Last week, Symantec and Microsoft announced a joint effort to deliver Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This hybrid approach will involve using Symantec Storage Foundation HA for Windows on the customer premises to provide data replication and failover management to Microsoft's Azure cloud services. This is a pretty big deal.
While our largest customers have the luxury of multiple data centers spread across a large area, most companies don't. With multiple data centers, a company can provision additional capacity in each one to host another data center's critical applications in the event of a site failure. But in the absence of additional real estate, a company's options for disaster recovery are more limited. And this is where DRaaS comes into play.
This service will allow smaller organizations to acquire virtual real estate in the form of Microsoft's Azure cloud services, which will host the customer's data replication targets and spin up critical applications in the event of a site outage at the customer's premises. Better still, since Microsoft prices compute resources separately from storage resources, the customer only has to pay for compute power when those applications have to go online. The compute power required to receive replicated data is minimal, so under normal (i.e., non-disaster) circumstances, the customer doesn't have to pay for compute power they're not using.
The service won't be available until some time next year so there are still many details to be worked out, but expect to see more on this exciting news in the coming months.
More news here and here, and a good video from Microsoft's site here.
