Disaster Recovery Case Study – Ascentis

Disaster Recovery & WAN Acceleration

Ascentis is a Human Resources software company headquartered in the US with some software development infrastructure located in Uruguay. The Uruguay-based data (development virtual machines) needs to be replicated to the US as part of Ascentis’ engineering department disaster recovery (DR) strategy.
This is a familiar set up for DR, with offsite backups playing an important role in securing against disaster. Often the backup sites are great distances to the source.

The Challenge

The main requirement from Ascentis was to ensure the replication happened in an acceptable timeframe to deliver daily snapshots within a few hours maximum, even if the entire volume needed to be replicated.
Slower replications lead to several issues that can cause business disruption: snapshots potentially piling up; over consumption of the link between Uruguay and the US; and lack of a workable DR strategy while virtual machines in both sites drift apart.

Due to the geographical distance between the sites, the connection wasn’t ideal at 60Mbps with over 200ms latency. Bandwidth was good but TrueNAS SSH+NETCAT replication protocol doesn’t work well with high latency networks.

“Replify allowed us to implement a D/R strategy based on TrueNAS as a source for iSCSI storage. The situation was pretty simple: without the incredible boost provided by Replify it was going to be impossible for us to utilize TrueNAS as a replication platform given the geographical distance between our datacenters.”

Jose Sebastian Battig – EVP, Saas Operation & Corp Technology

The Solution

Ascentis first tried other well-known WAN Optimization solutions. After some testing, Replify WAN Accelerator proved to show the most benefit and offered a simpler and friendlier licensing model.

Replify’s Intelligent Caching Engine performs a range of optimisations to the application traffic. This reduces bytes on the wire and speeds up application performance. For disaster recovery (DR) customers, this can have a dramatic impact on reducing the backup time.

“It’s been great to help Ascentis address their disaster recovery challenges by boosting the performance of TrueNAS.”

Rozy Corry – CEO, Replify