Bare-Metal DR: Reducing the Cost of Staying Ready
Key takeaways
- Enterprise SaaS buyers want documented RTO and RPO commitments, multi-region failover, and tested recovery, right alongside SOC 2 Type II.
- SaaS teams have traditionally opted for a production-equivalent disaster recovery (DR) standby that costs them cloud on-demand rates, significantly driving up expenses.
- The Hivelocity SaaS bundle provides a simplified path to more cost-efficient DR while meeting key enterprise buyer concerns.
In the past, DR was an internal concern. But with SaaS deals moving upmarket, DR has become part of the enterprise security review, sitting alongside SOC 2.
Today’s enterprise buyers are looking for documented RTOs and RPOs, with multi-region failover capabilities. They also demand evidence that the recovery plan has been put to the test. If a vendor can’t produce that documentation, they’re likely to lose the deal, or stall it for a quarter while building the capability.
The reality is that for most SaaS companies, DR becomes a necessity as soon as they start selling to enterprise customers.
Cloud-Based DR Costs SaaS Companies
To meet the new DR expectations, SaaS companies commonly build the standby the same way as their production environment. It lives on the same cloud, ready to take over, but the economics rarely work out. The production-equivalent standby costs cloud on-demand rates for capacity that mostly sits idle.
The outcome is that the reserve capacity roughly doubles the infrastructure bill. This is hard to defend at budget reviews, when the CFO asks, “Why does the DR line costs nearly as much as production?”
Increasing DR Cost-Efficiency
In truth, your recovery posture doesn’t need to cost that much.
By taking advantage of bare-metal infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, many SaaS teams find that they can build a genuine multi-region DR architecture on dedicated hardware, active or active-passive, at a fraction of what an equivalent hyperscale standby costs. When you take advantage of purpose-built IaaS, you can build your own DR capabilities, in whatever way works best for you: you own the design, the failover logic, and the recovery testing.
What changes is the price of the standing capacity underneath it. Data residency follows the same model, with regions chosen to match where your customers and their regulators expect the data to live.
How to Ensure Effective DR
DR investments need to be able to take over seamlessly when a failover occurs. Making sure that happens depends on having production-equivalent capabilities in your secondary region, not just a thin copy that can’t handle real traffic. It also requires rehearsal, which allows you to ensure the RTO and RPO you put in front of a customer are accurate.
The Hivelocity SaaS Bundle
The Hivelocity SaaS bundle can help SaaS companies embrace bare-metal DR while maximizing simplicity and cost-efficiency. The bundle positions multi-region DR in our Hi-Scale Compute tier (Tier 3), with bare metal database nodes in the primary region, the customer-built standby in a second region, and a hybrid cloud application tier on top.
Each DR initiative taking advantage of the bundle is a custom engagement to ensure the solution meets unique needs at scale. The bundle is backed up by a SOC 2 Type II report across core facilities. We provide dedicated hardware in each region, so the standby has database performance that matches the primary. That’s what makes a tested failover believable.
Meanwhile, our customers’ application tiers usually stay on cloud, so the effort concentrates on the database and its regional copies.
Get Started Today
Want to see how much you can save with bare-metal DR? We’re ready to show you.
Our experts can help you map top-of-mind concerns such as RTO, RPO, and multi-region capabilities to our bare-metal infrastructure. We’ll give you a clear picture of why the cost of staying ready is significantly less when you work with Hivelocity.
FAQs
Q: How do the costs compare between cloud and bare-metal DR?
A: Cloud-based DR costs on-demand rates for environments that mostly sit idle. This can have a sizable impact on costs; in many cases, roughly doubling the bill. The same recovery posture on dedicated hardware costs a fraction of that.
Q: Does Hivelocity run the DR environment?
A: No. Your team builds and operates the DR environment. They design the failover, choose the regions, and own the recovery testing, the same way you’d stand up a second region in the cloud.
Q: What’s top-of-mind for enterprise SaaS buyers when it comes to DR?
A: Critical elements include documented RTO and RPO commitments, a multi-region failover plan, evidence that recovery has been tested, and validation of where the data physically lives for residency. DR now shows up in the same security review as SOC 2, so having it ready keeps deals from stalling.
