CloudCasa and SUSE Deliver a Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Solution for Cloud Native Applications and Virtualization

CloudCasa by Catalogic and SUSE deliver disaster recovery for cloud native, Kubernetes and virtualization environments.  By deploying CloudCasa’s Kubernetes-native backup and recovery platform with SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization, customers can have a resilient, storage-driven DR strategy that reduces cost, complexity, and recovery times.

CloudCasa’s new DR for Storage solution separates backup and restore of Kubernetes resources, managed by CloudCasa, from the replication of persistent volumes, managed by SUSE Storage.  SUSE Storage is a cloud-native, distributed storage platform for Kubernetes, providing a reliable, block storage layer that underpins all virtual machine and containerized workloads in SUSE Rancher and SUSE Virtualization environments. By leveraging DR replication, built into SUSE Storage, the combined solution provides low-RTO (recovery time objective) DR that is simpler and more cost-effective than alternatives.

This partnership between SUSE and CloudCasa represents a major step forward for customers who are modernizing applications with containers but still need virtual machine support with enterprise-grade protection and recovery.
The full press announcement is available here: CloudCasa and SUSE Partner to Deliver Disaster Recovery for Kubernetes and Virtualization

Teams running workloads requiring short recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) in the event of a disaster often struggle with the cost and complexity of the configurations required to achieve them. Large hybrid and edge environments often add further constraints on bandwidth, cost, and supportability, making finding an appropriate solution even more difficult. Traditional low-RPO DR solutions can be prohibitively expensive and complex, and can lead to limited flexibility and vendor lock-in.

The combination of CloudCasa and SUSE Storage eliminates much of the cost and complexity by aligning application recovery with storage-based volume replication. CloudCasa protects Kubernetes application configurations, metadata, and associated Kubernetes resources.  SUSE Storage maintains Longhorn Disaster Recovery Volumes at the destination cluster, which are periodically updated from the source cluster.  In the event of a DR failover, CloudCasa’s DR for Storage restores the application and automatically maps andactivates the corresponding Longhorn DR volumes. This ensures that persistent volumes are instantly available to the application without manual intervention.

The result is a streamlined, repeatable workflow that minimizes downtime, reduces the amount of data that must be transferred during recovery, and removes the need to duplicate replication functionality.

Some additional background

A recovery point objective (RPO) for an application is the amount of data loss that can be tolerated in the event of a failure, measured in time. So, for example, if you are willing to lose at most the last 30 minutes worth of activity in a given system in the event of a disaster, the RPO for it would be 30 minutes.

A recovery time objective (RTO) for an application is the maximum amount of downtime that can be tolerated for it. For example, if an application must be back online within 60 minutes after a failure, the RTO would be 60 minutes.

It can be tempting to say that RPOs and RTOs for all of your applications must be near zero, but in most situations that is seldom really necessary or wise. The cost to deploy and maintain a system can increase exponentially as RPO and RTO requirements decrease, reaching a maximum at so-called “zero RTO” solutions that require complicated active-active configurations and/or synchronous remote replication of data.

CloudCasa with SUSE Storage is capable of providing RPOs and RTOs in the 10 minutes to 1 hour range, which is sufficient for even business-critical applications in most industries. And it can do it at a price that is a fraction of that of other solutions.

How it works

• SUSE Storage’s Longhorn DR volumes are configured to ensure volume replication between your source and destination clusters. Replication frequency should be based on your RPO.
• CloudCasa then runs periodic application-level backups, capturing Kubernetes resources and metadata, while relying on Longhorn to handle persistent volume replication. Again, the frequency should be based on your RPO. PV data can be excluded from the CloudCasa backups, or preferably backed up on a less frequent schedule to protect against logical failures.

In a disaster recovery scenario:

• CloudCasa restores the application resource data, referencing the existing Longhorn DR volumes.
• The DR volumes are automatically activated and made available as persistent volumes on the destination cluster as part of the restore.
• Since the amount of data restored is very small, the recovery process can be completed and the applications made available within minutes.

The result: A seamless recovery workflow where SUSE Storage delivers the data, CloudCasa delivers the application state, and together they ensure crash-consistent recovery on the destination cluster.CloudCasa by Catalogic and SUSE now offer a disaster recovery solution for cloud-native virtualization.  Purpose-built for modern, distributed environments where both speed and reliability are critical, this solution brings applications and data online faster, with less complexity, and at a lower cost.

Learn more: https://cloudcasa.io/partners/suse-rancher/

Contact us: casa@cloudcasa.io | https://cloudcasa.io/contact-us

Author Bio:

Bob Adair heads Product Management for CloudCasa at Catalogic Software, Inc. Bob has over 30 years of experience in the IT, storage, and data protection industries. Since beginning his career in IT on Wall Street, he has held senior positions in engineering and product development at technology companies including Storage Networks, Veritas, Symantec, Savvis, EMC, and Dell.