IT-Lifeline - Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Matt Gerber,CEO of managed service provider IT-Lifeline spent some time talking about AWS on camera. Here's the full video:

Matt enumerates the three main benefits that AWS provides him: cost, elasticity, and time to market (sometimes saving 6 months to a year for a new offering). He also talks about security and compliance, and about working with the AWS team. Matt notes that traditional disaster recovery (DR) is a capital-intensive business, and that they'll be able to pass savings of 25-50% on to their customers. He says that the carrying cost for disaster recovery is effectively reduced to zero -- "It doesn't cost us anything to know that that AWS infrastructure is there for when our customers need it for a disaster."

We've pulled together some additional DR and storage resources on our new Backup and Storage page.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Scott McDonald]

AWS infrastructure is perfect for backups and DR. For companies that already have their own infrastructure, AWS can be used as a hot DR site by setting up systems that mirror file contents and access replicated databases etc... Automated DR is easily accomplished between 3rd party infrastructures and AWS disaster recover sites by implementing DNS failover services. i.e. With DNSHAT.com you can easily setup a system to monitor an existing application stack hosted in house that includes automated failover to your AWS DR site should your primary in house hosted setup have an outage. I am seeing more and more of this as companies move away from high mark up vendors to hosting in house on Vmware infrastructures (especially in Cogent powered office buildings - where you can get an unmetered 100Mb fiber pipe for several hundred per month). I have personally replaced a traditional HA hosting setup on Verio/NTT with a Vmware/Cogent in house setup + DNSHAT failover + AWS for backups and DR. This is the most cost effective combination available anywhere today. It reduced this one company's recurring hosting related costs from half million dollar a year to less than $500/month. The AWS cost just to keep content and databases mirrored for DR usage is negligible - and the company only sees significant AWS fees if their primary hosting setup is down (for maintenances etc... - which is another great benefit of using DNSHAT failover you can shift traffic to AWS and upgrade all in house systems then shift traffic back in house and update all AWS systems with no outages).

Anyway - just wanted to express how thrilled I am with AWS for backups and DR site needs. AWS is helping companies to save a lot of money.

Thanks.
Scott McDonald
Founder - DNSHAT.com