Microsoft has announced a new feature called Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to its Azure Availability Zones. It will allow customers to replicate zone-pinned virtual machines to other regions within a geographic cluster.
The tech giant had introduced Azure AZs last year to provide unique fault-tolerated physical locations within an Azure region with an independent power, network and cooling. An AZ consists of a number of datacenters and houses infrastructure to support highly available and mission critical applications.
Customers can choose to deploy multiple virtual machines across multiple zones within a region for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) applications. These VMs are then physically separated across zones,and a virtual network is created using load balancers at each site.
“On rare occasions, an entire region could become unavailable due to major incidens such as natural disasters. Non-transient, large scale failures may exceed the ability of high availability (HA) features and require full-fledged disaster recovery (DR),” wrote Sujay Talasila, Senior Program Manager,Cloud + Enterprise, in a blog post.
Azure Site Recovery is aimed to complete the resiliency continuum for applications running on Azure VMs. It is a built-in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) in Azure that will help enterprises to keep doing their business even in the cases of major IT outages.
By deploying replication, failover, and recovery processing using Azure Site Recovery, enterprises can keep their applications running during planned and unplanned outages.
ASR is a native DRaaS, and Gartner has recognized Microsoft a leader in 2018 Magic Quadrant for DRaaS on the basis of completeness of vision and ability to execute.
Also read: Azure Machine Learning service now generally available
Azure Site Recovery is now generally available in all regions that support Availability Zones.
