Benefits

By adding Azure Site Recovery to its cloud services menu, EVRY is able to offer flexible, low-cost disaster recovery services to customers, insulate DR orchestration from any failure at its own datacenters, give customers an easy way to test their DR solutions, and expand its business.

Offer flexible, low-cost disaster recovery solutions

EVRY now has a competitive, flexible set of DR services that it can offer to customers of all sizes and budgets. “There’s a huge demand in the market for DR solutions,” says Mühlbradt. “Azure Site Recovery is perfect for our needs and a significant competitive differentiator for us.”

Adds Erik Sundet, Chief Architect in the EVRY Cloud Services Department, “Customers can now feel quite safe running their biggest workloads in Hyper-V private clouds. We have no doubt that we will have customers switch from other hypervisors to Hyper-V to take advantage of the cost saving.”

Some larger customers have been able to shut down DR datacenters or avoid building them in the first place. “One large bank was about to break ground on a new DR datacenter, which would have cost NOK70 million [USD9.3 million], but it cancelled those plans and is now going to use EVRY Azure-hosted services instead,” says Mühlbradt. “EVRY-based DR solutions will reduce customer costs drastically.”

Better protect and test DR orchestration

Because DR orchestration takes place in Azure rather than in EVRY datacenters, it’s insulated from failures at EVRY datacenters. “Having DR orchestration occur in the cloud is very advantageous for our customers, because it protects them from a regional failure that might affect our infrastructure,” Sundet says. “If there’s a weather-related, electrical, or other disaster that affects our customers’ and our own datacenters in Norway, those customers can still get to their applications, data, and Windows Azure Pack control panel that are running in an Azure datacenter outside of Norway.”

The cloud-centric DR capability also gives EVRY and its customers an easy way to test DR failover plans without affecting production workloads. “With ASR, it’s easy to create and store recovery plans through the Azure portal,” Sundet says. The plans can be as simple or as advanced as a customer desires, including the execution of custom Windows PowerShell scripts and pauses for manual interventions. “Traditionally, if a customer had a DR solution, testing it was problematic due to the risk of interrupting production workloads,” Sundet continues. “By using Azure Site Recovery, we can test failover plans by creating test virtual machines in the cloud.”

Expand the business

With the new capabilities made possible by ASR, EVRY has leapfrogged the competition and expects to sell its DR services to both existing and new customers. “It’s critical to our business to have a complete DR solution,” Mühlbradt says. “We don’t want to miss out on any opportunities. We expect to be able to sell ASR-based DR services to 20 percent of our customers. This will increase our revenues by 100 percent in this area over the next two years.”