Why Disaster Recovery Orchestration Matters for HCI

NetApp HCI

Johannes Pape

July 20, 2020

Disaster recovery orchestration helps you prepare for and practice failovers. Check out Cleondris HCC, the ultimate disaster recovery solution for NetApp HCI.

Let’s start off with, why should you care about disaster recovery orchestration? Disaster recovery orchestration helps companies to:

Prepare failover plans (a collection of commands that orchestrate, for example, a VM failover to recovery).
Practice test failovers (test failovers that happen on an isolated network); and practice real failovers (a real failover in a disaster or serious test).
Provides roles, audit trail, and necessary features for these failover plans and tests and proves that the company can handle a disaster recovery event successfully.

Today, companies of all sizes depend on the availability of data management systems. Even a short-term unavailability can have catastrophic financial consequences. Although an increasing amount of data is being processed in the cloud, on-premises systems will remain an important pillar of a company's strategy for years to come and must therefore be protected with the best possible tools.

With Cleondris HCC, NetApp customers have a simple, cost-effective, and very effective tool to ensure the availability of NetApp HCI environments. Thanks to the deep integration in NetApp HCI and VMware vSphere and the automatic discovery mechanisms, Cleondris HCC can be integrated into existing environments with minimal effort.

—Dr. Christian Plattner, founder and CEO of Cleondris.

Looking into the solution with NetApp^® HCI and Cleondris, both companies recently announced that they are expanding their partnership. Cleondris is a global supplier of NetApp backup and recovery add-on software for on-premises and cloud environments. Cleondris HCI Control Center (HCC) leverages the strengths of the NetApp HCI portfolio and is based on the established Cleondris Data Manager technology, which offers snapshot management and backup and disaster recovery functions.

We worked closely with Cleondris to bring to market a simple, seamless disaster recovery experience for NetApp HCI. The Cleondris disaster recovery tool delivers the business continuity/disaster recovery automation needed to protect the applications that power our customers' businesses.

—McClain Buggle, Senior Director, Product Management.

Here’s a look under the hood. Cleondris can be installed in less than 15 minutes. The focus is on NetApp HCI (and in the future, on NetApp ONTAP^® as well). The tool works out of the box—no plug-ins, adapters, or scripting needed to integrate with NetApp storage. Cleondris HCC has built-in disaster recovery protection reports, and you can set up replication for NetApp HCI directly from the UI. When using the native NetApp HCI (NetApp Element^®software) replication, there is no need to license vSphere Replication.

Cleondris has a plans-of-plans feature to orchestrate different plans simultaneously. It also offers backup and restore for VMware using NetApp HCI snapshots from the same UI. All-in-all, this is a very smart solution that is sold directly by NetApp together with NetApp HCI, so customers get support out of one hand as well.

One of the things that I personally like the most is that this solution does not add any abstraction layer to the storage, which would cause the loss of all the cool features the underlying storage offers. That's like built-in smart QoS, replication, and snapshot features that comes with NetApp HCI at no extra cost.

Finally, what comes with a nondisruptive integration into a NetApp HCI solution can go with a nondisruptive exit—– only if you don't like what you get, which I doubt.

Cleondris HCC is available from NetApp and NetApp channel partners only.

To learn more about Cleondris, visit www.cleondris.com.

To learn more about NetApp HCI, visit https://www.netapp.com/us/products/converged-systems/hyper-converged-infrastructure.aspx and https://www.netapp.com/us/info/what-is-hyper-converged-infrastructure.aspx.

Johannes Pape

JP is currently the Director of Presales for the HCS Specialist Teams in Europe, Middle East and Africa that includes NetApp’s Private Cloud solutions and dHCI, SolidFire and StorageGRID. In this role he engages with customers, partners and the field to help clients achieve transformational business outcomes through the use of disruptive technologies and solutions. He helps to incubate, accelerate, and scale new businesses for NetApp. His team provides world-class technology thought leadership and comprehensive solution expertise to empower NetApp's customers. JP has been with NetApp since 2018. He has been working in technology for over 25 years. Prior to joining NetApp, he worked at Dell/EMC in several roles and other companies.

View all Posts by Johannes Pape

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