Recovery Point: DRaaS Product Overview and Analysis

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Bottom Line:

U.S.-based organizations with complex recovery or compliance needs that span both x86 and non-x86 platforms should put Recovery Point on their DRaaS shortlist.

It is the breadth and depth of the company’s product offering that enables it to handle such complex scenarios. Along with DRaaS, it offers private, multi-tenant, hyperscale, and hybrid cloud products as well as hosting, networking, IaaS, and backup.

Furthermore, businesses in numerous verticals will find a suitable solution. Recovery Point’s client base consists of commercial, civilian and federal agencies, and state and local governments.

Most specifically, it is well-suited for customers with complex heterogeneous environments that include physical systems and servers, such as IBM Z, IBM i, IBM Power Systems and Oracle SPARC.

Service Description:

While the great majority of DRaaS providers serve virtualized x86 Windows and Linux environments, Recovery Point has decades of experience supporting complex, heterogeneous environments beyond physical and visualized x86 deployments, including:

  • IBM Z Mainframe
  • IBM I
  • AIX
  • x86
  • HP-UX
  • Oracle

Protection extends to wherever assets and data reside, whether on-premises, in a private, public or hybrid cloud, in a dedicated or multi-tenant Recovery Point cloud or any combination that best supports achieving business resilience.

  • Recovery Point DRaaS for IBM Z mainframe uses IBM’s Global Mirror replication technology to maintain identical data in source and target volumes to provide data protection and disaster recovery for IBM Z workloads. The service replicates the data between two sites, over extended distances.
  • Recovery Point AIX High Availability (HA) Replication DRaaS uses Capital Continuity’s Business Interruption Protection Software (BIPs) to protect and recover AIX workloads.
  • Recovery Point IBM i DRaaS uses IBM Global Mirror to provide data protection and disaster recovery for an IBM i environment between two sites over extended distances.
  • Recovery Point Snapshot Recovery and Backup DRaaS uses the Veeam Enterprise Plus Availability Suite to provide data protection and disaster recovery for all of Windows/Linux workloads.
  • Recovery Point x86 High Availability (HA) replication DRaaS uses Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform.

Additionally, Recovery Point offers private, multitenant, hyperscale, and hybrid cloud offerings, certified hosting infrastructure, national network services, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS).

“Recovery Point’s ability to walk us through every phase has been invaluable. We feel like they are part of our DR Team, not just a vendor. They are readily available to solve whatever issues arise,” said a Senior Project Manager in the manufacturing industry.

Features:

Workloads Supported:

Physical and virtual x86, UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris), IBM i, and mainframes.

Recovery Presence:

Three data centers in the U.S.

Experience:

Organizations based in the U.S. with complex heterogeneous environments and typically up to 750 servers under management.

Replication:

Array agnostic, replicates to any cloud over extended distances.

Failover:

Orchestrated cross-platform failover and failback to protect applications and business processes; seamless failback to original source site with Reverse Protect feature.

Recovery Time:

RTOs of 30 minutes or less. RPOs vary from seconds to one hour, depending on the platform.

Delivery:

Most are fully managed or assisted; 20% of users are self-service after initial onboarding. Users gave it low marks relative to some competitors on ease of use.

“Recovery Point has been very responsive and instrumental in transitioning from the prior DRaaS partner. Their project management has been stellar,” said a Director of IT in financial services.

Security/encryption:

Encryption in flight and at rest using TLS and 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). FISMA, SOC2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other compliance requirements supported. Pre-staged, software defined network and security provisioning.

Support:

24/7 support including onboarding for all customers. Users tout Recovery Point staff’s technical expertise, responsiveness, degree of involvement during exercises, willingness, flexibility, and collaboration. Others gave the company high marks for RTO and RPO performance and support in low as well as high complexity environments. The company also received user kudos for security, compliance, and managed service recovery.

“Recovery Point has been able to quickly respond to our needs’ customer support is excellent,” said a Network Manager in the energy sector.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

U.S.-based organizations with complex recovery needs that go beyond x86 platforms. Also, organizations with U.S. Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) needs and those that wish to leverage tape as a secondary recovery option to DRaaS.

As Recovery Point has invested in its own dark-fiber-based national network infrastructure, this helps lower customer costs and provides FISMA-level protection to all customers by default. This gives it an edge in some bids over IBM and Sungard AS.

Pricing:

Mid-range

Recovery Point: Summary

Vendor
Workload Support x86, UNIX, IBM i, mainframe
Regions Covered US
Best RTO Less than 30 mins
Delivery Fully managed/ assisted
Key Markets Complex US with compliance needs
Analyst Eval Challenger
Price Mid-range
Key Differentiator Extensive product offering
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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