Azure Site Recovery contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy, by orchestrating and automating replication of Azure VMs between regions, on-premises virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, and on-premises machines to a secondary datacenter.
Achieve low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets for every major system in your organization, simply and cost-effectively. Eliminate the hassle and cost of secondary data centers and tap into nearly infinite capacity at a moment’s notice with a cloud-based data recovery solution designed for the needs of enterprises.
Azure Site Recovery provides disaster recovery solution that protects and natively supports the widest range of enterprise applications of any cloud disaster recovery provider. Fail over your apps—and your entire datacenter—with automated recovery plans in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months.
What does Site Recovery provide?
Simple BCDR Solution:
Using Site Recovery, you can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from a single location in the Azure portal.
Azure VM Replication:
You can set up disaster recovery of Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region.
On-Premises VM Replication:
You can replicate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure, or to a secondary on-premises datacenter. Replication to Azure eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter.
Workload Replication:
Replicate any workload running on supported Azure VMs, on-premises Hyper-V and VMware VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers.
Data Resilience:
Site Recovery orchestrates replication without intercepting application data. When you replicate to Azure, data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created, based on the replicated data.
RTO and RPO targets:
Keep recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) within organizational limits. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V.
Keep apps consistent over failover:
You can replicate using recovery points with application-consistent snapshots. These snapshots capture disk data, all data in memory, and all transactions in process.
Testing without disruption:
You can easily run disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication.
Flexible failovers:
You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it’s available again.
Customized recovery plans:
Using recovery plans, can customize and sequence the failover and recovery of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs. You group machines together in a recovery plan, and optionally add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure automation run books.
BCDR integration:
Site Recovery integrates with other BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server Always-On, to manage the failover of availability groups.
Azure automation integration:
A rich Azure Automation library provides production-ready, application-specific scripts that can be downloaded and integrated with Site Recovery.
Network integration:
Site Recovery integrates with Azure for simple application network management, including reserving IP addresses, configuring load-balancers, and integrating Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers.