Hosted Private Cloud (HPC): Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and disaster recovery are critical to ensure business continuity. Being prepared means having a solid plan in place that protects your systems from any eventuality. This can include loss of physical location, malicious attacks, human error, power failures, political uncertainty, and just about any other catastrophic event you can think of.

The general principle of disaster recovery is to keep your systems safe, redundant, and agile. That way, your employees and customers do not experience any interruption of service. While that is not always possible in extreme circumstances, there are many ways to fortify your response to minimize downtime and ensure that no further damage is done.

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Cloud disaster recovery leverages a combination of strategies and technologies that migrate your systems, data, and applications to a virtualized cloud, from which it will be restored to your data centers once the danger has passed.

Since the process is based on virtualization, your entire server is copied and backed up to an additional server or data center. When disaster strikes, your systems are instantly available on the virtualized machine and will continue to operate without interruption.

Conversely, traditional disaster recovery processes are more complex, and recovery times are unpredictable, often requiring days and hundreds of IT hours to perform the same tasks. All things considered, cloud disaster recovery is far more efficient and cost-effective than any other option.

Options for Cloud Disaster Recovery with OVHcloud

OVHcloud hosted private cloud customers have several options for backup and disaster recovery.

Veeam Backup

OVHcloud offers Veeam backup and replication for our hosted private cloud clients in three distinct tiers. All options are fully automated and configurable to your specific needs, meaning they run transparently and are fully managed by the OVHcloud team. Your backups do not count towards your cloud storage limits.

The standard package is recommended for clients whose data is not critical to the survival of their business and for situations where data can be reconstructed relatively easily. Recovery times vary, but depending on the complexity of your data, it could take up to several days to restore. If your systems are mission-critical, you should consider a more advanced solution.

Features of the standard package include:

• 14 days of data retention
• Fully encrypted backups
• Two complete backups
• Custom report configurations

The advanced package offers greater flexibility and power, offering faster backup and recovery and allowing you to schedule backups during non-peak hours to maximize resources.

Features of the advanced Veeam backup package include:

• Fully encrypted backups
• 28 days retention
• Flexible backup scheduling
• Four complete backups
• Custom report configurations

The premium Veeam backup package is best for mission-critical applications and data centers as it provides a more robust solution that includes all of the features mentioned above, plus more complete backups, 35 days retention, and 11 days GFS (grandfather-father-son) retention.

Check our Veeam page for compatibility specs and other requirements, or go directly to our setup page to learn how to set up your replication server.

VMware HCX

If your in-house team has a level of comfort with VMware but needs to enhance your capabilities, VMware HCX (Hybrid Cloud Extension) offers high-performance at scale. It allows you to add or subtract resources as is necessary to achieve the right balance, an essential concern for any enterprise that operates multiple clouds and is concerned about how to migrate their data safely between them.

For example, in a growth environment, it is not unusual to have incompatible tech stacks residing in two different data centers. You want to migrate these systems to a single cloud, but your current hardware might be incapable of managing such a request. Networking, application dependency, and security issues ensue, and if no solution is present, it can lead to business disruption.

VMware HCX was developed to address—and automate—these problems:

• Migrating applications when consolidating or evacuating a data center
• Upgrading or re-platforming
• Rebalancing cloud resources
• Back up or migrate large amounts of data in bulk
• Solves application or operating system incompatibility
• Enables cross-site networking and security
• Efficiently manages bandwidth and IP addresses during migration
• Supports application mapping
• Live migration
• And more

In essence, VMware HCX enables an interconnected network across all of your VMware stacks. It is an advanced solution that looks, performs, and operates much like all the VMware solutions your team is already familiar with, including vCenter®, vSphere®, and NSX®, so it’s easy to get up to speed quickly. Because processes are automated, and OVHcloud™ manages all necessary patching and upgrading, you can focus on what you do best and leave the heavy lifting to us.

To learn more about VMware HCX on OVHcloud, check out our feature page.

Zerto DRaaS

Zerto is a leading provider of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), offering continuous data protection that gives you up-to-the-second recovery for all protected systems. Zerto is an all-in-one solution that provides you with a complete backup and recovery solution without the complexities of having to configure additional storage or worry about backup scheduling.

Using Zerto with OVHcloud private cloud is easy. However, you will require two hosted private clouds in two separate data centers – unless you have your own data center, in which case you will only need one.

Your systems are backed up continuously to the second cloud and are immediately switched over to the secondary data center as soon as an incident is detected. While it’s difficult to choose which of Zerto’s features are the most critical, having access to a continuous backup and the ability to switch over with a single click are certainly the highlights. With a very short (almost immediate) recovery time objective (RTO) and an infinitely flexible recovery point, Zerto offers the ultimate peace of mind.

Which Backup and Disaster Recovery Option is Right For You?

All of our backup and DR solutions are powerful players in their own right. However, we know that every organization has different needs and concerns. One thing is sure – disaster recovery and backup are critical to your business continuity. And if your business systems operate within a hosted private cloud, you have particular concerns in terms of how you accomplish these goals.

In a dedicated cloud environment, disaster recovery and backup is highly customizable, as opposed to public cloud or shared solutions where you might be limited as to the available solutions, or you might be paying for services and software you don’t really need at all.

Ultimately, the technologies you choose should reflect your needs at the moment, as well as where you envision yourself in the years to come. Deploying a solution that is flexible, scalable, and doesn’t put undue strain on your IT team is the key to ongoing success and business growth.

Of course, having a reliable cloud provider like OVHcloud doesn’t hurt either. Our reputation, service, support, and in-depth knowledge of every possible cloud use case are your asset, especially during times of rapid growth.

Reach out today to speak to us about backup and disaster recovery solutions for your OVHcloud hosted private cloud (HPC). Our cloud enablement specialists will work closely with you to ensure your systems are always protected, backed up, and operating at peak performance.