Disaster Recovery

Service Overview

Expedient's "Push Button DR" is, by definition, a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) product that allows you to protect your applications and recover quickly in the event of a disaster. As a managed service, Expedient maintains the platform and manages recovery resources so that you can focus on your production workloads and business continuity plans. You have full access to declare disasters and initiate failovers when needed, and Expedient is available to initiate a failover and assist with recovery each step of the way.

Service Features

• Pay per VM replicated and GB of storage consumed
• Encryption-at-rest and in-flight
• Protection groups for grouping applications
• Journaling for granular point-in-time recoveries
• Self-service portal
• Full network failover between Expedient locations
• Replicate from client site to Expedient or between Expedient locations
• 24x7x365 support for declaring disasters and initiating failovers
• Multiple RPO options are available

Default Deployment Settings

• Client networking will be configured on the Expedient platform
• Workload protection will be configured with the Client's input
• Networking will be configured for failover between Expedient locations
• Client will be provided a "test bubble" network for testing
  • This is to prevent IP conflicts with production during the testing
  • This also prevents application, data, and IT service conflicts with production during testing validation
• Clients will be given access and authenticate to the self-service portal
  • Clients can also contact our Operations Support Center (OSC) to initiate a failover in the event of an actual disaster, or to schedule a test failover. 
  • Please note: DR tests must be scheduled several weeks in advance.
• Clients are provided a Disaster Recovery runbook outlining the steps to execute a failover operation to be incorporated with a larger DR or Business Continuity plan
• Clients that declare a disaster or commit to a failover operation, will be asked to reside in a secondary site for a period of time for reverse replication to complete successfully, typically 24- 48 hours depending on the size and change rate of the environment.
• Data protection and monitoring services will be re-established after a failover AND committed to the secondary site when longer than a 48hr timeframe.
• Clients may request a DR test during the implementation project or elect to postpone
  1. Postponing a DR test exempts any credit requests during a disaster or future test.
  2. A test plan will be requested from the Client to validate a successful test, including infrastructure, application, and/or end-user acceptance criteria

Use Cases

• Business Continuity
• Virtual Machine recoveries
  • On-premises virtual machines
  • Expedient virtual machines
• Operating system recoveries
  • Windows
  • Linux
• Database recoveries
  • Microsoft SQL
  • Oracle
• Mission-critical application recoveries
• Tier 1/2/3 application recoveries
• Run Test/Dev/QA workloads outside of recoveries

Recovery Workflows

There are multiple options you can use to perform a disaster recovery of your workloads.

1. Clients can perform their own recoveries by following these procedures:
   1. For Neal Real-Time RPO (Zerto): Host-to-Host Replication Failover Operations
   2. For 5 Minute RPO (VCDA): VCDA Failover Operations
2. Clients can contact our OSC to request that Expedient staff perform the failover on their behalf. OSC staff will remain on standby to assist with further disaster recovery tasks, as needed.

Responsibility and Accountability Matrix

Supported Platforms