QTS Realty Expands Disaster Recovery Portfolio with DRaaS

QTS Realty Trust announced a new disaster recovery solution dubbed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Monday. DRaaS is a cloudy counterpart to the company's existing managed disaster recovery portfolio.

The DRaaS offering is a software-based product that installs seamlessly onto existing IT infrastructure, according to QTS. DRaaS is application- and hardware-independent and suitable for physical and virtual environments.

It works with different storage and server technologies, aiming to extend the life of legacy assets. It is also tunable down to selecting what virtual machines you want to protect.

It provides real-time protection and instant workload recovery on any combination of physical, cloud or virtual servers.

Users can select the specific virtual machines they want to protect, replicate single or multiple VMs and protect multiple Virtual Machine Disks (VMDKs) connected to the same VM. No storage configuration is necessary.

Customers are able to manage and customize how systems will run in the event of a disaster without additional hardware or data center application dependencies. Parameters for replication and recovery can be established at desired intervals, be it 15 minutes or every five hours, depending on the business need.

The offering expands the company’s disaster recovery offerings, which include website failover, QTS DR On-Demand and QTS DR High Availability. DRaaS brings in an entirely software-based product.

QTS launched the On-Demand and High Availability DR offerings in August of last year. On-Demand is a fully managed, image-based replication service for customers with virtual server environments. It utilizes geographically dispersed online servers that are activated in the event of a disaster. The DR High Availability service provides real-time, continuous data replication of both physical and virtual server environments.

“Today's complex IT infrastructures and demanding business requirements make being prepared for unplanned interruptions more critical than ever," said Jim Reinhart, chief operating officer, development and operations, QTS. "We've designed QTS Disaster Recovery as a Service to be consistent with our overall mission to provide high-value, high-benefit, cost-effective customer solutions."