Deploying disaster recovery environments is challenging for most organizations due to the requirement for infrastructure and site independence. There are huge costs involved in establishing and maintaining such sites physically—basically the same costs as the entire production environment but for a site that will sit idle for most of the time. This is where the cloud helps to lower the barrier to entry by providing scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions that can be used to build DR environments for both on-premises or cloud- based systems. After building out all DR services, the challenge then becomes to synchronize data from the production environment, and to keep it in synchronized going forward.

In this white paper, we examine in detail the challenges involved in setting up a DR environment, discuss the available services in AWS and Azure that can be used to build DR solutions, and look at how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides cost-effective enterprise-grade support for data replication and disaster recovery both for existing NetApp storage system users and for cloud-based deployments on AWS and Azure.