About DRE

When using StorPool Storage in your cloud infrastructure you can utilize the Disaster Recovery Engine (DRE) for recovering VMs quickly, ensuring business continuity in the face of disaster scenarios. DRE simplifies the configuration and execution of disaster recovery services for VMs in KVM-based cloud environments.

Overview

DRE works together with StorPool VolumeCare, a service that manages atomic storage-level snapshots of VM disks. It is used by DRE due to its ability to handle the complexity of scheduling, managing, and replicating recovery points between different zones in a storage-efficient manner.

From a technical point of view, DRE serves as an abstract linking layer between a cloud platform, StorPool’s plugin for this platform, and StorPool itself. The REST API provided by DRE allows integrating VolumeCare capabilities with the cloud platform; for details, see DRE procedures.

Having a disaster recovery mechanism based on DRE allows you to protect and recover a virtual machine (VM) in minutes, ensuring business continuity in the face of disaster scenarios (floods, fires, mass power outages, and so on). The main advantages of DRE are:

  • Simplified implementation, configuration, and execution of disaster recovery services for VMs in Linux KVM-based cloud environments.

  • Significantly reduced recovery point objectives (RPO).

  • Significantly accelerated recovery time objectives (RTO) in disaster scenarios - that is, how quickly VMs can be started up in case the primary site goes offline for some reason.

The DRE is part of the StorPool Storage cluster installation. Its installation and initial configuration are performed by StorPool’s Operations team.

Integration

DRE is compatible with the OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, and Proxmox cloud management platforms (see StorPool integrations). There is no compatibility with environments connected to StorPool over iSCSI.

In case you are using VolumeCare and have configured its policies, consider they need to be synced carefully with the DRE policies. It is recommended to contact StorPool for details on how this should be performed.

Availability

The Beta version of the StorPool Disaster Recovery Engine was released in February 2025. It will be included with every StorPool license. General availability is expected later in 2025.