We hear a lot about being “always on” and having “100 percent uptime.” While this is a reasonable expectation, it’s a difficult task to accomplish when an outage occurs due to a disaster or some other unavoidable circumstance. What to do in such a situation is a dilemma that keeps IT professionals on the edge of their seats and reaching for the latest technology that can keep their workloads backed up and secure in a time of need.
Pittsburgh-based data center infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider Expedient saw this complex challenge continuously impede IT teams. They decided to integrate industry-leading technologies to develop a solution that would keep mission critical enterprise workloads replicated in real-time. It would also support teams in establishing and maintaining disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. Since Expedient’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution is for both public and private clouds, a specific challenge they set out to conquer was network security associated with firewalls, as it presented a particular problem in maintaining resiliency across public networks.
So, how does it work and what are the benefits? Expedient’s DRaaS is a cloud solution using SAN-to-SAN and Host-to-Host replication methods, with the use of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) or Zerto Virtual Replication. An important element to this solution is the Push Button DR, in which Juniper Networks is proud to announce that Expedient is using the Juniper Networks® vSRX Virtual Firewall for its advanced routing (BGP) and next generation firewall features. The vSRX is deployed as a replicated two-node clustered virtual machine to ensure secure transportation of connected computing workloads.
Additionally, by leveraging VMware’s NSX technology, when a customer declares a disaster with the push of a button, Expedient is able to create a hybrid network mesh through micro-segmentation between physical locations and dynamic routing protocols, including border gateway protocol (BGP) and public internet protocol (IP) subnets.
The Push Button DR technology is key for the DRaaS solution, as it ensures that public IPs and all virtual network appliances—including firewalls—move securely within their connected computing workloads. As Juniper and Expedient have a mutual goal to deliver an exceptional customer experience, their joint solution is offering organizations a truly secure hybrid cloud.
If you’d like to learn more, Expedient has teamed up with 451 Research and Juniper Networks for a webinar on its DRaaS solution. This webinar will provide a deep dive into how software-defined networking (SDN) is ensuring that replicated workloads are protected exactly the same in both primary and secondary sites. To learn more about the vSRX or try it for free, visit here.