If you forage through the internet, you will find a considerable amount of stories, on how organizations have lost production data.

Most if not all of these stories, are not from inexperienced teams; that did not know the importance of backups, or have a backup procedure in place. They are, but stories of a series of unrelated, unfortunate incidences, leading up to the loss of valuable production data.

To mention but a few of the few the well documented incidences:

1. Disneys Pixar deleted almost two hours of work (Toy Story 2) with one command (rm * meaning "remove all")

2. GitLab deleted the production database earlier this year

3. GitHub deleted a production database seven years ago

Node Africa held a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery As A Service) round-table on the 16th of March 2017 which was kindly sponsored by our partners, Westcon and NetApp, to help organizations understand how to alleviate data loss and demystify the service.

A well executed DRaaS service can help an organization; become more responsive, improve data control and help the organization make better choices.

David Mugo (Lead System Engineer – NetApp)

Mr. David Mugo, a Lead System Engineer at NetApp, started the session off; explaining to the ecstatic crowd that they should choose, the DRaaS service on offer from Node Africa, since it would accord them:

Responsiveness: In the unfortunate event that an organization lost production data while on the Node Africa DRaaS service, the organization could effectively fail-over to the public cloud system and run off it until they manage to successfully rebuild their local services. The NetApp service also makes it easy to sync data from the cloud system back to the local production system.

Control and Security: NetApp provides the ability to; encrypt data and create password/s for an SVM’s (not optional) to keep data from falling into the wrong hands while on transit or at the public cloud facility and to meet organizational security audit requirements.

Choice: NetAPP allows organizations to backup workloads regardless of the system/s that are using. Organizations do not necessarily need to have a NetAPP array for them to make use of the Node Africa DRaaS service.

Mr. Mugo also took some time to point out a few factors which are intrinsic in Node Africa’s service that make Cloud Computing Compelling:

• DRaaS(Disaster Recovery Services) – This is the ability to have an offsite backup for your production systems

• Compute Burst – The ability to destroy, request, use and pay for compute services as needs arise without worrying about the infrastructure

• Devops -Testing – The ability to build and test systems in isolation without affecting production services

• Backup & Archiving – The ability to take/test synchronous and asynchronous backups

Mr. Mugo added that at OnApp they have been working hard to help customers move data seamlessly and he reiterated that NetAPP ONTAPP was the foundation for the Data Fabric that gives customers data mobility and seamless data management capabilities.

Mr. Phares Kariuki, the C.E.O Node Africa; towed Mr Mugos maiden speech of the day, explaining to the eager crowd that they could pay for storage and DR (Disaster Recovery) testing / compute separately, making the Node Africa service much more efficient and cost effective.

Mr Kariuki, mentioned that the company (Node Africa); founded on December 2015, had a highly skilled 10 member staff team. The company, is a cloud and infrastructure service provider, with over 53 high net worth customers.

The company is effectively, purposing to change the nature of IT consumption in Kenya. They feature a hybrid cloud setup with 3 server brands, two arrays and their signature no physical routers setup.

People want compute and are not concerned with the details of what that entails.

We demystify the process and give you the best solution for you so that you do not get lost in the ‘forest’ of ISP’s hardware, software and networking

Phares Kariuki (C.E.O Node Africa)

Mr Kariuki, provided the crowd with a few case studies, from some of their current customers (AfMobi Group, ION Kenya and a local insurance firm), to further demonstrate the confidence that the industry has, in the DRaaS services provided by Node Africa.