One of the biggest obstacles to disaster recovery in the public cloud is hypervisor conversion. The fact of the matter is that if you are going to recover in a public cloud then you going to have to use their hypervisor. If you’re not using that hypervisor now then you’re going to have to convert. Like everything in IT, this isn’t a straight black & white decision.
Maybe you’re using the public cloud hypervisor on premises – problem solved, no conversion necessary. If you’re using vSphere maybe you have the time, money & patience to make the new VMware/AWS partnership work for you. But in most cases, hypervisor conversion is simply a “bridge to far”, especially when the chips are down, i.e. in a DR scenario. But let’s say you bite the bullet and convert, you cross that bridge. Once on the other side, you learn something else about the bridge, not only is it long…it’s also one way. Public clouds are more than accommodating when it comes to converting to their hypervisor. They’re not so much when it comes to a path back, which is what you’ll eventually have to do when you attempt to bring your VMs home.
Solution? Private cloud providers. You get what you’re looking for in the cloud – pay for use, management if you want it, available resources, but you’ll also find ‘like to like’ hypervisor recovery capabilities for DR. By leveraging Rubrik’s elegant and efficient replication along with their Livemount technology you can reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) to minutes. Combine that with access to all of the major commercial hypervisors and you’ve eliminated the complexity of hypervisor conversion when disaster strikes. Just as important, when it’s time to fail back, because thankfully most disasters end, simply reverse replication, Rubrik Livemount and migrate back to primary and you’re right back in business.
