Our prior post, A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection, discussed both the benefits and limitations of a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) strategy. As we highlighted last week, traditional disaster recovery options leave open a huge hole: At one extreme are high-cost, quick recovery time options using hosted or colocation sites and at the other extreme are low-cost, long recovery time options such as tape or disk backup.
As a result, organizations who cannot afford a cold or hot standby site have been left to either cobble together a complicated and risky DR strategy or rely solely on offsite data protection, which affords them limited business continuity.
You’ll recall that we outlined three cloud-based options that are beginning to fill this hole:
- Recovering applications on virtual servers through a cloud provider’s catalog
- Recovering virtual machines directly in cloud compute
- Importing on-premises virtual machines into the cloud via conversion scripts and tools
Unfortunately, these cloud options, while viable (and certainly better than data recovery only options), still present an extraordinary amount of risk and complexity – exactly the opposite of what you want during a disaster.
Last week, we promised you a fourth answer that helps you address those issues. Today, TwinStrata launched a new solution: on-demand DR infrastructure that is completely interoperable with on-premises virtualized environments. Unlike traditional DR strategies, CloudArray DRaaS overcomes the hurdles to DR on-demand, offering:
- 2-4 hour spin up times of DR infrastructure, whenever it is needed, without having to pay for it in the meantime. The only time organizations need to pay for the infrastructure is during disaster and disaster test scenarios.
- A VMware environment that work seamlessly with customer’s on-premises environment. All controls and privileges are available to customers so that they can orchestrate failover and failback as seamlessly as an on-premise to on-premise environment.

CloudArray with DR On-Demand
- No need for a time-consuming spin up and rebuild of individual servers from a cloud provider’s catalog. Instead virtual machines can be recovered via standard hypervisor tools.
- No need for risky conversion utilities to move virtual machines from one hypervisor format to another, potentially compromising recoverability.
Most importantly, it positions an affordable DR offering that rivals and sometimes even improves upon the recovery times of cold standby disaster sites or hot-standby DR sites for a fraction of the cost.
The far-reaching implication is a viable disaster recovery plan for virtually any organization, particularly the IT-constrained mid-market organization that may not have the wherewithal to build or manage a secondary data center. Moreover, smaller organizations struggling with a DR plan can now be compliant with regulatory standards (i.e. HIPAA, FINRA, etc.) that require them to have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Larger organizations, which already have a DR plan, can still benefit from substantial cost savings. Either way, an affordable, enterprise-class disaster recovery strategy has just become attainable for virtually any organization.
You can read the full press release for more information or join us for our webinar on May 30th, “Affordable, On-Demand Disaster Recovery: Introducing CloudArray DRaaS.”


















