User guide

24 | Introduction to AppAssure 5
Replication begins with seeding: the initial transfer of deduplicated base images and
incremental snapshots of the protected agents, which can add up to hundreds or
thousands of gigabytes of data. Initial replication can be seeded to the target core
using external media. This is typically useful for large sets of data or sites with slow
links. The data in the seeding archive is compressed, encrypted and deduplicated. If
the total size of the archive is larger than the space available on the removable
media, the archive can span across multiple devices based on the available space on
the media. During the seeding process, the incremental recovery points replicate to
the target site. After the target core consumes the seeding archive, the newly
replicated incremental recovery points automatically synchronize.
Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS)
Managed service providers (MSPs) can fully leverage AppAssure 5 as a platform for
delivering recovery as a service (RaaS). RaaS facilitates complete recovery-in-the-
cloud by replicating customers' physical and virtual servers along with their data to
the service provider's cloud as virtual machines to support recovery testing or actual
recovery operations. Customers wanting to perform recovery-in-the-cloud can
configure replication on their protected machines on the local cores to an
AppAssure service provider. In the event of a disaster, the MSPs can instantly spin-up
virtual machines for the customer.
MSPs can deploy multi-tenant AppAssure 5-based RaaS infrastructure that can host
multiple and discrete organizations or business units (the tenants) that ordinarily do
not share security or data on a single server or a group of servers. The data of each
tenant is isolated and secure from other tenants and the service provider.
Retention and Archiving
AppAssure 5 offers flexible backup and retention policies that are easily configurable.
The ability to tailor retention polices to the needs of an organization not only helps
to meet compliance requirements but does so without compromising recovery time
objectives (RTO).