2. Expedient Data Centers is a managed infrastructure and cloud services provider. It recently updated its disas-
ter recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering by implementing VMware’s NSX networking software. By doing so,
Expedient not only removed the need to update DNS records during a failover event – a disaster – but dem-
onstrated that NSX can be a money-making proposition for providers, if they can successfully bring it to heel.
Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Expedient currently has 11 datacenters in Boston; Baltimore,
Maryland; Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; Memphis,Tennessee; and Pittsburgh. It has about 300
employees, and says it is growing and profitable, although it doesn’t disclose revenue. Expedient says its busi-
ness is split about equally between colocation and managed infrastructure services.
THE 451 TAKE
It is important not to oversell what Expedient has done with NSX: it has one major service stable and opera-
tional on the platform. But it’s also important to recognize the significance of this. NSX is next-generation
software, notoriously different and incompatible with what most of the IT world considers networking (virtual
or otherwise), and not mature even after years of development. Yet Expedient saw and realized the potential
in NSX to make sweeping changes to a problem most IT shops and providers consider simply impossible to
change. What’s more, this kind of innovation is iterative. Lessons here may allow Expedient to make similar
leaps in other service areas, and the true potential of NSX is very broad indeed for the rest of the market.
CONTEXT
Expedient has been a managed infrastructure and colocation provider for well over a decade, and first launched virtual-
ized disaster-recovery services in 2011. Based on VMware – and in what has now become a standard mode of modern
disaster-recovery setups – it was virtualized and sold on-demand as a subscription-based service at a much lower cost
than traditional full-site replication, and was generally an improvement in all directions.
However, it wasn’t enough of an improvement – company officials say that actual recovery times involving migration of
virtual machines and data were still slow, and involved manual intervention to make sure the network and DNS handover
went smoothly. Customer interest wasn’t there. Over time, Expedient used Zerto, a VMware-based DR/BC software pack-
age to improve the experience, but felt a major revamp was required to help it stand out from the increasingly crowded
ranks of DRaaS providers and to make material improvements to service delivery.
In order for a disaster-recovery scenario to be considered ‘as a service,’ it must meet the same criteria as other cloud ser-
vices, being on-demand rather than up-front investment, self-service and automated. Most of this can be accomplished
with software, but there are still critical steps in the middle that are resistant to change, and this is what Expedient did.
TECHNO LOGY
Recognizing the need to remove the manual process – costly both in time and human resources – of failing over an IT
environment from one network to another in a separate location, Expedient used VMware’s NSX to bridge the divide. For
each client, it uses a pair of NSX Edge devices that govern and segregate the client’s network, and virtualized Juniper SRX
gateways (vSRX).
This can happen from one Expedient location to another, which the company prefers since it has dedicated links between
datacenters; or it can happen from an enterprise datacenter to an Expedient facility over the internet or a backhaul link
– the external location needs one half of the NSX Edge pair, and Expedient needs to assign the public IP address for the
failover. This provides a fully virtualized, direct Layer 2 connection from site to site that removes the necessity to switch
networks and update DNS records completely.
451 RES EAR C H R EPRINT
3. 451 RES EAR C H R EPRINT
In practice, that means all network functions, including public websites, application interfaces, monitoring and
reporting tools – the whole nine yards – will experience no disruption except for a halt in traffic while remote
instances are spun up in a failover scenario. That’s a huge improvement of the process. It also means that some
applications, especially those that could be considered stateless or don’t involve a lot of data transfer to return to
operations, can come back up in minutes rather than hours.
Expedient says that doing this with NSX was a lot of engineering investment into learning how the product func-
tioned and why it is so different from standard networking, as well as into making it work in the lab by dint of
repeated efforts. Most of the basic functionality was built in PowerShell and uses VMware Site Recovery Manager
(SRM). One notable result is that Expedient’s DRaaS service no longer requires a dedicated connection for SRM –
for some contexts, VMware’s vCloud Disaster Recovery service, which also uses SRM, still requires that dedicated
site-to-site connection, but the Expedient iteration is more flexible.
It’s a remarkable achievement, especially for an infrastructure services provider, which is banking future revenue
on this capability.There are more than 1,000 NSX customers right now, most of them enterprises or software/SaaS
organizations.This is a rare example of an infrastructure provider not only using NSX in production, but productiz-
ing its capabilities directly. That’s a significant step forward in adoption.
COMPETITION
DRaaS was a rare beast a few years ago, but the field has exploded, thanks in large part to ISVs like Zerto, Strato-
Gen and Veeam, and the growth of virtualization is a standard deployment for enterprises. Expedient competes
with other colocation and managed services providers that advertise DRaaS, like Peak 10, Bluelock, iLand, NTT,
SunGard, Cosentry (TierPoint) and VMware vCloud Air.
Armor Defense uses NSX, and most managed infrastructure providers can put together a DRaaS-style implemen-
tation at the request of a customer. These are some of the growing number that have productized it, or made it a
specialty. Microsoft Azure is set to offer recovery services on its platform as well.
SWOT ANALYSIS
STRENGTHS
Expedient used NSX to make substantial im-
provements to normal DRaaS practices. It
has a good footprint and interconnection to
serve its markets.
WEAKNESSES
Expedient will have to remain actively in-
volved in investing in and developing NSX ca-
pabilities for future use.
OPPORTUNITIES
DRaaS is an excellent entry point for new
customers, as well as an upsell for existing
ones, and the market is flourishing right now.
THREATS
Competition is growing extremely fast –
DRaaS will not be a significant differentiator
from the rest of the managed infrastructure
services market segment.
