GRAND RAPIDS—US Signal Co. LLC, the Grand Rapids-based data center and connectivity service provider, Thursday announced enhancements to its Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering with Zerto Ltd., the business continuity software developer.
Company officials said the enhancements provide customers with options for additional protection against common IT issues such as outages and downtime due to human error, malicious threats, bad patches, and natural disasters.
The four new enhancements include several new benefits that make this possible, including:
Self-Managed DRaaS: US Signal’s Disaster Recovery with Zerto now enables companies to manage and control their DR solution while taking advantage of the strength and security of the US Signal cloud. This allows them to achieve geo-diversity, minimize human error, avoid issues from patching and keep malicious threats like ransomware separate from their production environments. They can also take advantage of US Signal’s infrastructure and networking while having the flexibility to build their own virtual protection groups (VPGs) to turn replication on or off, test different failover scenarios, or to fail over whenever necessary. In addition, customers can fail over isolated VPGs or their entire environment using a web-accessible self-service portal in case of a full-site failure that leaves the central management interface unavailable.
Enterprise License Mobility: US Signal Disaster Recovery with Zerto now supports customers who already have purchased a perpetual Zerto IT Resilience Platform Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE) license along with maintenance and support from Zerto. Leveraging an existing license results in lower fees, and customers can still elect to have their service managed by US Signal or can manage it themselves.
Multi-cloud Replication: With US Signal’s multi-cloud replication option, customers can leverage having secondary copies of their production environments in multiple virtual data centers for added protection. This feature enables protection for different failure domains– locally for individual machine restores and remotely for full site protection. It also empowers customers to follow best practices with a 3-2-1 backup and disaster recovery plan by creating local copies, for faster restores, while still having an off-site copy for added protection. Multi-cloud replication is also great for customers going through digital transformation, as it provides a way to migrate workloads into the US Signal cloud.
Stretch Layer 2: Stretch layer 2 is a product extension with the ability to stretch a virtual local area network (VLAN) to allow virtual machines to talk over the same broadcast domain while in different physical locations. Layer 2 connectivity can be stretched over a layer 3 connection. This allows customers to fail over VPGs without the need to reconfigure IP addresses.
“With the new enhancements for our DRaaS with Zerto offering, we are giving our customers the tools they need to make sure their critical IT workloads are always available,” said David McClure, product development manager at US Signal. “Today’s organizations rely on the availability of their IT assets more than ever, and we are excited to be a strategic partner that helps them achieve maximum up time with minimum data loss, no matter what disaster they are facing.”
To learn more about US Signal DR solutions that leverage Zerto’s journal-based continuous replication, call 866.2.SIGNAL or email info@ussignal.com.