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Disasters are an inevitable evil that IT professionals wish they could hide from. Unfortunately for them, hurricanes and hackers won’t stop their doomsday plans just to play nice. But the cloud can safeguard a company from disasters by serving as an effective disaster recovery solution, based on its scalability, cost and flexibility.
A new CloudFormation template enables NetApp customers to establish an operational DR solution in less than an hour. It’s part of NetApp’s larger DR solution that helps businesses recover fast from a system, site, or regional outage.
AWS CloudFormation in the Face of Disaster
The beauty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is its resource availability around the world, enabling customers to build solutions anywhere and at any time of the day. The CloudFormation template from NetApp now allows the creation of a DR copy of NetApp FAS systems in the AWS cloud.
CloudFormation speeds up your time to recovery through automation. Provisioning infrastructure services and building a resource stack with predefined templates provides a head start for your defense.
In terms of running your DR application in AWS, another feature that comes in handy is auto scaling. Depending on the situation, the amount of instances will vary. These metrics and requirements can be specified through AWS CloudWatch to ensure usage matches demand. In the case of DR, solutions can dynamically scale during the event and decrease as equilibrium is restored.
Typically, once developers and systems administrators have moved through an event, they then must begin deploying software installations and configurations. With CloudFormation, this can all be automated during the recovery phase. Using templates, stacks can be created to provision EC2 and RDS instances as well as their respective settings and configurations in an organized manner.
AWS CloudFormation for DR Testing
Disaster recovery in the cloud draws fans for its ability to scale when an issue arises, but a quieter value-add is flexible testing. With a DR solution in place, testing to ensure proper documentation and expected outcomes is not only a best practice, but provides peace of mind to all stakeholders, not just IT professionals. With time consuming planning and manual intervention out of the way, instances can be spun up with an AWS CloudFormation template.
IT also then has the ability to test a failover plan in a duplicate environment without impacting production resources.
AWS CloudFormation streamlines testing through the use of templates. Whether using a sample template or an individually created one, standard needs can be outlined. Full environments for DR solutions with AWS resources and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters can be detailed for easy automation.
Templates can be visually managed and edited with AWS CloudFormation Designer to fulfill the needs of any disaster recovery plan.
AWS & NetApp for DR
Together, NetApp and AWS help companies manage their disaster solutions through a flexible hybrid cloud. Living in an unpredictable world can be challenging for those that have to manage the impacts.
Resources such as NetApp’s disaster recovery solution and AWS CloudFormation automate and accelerate the time it takes to get back to a state of normalcy, speed up DR testing and assure compliance.
You can try out Cloud Volumes ONTAP today with a 30-day free trial on AWS
