As more and more solution providers enter the Disaster Recovery as a Service market--a market that’s expected to grow to almost $20 billion by 2020--there’s growing confusion about how DRaaS differs from Bare Metal Recovery.

November 30, 2015

3 Min Read
Top Three Differences Between DRaaS and Bare Metal Recovery

By Infrascale Guest Blog 1

As more and more solution providers enter the Disaster Recovery as a Service market–a market that’s expected to grow to almost $20 billion by 2020–there’s growing confusion about how DRaaS differs from Bare Metal Recovery.

Let’s start with a quick definition of each and then explore key differences.

Bare Metal Recovery (BMR)

With Bare Metal Recovery, you can back up an entire physical server disk image–literally, every bit on the disks. This, in turn, allows you to restore an entire system, including the operating system and its settings, applications (including their configurations and updates), files, folders and volumes. This saves you time because you don’t have to reinstall everything from scratch.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is the same as BMR, plus the ability to start and run that system in a virtual environment, typically on an appliance or in the cloud, in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe. Fundamentally, DRaaS lets you “instantly” boot a protected server or your entire site and immediately get back to business, whether you’re booting from the appliance or from the cloud.

Key Differences Between DRaaS and BMR

1. Speed: The biggest difference is how quickly you can get operational if a server crashes. With BMR, you need to first restore the image to a server, which can take hours, and then boot up the system. With DRaaS, the system has already been converted into a virtual machine and prepared for booting in a different environment, and can be booted immediately.

2. Scale: With BMR, the more systems you need to restore, the longer you wait before you are operational again. This can take considerable time and is not terribly scalable if you have lots of large servers. With DRaaS, you can boot all of your systems in parallel, especially if you are using an elastic cloud infrastructure, and be up and running in minutes regardless of how many systems you have. You will still have to consider the orchestration of what needs to be booted first and in what order.

3. Different Downtime Goals: The goal of BMR is to recover a system for production use. It does not presume urgency or an emergency situation. DRaaS is about getting you up and running as fast as possible first, and then restoring your systems for production use when the emergency is over.

Mind the Disaster Recovery Gap

The increased frequency and cost of downtime are forcing companies to re-evaluate their disaster recovery needs.

If a disaster takes down the infrastructure, fast recovery is critical and can dictate the difference between your company’s long-term success and failure.

While BMR is important in your overall data protection planning, it is not a suitable replacement for on-demand failover. With DraaS, you can now deliver fast recovery times–usually measured in seconds to minutes–for the cost of traditional backup.

So, start building the business case to eradicate downtime with our Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Kit:

  •          ActualTech Media DRaaS 2015 Attitudes and Adoption Report

  •          George Crump’s DRaaS Buyer’s Guide: 5 Must Ask Questions

  •          Infrascale Cloud Failover Appliance Datasheet

  •          Tech Brief: Infrascale Cloud Failover Appliance

  •          Infographic: Top 25 DR Statistics

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

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