Symantec, Microsoft Team On Disaster Recovery Service

Symantec is uniting with the world’s largest software vendor to deliver its flavor of the emerging cloud offering, DRaaS.

Symantec last week announced plans to present disaster-recovery-as-a-service in collaboration with Microsoft. “The Symantec DRaaS solution will recover any Microsoft application,” said Jennifer Ellard, senior manager with Symantec’s storage and availability management group.

As a part of the agreement, Symantec will extend its Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows (online storage management) and Veritas Volume Replicator disaster recovery software product to the Windows Azure cloud platform. The Azure service will enable organizations of any size to recover replicated business-critical applications and information swiftly and automatically into Windows Azure within the event of a native failure or disaster, in step with the Symantec announcement.

Symantec expects its DRaaS product to present greater flexibility to data centers and IT. “Our customers would be in a position to start a DR service in Symantec DRaaS for [Microsoft] Exchange, as an instance, and switch it off the following day. There are a ton of pliability features like that it could activate and rancid as needed,” Ellard said. The service will use the Windows Azure Connector to speak with the Windows Azure cloud environment. “This may be sure that we’re seeing your entire data it is newly posted and replicating that data,” she said.

“Symantec’s customers will use the Windows Azure cloud as an infrastructure-as-a-service platform,” said Al Gillen, program VP for operating systems, cloud, and virtualization system software research at IDC. “They’ll restore to VMs running in Windows Azure and run their applications inside the cloud until they’re back up. Customers will enjoy the stability and availability of the cloud, and they’ll only pay for Windows Azure once they need it,” Gillen said.

Symantec sees its customers facing increasing challenges regarding DR, Ellard said. Customers are running into increasing costs to construct, manage, and maintain a second or third DR data center, she said. They’re absolute to lengthy manual processes related to completing failovers and making certain everything comes back online. There’s always some data loss after they perform these recoveries. And the shoppers don’t seem to be confident of their DR systems, so that they test frequently. “These are the challenges so as to drive the adoption of DRaaS,” said Ellard.

“The cloud is changing the way it organizations handle DR,” Gillen said. “While the vast majority of DR becomes recovery to the cloud in 10 to twenty years, the facility to fail over to the cloud seriously isn’t trivial. DRaaS is becoming a viable alternative. Traditional DR providers are already moving in that direction.”

Symantec’s forthcoming DRaaS service, expected in 2013, will enable organizations to off-load the capex and opex that might apply when building out and managing additional DR data centers, Ellard said. Symantec plans to switch its customers’ manual recovery processes for a completely automated end-to-end process with little to no data loss. “Customers can test it proactively. And when the disaster occurs, they’ll believe within the recovery process,” she said.

Ellard said Symantec DRaaS will improve recovery time and recovery point objectives throughout the continuous replication, data preservation, and automation that make the service faster than other recovery methods. Symantec sees IT organizations skirting the encumbrances of a separate, physical DR data center site while realizing the advantages of Windows Azure’s cloud services.

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