VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery For Exclusive Island Resort In Arabian Gulf Region

An exclusive five-star island of 43 hectares in the Persian Gulf that belongs to the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. It is one of the most talked-about and scroll-stopping destinations in the entire United Arab Emirates. Sustainability and eco-consciousness are not an afterthought; they are ingrained in every aspect of the event, design, architecture, and plant life to the energy sources, packaging, and company ethos (proud to be plastic-free!). Customer utilize innovative clean food waste technology (ORCA system) to ensure that they produce no wet garbage, thereby reducing harmful gas emissions and pesticide use on the island.

Citrus Consulting Services Enables Global Distribution and Supply Chain Solutions Provider with VMware Cloud on AWS

Customer is hosting all their business applications at an on-prem data center, and they were worried about business continuity and fault tolerance for the workloads that are running in the data center. The cost of setting up a dedicated DR site would be very high, and it would also take a longer period to set up an on-prem DR. OPEX cost for keeping the lights on for the DR site was also prohibitive considering Data Center facilities cost, Hardware Cost, Labor Cost, Electricity and Cooling cost. The customer was looking for a solution that would solve the business continuity problem with a quick turn-around time for the DR setup

The customer has seen a tremendous benefit with the implemented VMware VCDR solution which had increased their application business availability and data reliability. By eliminating the on-prem DR Data Center customer has seen immediate cost savings. Now they feel they are empowered to help their business by supporting their growth for years to come. If the entire primary site goes down, customer can quickly fall back all their applications onto the DR site with 30 mins RPO and 4 hours RTO. This allows them to consistently maintain the state of their application and business data within acceptable limits.

Considering the Customer’s Core theme around Sustainability and Eco-consciousness for their business, Citrus approached the challenge by Reducing Carbon Footprint angle along with giving the best possible solution that would solve their challenge. Running an always-on on-prem DR data center would increase the customer’s carbon footprint. Instead, if they go with an on-demand DR solution it would help them to achieve their business goal while keeping in line with their core theme around Sustainability. Citrus adopted a consultative approach and undertook a pro-bono exercise of thorough assessment covering application workloads, end-user profiles, connectivity landscape, security requirements, IT budgets IT Ops team skills, and business growth pattern. As an outcome of this exercise, Citrus created a wholesome IT Disaster Recovery business plan that included target RTO and RPO by applications workload, comparison of various solution options, cost-benefit analysis, TCO/ROI analysis. Citrus went on to propose VMware VCDR as a preferred solution for this project. Once the customer was convinced that this is the right solution, Citrus went on to implement a VCDR solution for the Customer. The solution helped the customer to achieve effective failover and failback of their applications with very minimal disruption. The solution empowered the business by restoring access and functionality of their IT infrastructure after a disaster situation. Implemented VCDR allows VMs to be protected through delta-based replication that is scheduled every 30 minutes giving the customer up to 48 recoverable snapshots per day.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery offers on-demand disaster recovery to IT administrators who are responsible for IT infrastructure and services resiliency, and face DR being complex, expensive and unreliable. It also helps security and compliance teams ensure operations can resume after a disaster event. Delivered as an easy-to-use software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with cloud economics, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery combines cost-efficient cloud storage with simple SaaS-based management for IT resiliency at scale. Customers benefit from consistent, familiar VMware operations across production and DR sites, a pay-when-you-need-failover capacity model for DR resources, and instant power-on capabilities for fast recovery after disaster events.

This solution provides a more dynamic and cost-effective, cloud-managed DR site approach that leverages SCFS for maintaining the recovery points and an on-demand and scalable SDDC deployment method.

Failover workloads can begin almost immediately from this recovery point, and storage vMotion proceeds automatically in the background to place the VMs into the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC vSAN datastore. VMware Cloud DR has the trade-off of slightly larger (longer) RPO, SLAs, and potentially longer RTO logistics to build and scale the failover site.

VMware Cloud DR enables you to start with as little as a 2-node Pilot Light environment, which provides an always-on way to run Tier-0 applications as well as critical utility VMs like secondary domain controllers. You can then scale up on-demand during the event of a disaster.

On-demand

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery delivers fast recovery with zero-copy and no rehydration of data from cloud storage to VMware Cloud on AWS hosts required. For achieving production-level performance, workloads can be promoted (i.e., rehydrated) to VMware Cloud on AWS hosts after initial power-on of failover VMs. Using optional pilot light clusters makes the recovery time even faster. VMs are maintained in their native VMware vSphere® format, eliminating the need for brittle and time-consuming VM disk format conversions. Instant power-on of VMs is very powerful for rapid identification of the best recovery point when recovering from a ransomware attack

Easy to use

During transient events, such as DR testing or failover, customers don’t need to learn new operational processes and tools of cloud infrastructure. They can manage both the cloud DR site and production sites with VMware vCenter® and retain access to familiar vSphere constructs—such as clusters, resource pools, datastores, virtual switches, and port groups—following a failover. The SaaS-based management console simplifies DR maintenance operations, eliminating the customer burden of lifecycle managing the DR software, and scales up to 1,500 VMs across multiple SDDC clusters. DR health checks occur every 30 minutes, increasing the confidence that the DR plan will work when needed. Audit-ready, built-in, automated audit reports help meet a company’s internal policies and regulatory compliance requirements. A sophisticated DR workflow engine allows users to create customized and flexible recovery plans for hundreds to thousands of workloads. The scale-out cloud file system checks the data integrity every day to confirm the backup data is ready and usable when needed

Cloud economics

Leveraging the elasticity of cloud computing, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery spins up VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure only during a DR testing or failover event. It utilizes a highly efficient cloud storage layer for storing backups, lowering DR costs. With a simplified pricing model, customers do not need to figure out all the underlying detailed infrastructure costs (such as compute, networking, and storage charges), they just need to determine how many VMs and how much total data to protect. Failbacks result in minimal AWS egress charges because only data deltas/changes are transferred.

Disasters, including ransomware, are happening more frequently than ever. Ensure your applications can continue to run even when disaster strikes.

Select the DR solution that best suits the criticality of your applications, RTO and RPO requirements, and the ability to leverage cloud economics.

Create and manage recovery plans for all your VMs with automated DR orchestration, and a consistent VMware environment across production and DR sites.

Enable predictable disaster recovery and learn how to seamlessly failover to a second physical site.

Ensure confident recovery from ransomware with a plan that rapidly restores your critical applications and supports your resiliency strategy. With VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, address ransomware by quickly and efficiently identifying your point of recovery to run rapid recovery point validations. In addition, ensure DR readiness by simplifying operations and testing your plans frequently.

Removing the DR infrastructure including server, storage and other components helps to reduce power consumption.

The customer has seen a tremendous transformation of their IT infra by consistently maintaining the state of our application and business data using VMware cloud disaster recovery solution. The customer has eliminated the DR Data Center and seen immediate cost savings. Now they feel they are empowered to help their business for the years to come.

With the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery implementation customer has no need to rely solely on a on premises DR location. This makes things easy for customer to replicates the data to using VCDR solution. This means that even if the entire primary site goes down, customer can fall back all the application that is available on the DR site. This allows them to consistently maintain the state of their application and business data.