Expedient: DRaaS Product Overview and Analysis

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Bottom Line:

Expedient’s strength as a DRaaS provider is its local personalized touch – the company will work closely with clients. This is particularly important in the DRaaS sector, given the complexity of DR. Plus, Expedient’s full menu of related services is impressive – ranging from IaaS to colocation to storage. It chiefly serves the eastern and central US, so it’s not known as a “complete US” provider. But anyone in its service area should consider Expedient.

Cheaper options are available within its service area in the Eastern US, yet the company offers a strong, comprehensive fully managed solution. If you’re looking for a provider that assumes as much of the work for DR as possible, Expedient is an option.

The company’s On-Site Private Cloud appliances offers an in-house hardware-based solution for those that prefer it.

Service Description:

It provides DRaaS to clients hosted within its data centers and separately as a service for hosting production workloads on-premises or in other locations using on-site private cloud appliances.

Expedient Push Button DR offers rapid, total network failover between locations without IP or DNS changes.

Expedient On-Site Private Cloud with Disaster Recovery as a Service offers dedicated on-premises cloud resources coupled with managed disaster recovery to any one of Expedient’s 11 data centers using Push Button DR.

Additionally, Expedient, offers IaaS, colocation, backup, compliance, security, network access, and storage.

“The technical solution has worked entirely as expected. The flexibility of Expedient to meet our needs and do so with little to no bureaucracy has been helpful. The ability of the service organization to quickly meet any newly articulated need has made implementation costs low,” said the Director of Technology in the transportation industry.

Features:

Workloads Supported:

Physical and virtual x86.

Regional Presence:

Midwest, mid-Atlantic and Northeastern portions of the U.S.

Experience:

Up to 600+ server images.

Replication:

With host-to-host replication, protect data integrity by replicating virtual machine workloads to one of Expedient’s data centers for disaster recovery.

Failover:

Expedient’s Push Button DR can rapidly fail over entire sites with minimal interruption to external service availability by leveraging Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) during failover. Expedient mitigates risk by not oversubscribing clients across its resource pools.

Recovery time:

Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) are measured in minutes.

Delivery:

Fully managed.

Security/encryption:

Protect data and comply with mandates like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and others. Service includes two-factor authentication and encryption.

Support:

Has a 24x7x365 Operations Support Center team

Customer references state the buying process featured quick turnaround for proposals. User feedback is largely positive. Good marks, in particular, for support and self-service recovery.

“They worked closely with us to design our solution, led the implementation, and continued to support us post go-live. They offered a unique product which answered our needs perfectly and reduced risks to the project and our company. They were a pleasure to work with and would be happy to recommend them to others,” said the Director of IT in the manufacturing industry.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

Organizations that prefer Expedient’s regional locations and local staff along with compute resources that can be utilized for more than just DR. Core markets are Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Memphis, Pittsburgh.

Pricing:

High.

Expedient’s pricing is higher than many others in this guide. It doesn’t try to compete on price with low cost operators, preferring the local, personalized touch.

Expedient

Vendor
Workload Support x86
Regions Covered Central, Northeast US
Best RTO Less than 1 hour
Delivery Fully managed
Key Markets Northeast US
Analyst Eval Niche Player
Price High
Key Differentiator Personal service
Drew Robb
Drew Robb
Drew Robb is a contributing writer for Datamation, Enterprise Storage Forum, eSecurity Planet, Channel Insider, and eWeek. He has been reporting on all areas of IT for more than 25 years. He has a degree from the University of Strathclyde UK (USUK), and lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

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