Many organizations prefer not to run their own disaster recovery (DR) site because they:

• Do not have a second-site data center for DR.
• Prefer not to rent space in a hosting facility or acquire and operate the DR site system.
• Do not want to buy capital equipment and prefer to pay a monthly fee per GB as an operating expense versus a capital expense.

3rd party service providers can offer an ExaGrid Hybrid Cloud service. These providers house racks of ExaGrid systems at their data centers, allowing customers to replicate from their onsite ExaGrid system to an ExaGrid system owned and operated by either the 3rd party provider or the customer. The 3rd party provider can be a true cloud service provider or can be the customer’s reseller of choice.

All service providers offer the following benefits for offsite DR:

• ExaGrid target systems are owned and operated by a 3rd party service provider, and are located in a high-quality, high-speed, and high-availability data center.
• Added security layers are in place around data transfer, data access security, and data-at-rest security.
• With this pay-as-you-use model, organizations pay by the GB per month.

In a typical scenario this is how it works. The customer acquires an ExaGrid system for their onsite data center to back up and maintain local retention for fast backups and local restores. The onsite ExaGrid system replicates data to an offsite ExaGrid system located at the 3rd party service provider, allowing data to be recovered over the WAN and offering an export appliance recovery procedure. Most 3rd party service providers allow data to be recovered over the WAN and can also ship the ExaGrid system with just your organization’s data to the physical DR site.