TierPoint: DRaaS Product Overview and Analysis

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Bottom Line:

As a DRaaS provider, TierPoint is ideal for medium-complexity environments that favor flexibility and reliability of managed services over a hands-on approach. If a customer has the in-house staff for an extensive in-house approach, TierPoint is probably not its best option.

TierPoint emphasizes power and infrastructure reliability via dedicated redundant elements backed by generators, utility feeds, main electrical switchboards, and high-speed networks.

TierPoint is focused exclusively on the US market, though its US coverage is wide. It now has over 40 facilities in the U.S.

Its extensive infrastructure isn’t cheap – it largely concedes the low-priced cloud DR market. Yet its offering can command a substantial price. It provides a full set of disaster recovery services, including workspace recovery in some of its locations, in addition to offering cloud and colocation solutions to enable hybrid IT and hybrid resiliency. A strong contender.

Service Description:

TierPoint offers several versions available:

• DRaaS Cloud to Cloud Recovery: Hypervisor-based replication protects virtualized production environments in any cloud. With recovery times measured in minutes, users have control over recovery plans and faster automated failover to a secondary site. This has the fastest recovery times of any of their services. It includes a variety of configurations and high-availability options with failover to a TierPoint private or multitenant cloud. Fully managed or self-service.
• Azure Site Recovery: Tierpoint offers a managed service for orderly replication and recovery using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.
• DRaaS Server to Cloud Recovery: Protects non-virtualized physical servers on-premises or colocated in a TierPoint facility, as well as multiple types of virtual servers.
• High-availability DR for diverse environments: Management and recovery capabilities across most applications and platforms. Protects workloads such as IBM pSeries/iSeries, Oracle and Unix.
• Hybrid IT cloud recovery service: TierPoint protects Hyper-V and VMware VMs, as well as physical environments, regardless of underlying hardware.

Additionally, TierPoint provides information technology and data center services. The company offers TierPoint Cloud, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that includes public, private, multi-tenant, and hybrid deployments for production, DR, and backup services.

Other services include colocation, cloud computing, backup and business continuity, managed security, firewall, professional services, and a business continuity workspace during a disaster.

Features:

Workloads Supported:

Physical and virtual x86, UNIX (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX), and SAN and database replication.

Recovery Presence:

Twenty locations in the U.S., spread from the Northwest to the East Coast. TierPoint operates redundant, carrier-neutral data centers in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Experience:

Up to 200+ server images.

Replication:

Replicate from any cloud to a TierPoint cloud in any region. VM-level near-synchronous replication minimizes data loss.

Failover:

Cloud-to-cloud recovery offers configuration and high-availability options with failover to a TierPoint private or multitenant cloud.

Recovery time:

Recover in minutes with automated failover to a secondary site. Tierpoint gets high marks from users for RTO and RPO performance, as well as support for both low- and high-complexity environments.

Delivery:

Fully managed and self-service.

“Overall, TierPoint has been great. Once everything gets going they are very reliable and it becomes a set it and forget it process. Our only complaint is that since they are a larger company, implementation can take a little long due to PM’s and scheduling and coordinating on their end — but once engaged they are good and very attentive to details,” said a System Admin in the services industry.

Security:

With multiple HIPAA, PCI DSS, SSAE-16 SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II compliant data centers, Tierpoint users give the company high marks for security and compliance.

Support:

Tierpoint provides a high level of hands-on support. There are local support teams in each geographical area they serve, available 24 hours a day.

Each region has its own Network Operations Center to monitor local data centers. They contact users in the event of any disruptions to resolve any problems.

Customer references scored TierPoint higher than other providers. “We have found all aspects of the experience positive, from the initial sales experience to the ongoing support and relationship. We consider TierPoint to be a solid, reliable partner who has helped us alleviate much of the pain associated with establishing and maintaining our DR strategy,” said the Director of IT in the retail sector.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

The company serves education, energy, financial, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, public sector, retail, and technology industries. It does particularly well for mediumly complex environments wanting flexibility and multiple tiers of services.

Pricing:

Medium.

Managed customers have an initial failover test and one yearly test included in the pricing, with the option to purchase additional tests if desired. There are no fees for disaster declarations, although usage above the reservation level is subject to usage-based billing, and there is a one-time fee per failback if that is needed.

Tierpoint Summary

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