Why SREs Need DR Now
IT is filled with acronyms. From A to Zerto Virtual Manager Appliance (ZVMA), there’s no shortage of letter combinations that make up technical jargon. However, these acronyms help us quickly describe the relationship between technical functions, like two that we hear often when talking about application infrastructure: SRE and DR.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) and disaster recovery (DR) are two important activities that ensure the availability and resilience of an organization’s application infrastructure. While SRE and DR share some similarities, they also have distinct differences and are used for different purposes. In fact, SREs need to integrate DR solutions as part of their systems to ensure resilience. To see how SRE benefits from a robust DR strategy, we need to define the two.
SREs and DR
DR refers to the processes, procedures, and technologies used to prepare for and recover from natural or man-made disasters that threaten the availability of critical systems. DR tries to minimize the impact a disaster has on applications, restoring them to a usable state as quickly as possible.
Looking for further guidance on DR? Read the only essentials guide you’ll ever need.
SRE, on the other hand, is a discipline (and job title for many) that applies engineering practices to operations to improve the reliability and availability of the infrastructure that hosts applications. SRE teams ensure that systems are designed and operated in a way that minimizes downtime and maximizes performance. To do this, they implement automated monitoring and alerting systems and automated recovery processes. They continuously improve systems’ design and operation, and they work closely with development teams to ensure that systems are highly available, resilient, and prepared for planned and unplanned disruptions to applications.
A robust DR strategy is critical to application availability and resilience. Today, SREs are turning to Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, to help achieve their DR needs and requirements. This includes developing and testing DR plans, implementing backup and recovery solutions, and providing training for staff on how to respond to a disaster.
Why Zerto? Why Now?
Zerto addresses DR needs with a comprehensive solution that is both fast and reliable. With Zerto, SREs can replicate data in real-time, ensuring that the most recent version of data is always available in the event of a disaster. This eliminates lengthy recovery times and minimizes the risk of data loss or corruption.
Zerto also automates DR processes. SREs can set up customer service-level agreements (SLAs) that will trigger when prompted during a disruption, automating the recovery and bringing the application back online. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and reduces the risk of human error when initiating a failover.
Zerto enables flexible recovery options, even from one-to-many target locations, such as data recovery to a remote site and natively to the public cloud. This flexibility allows SREs to tailor their DR plans for their organization, ensuring that they can recover quickly and effectively in the event of a disaster.
Another important aspect of DR is testing. SREs need to be able to test their DR plans to ensure that they will work as intended during a disaster. Zerto provides built-in testing capabilities that allow SREs to simulate different disaster scenarios. SREs can generate a report showing which recovery processes were automated and how long each step took. This can give SREs peace of mind and confidence that their DR plans will work as expected when a disaster strikes.
In addition, Zerto provides a wide range of reporting and analytics capabilities that allow SREs to monitor their DR systems’ performance, identifying potential issues before they become critical. Zerto helps SREs to proactively address vulnerabilities in their current DR architecture and improve their DR plans over time.
Dive deeper into insight-driven data about your DR strategy with Zerto Analytics.
Zerto Helps SREs Protect Their Organizations
SREs need DR plans and processes in place to ensure that their organizations can recover quickly and effectively from a disaster. Zerto provides them with the tools they need to achieve this goal. With its real-time data replication, automation, flexibility, testing, and reporting capabilities, Zerto makes it easy for SREs to protect their systems and data from disaster. SREs can rest assured that they have a comprehensive and reliable disaster recovery solution that will keep their systems running smoothly and their data safe.
Learn more about Zerto and get an overview of its DR solution.
Anthony Dutra 
