Project Overview

Founded in 1996, a leading real estate group in China has established itself as a top 100 enterprise in the real estate sector, excelling in real estate development, commercial operations, and hotel management.

In recent years, digital transformation has become a popular strategy for traditional enterprises to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. This group has developed an intelligent digital system, including ERP, OA, and business management analysis platforms. With business expansion and the rapid growth of data volume, coupled with threats like ransomware attacks, the group now requires stronger data protection and improved business continuity.

To achieve higher-than-average availability and application protection, the group sought a more efficient disaster recovery (DR) solution to replace its previous on-premises backup services. The goal was to maximize uptime and minimize downtime, ensuring recovery within 30 minutes of a failure. They planned to implement a hybrid public cloud + HyperBDR disaster recovery solution for selected business systems on Alibaba Cloud.

Challenges

Complex production platform systems
The group’s diverse business operations involve multiple systems requiring DR, including ERP and OA. These systems span various architectures such as CentOS 7, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012, VMware virtualization, and hyper-converged virtualization, making disaster recovery more complex.

Dispersed business systems across regions
With operations in over 40 cities across China, including core areas like the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and Central China, managing DR across regions is challenging. The geographical scope hinders unified management and compromises business continuity and stability.

Lack of highly automated cloud DR tools
To align with the goal of full cloud adoption and reduce capital expenditure and operational costs, the group aimed to leverage public cloud resources for DR. However, there are few automated tools on the market that support heterogeneous platform disaster recovery.

Solution

Multi-cloud and multi-scenario adaptability
HyperBDR supports various DR scenarios, including physical-to-cloud, cloud-to-traditional IDC, and DR between public, private, and dedicated clouds. It achieves high levels of automation across heterogeneous platforms without manual intervention, ensuring seamless DR adaptation.

Cross-regional DR for massive data
By leveraging the elasticity of public cloud resources, HyperBDR centralized DR for distributed business systems and allowed on-demand scaling. This enabled unified DR management for business systems across regions.

Boot-in-Cloud technology
Utilizing exclusive cloud API integration, HyperBDR eliminates the need for pre-starting 1:1 instances in the cloud, significantly reducing DR costs. It supports one-click activation of business systems in the cloud for immediate availability.

Agentless VMware source integration
HyperBDR uses an agentless approach to retrieve data from VMware virtual machines, enabling non-intrusive, batch synchronization. This reduces operational overhead for IT staff, protects data privacy, and ensures efficient and secure DR to the cloud.

Customer Benefits

Rapid DR deployment on Alibaba Cloud
With HyperBDR, the group efficiently migrated 60 servers, 120 disks, and 50TB of data to Alibaba Cloud, meeting stringent DR objectives (RTO and RPO) with ease.

Foundation for full cloud adoption
This project successfully implemented DR for part of the group’s business systems on Alibaba Cloud, serving as a blueprint for future DR initiatives. It achieved cost reduction and efficiency gains while ensuring sustainable and stable business growth for the group.