options have their own advantages and trade-offs. So make your infrastructure disaster-proof and contact us for a comprehensive, tailor-made solution for your company!