Disaster Recovery Appliance Speeds, Simplifies Recovery

Business continuity vendor Arcserve has introduced an appliance that allows companies to quickly restart applications in the event of disasters and consolidate various methods of disaster recovery. The 9000 series appliance, which uses Arcserve’s Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, fits somewhere between a purpose-built backup appliance and hyperconverged infrastructure. It combines fast server processing, high-speed networking and flash-accelerated deduplicated storage. It also includes WAN-optimized replication to both private and public clouds. The appliance can quickly spin up dozens of virtual machines with up to 20 cores and as much as 768GB of RAM, and can store up to 504TB of backups per appliance. With expansion kits, the capacity can be increased four-fold.

One of the most important features of the appliance is cutting down on the time it takes to get back up and running—an important capability in today’s world.

“What’s unique is the ability to actually host and run applications on the device,” explains Phil Goodwin, research director in IDC’s enterprise infrastructure practice. “Typically, you would have a disaster recovery scenario where the data would have to be recovered or rehydrated as an intermediate step to restarting the application. In this case, you can restart the application directly on the device.”

This type of appliance will be most beneficial to smaller companies or those without modern disaster recovery capabilities, Goodwin says. That’s a big pool: IDC estimates that up to 50 percent of organizations don’t have a disaster recovery capability or plan.

But even companies that already have a disaster recovery plan in place like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) might consider this approach for a subset of applications because of the time savings it offers.

“There is always at least some delay in actually moving resources to a disaster recovery site, but something like can significantly reduce the recovery time necessary to bring applications up in the case of disaster,” Goodwin said.

Because the appliance integrates on-appliance, backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service and offsite disaster recovery, it also allows companies to consolidate and make better use of their IT resources, he added.