An introduction to Zerto

Disaster recovery is a key component in business sustainability.  Learn about Zerto – a company that can help make it easier.

This week, I had the good fortune to attend Virtualization Field Day 2.  One of the companies presenting at this event was Zerto, a company which “…provides enterprise-class, virtual replication and BC/DR solutions for the data center and the cloud.”  Zerto is new to the scene, established in 2009 with a first product launch taking place in August of 2011.  In the market spectrum, the company is targeting their efforts at the Fortune 500 and medium enterprise space.  The SMB space is not in their target market.

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Very recently, Zerto announced their 2.0 product, a cloud BC/DR platform which supports a number of different scenarios:

  • Enterprise-based datacenters – primary tosecondary (Private Cloud BC/DR)
  • Enterprise to Cloud-based DR/BC (DR-as-a-Service)
  • Cloud provider data centers – primary to secondary (In-cloud BC/DR)

The Zerto Virtual Replication tool has a number of features:

  • 100% virtualization-aware protection – VMs, virtual disks, virtual networks are included.
  • Software only solution.  To be clear, this is not a hardware solution.  This is a solution that implements DR/BC capability at the hypervisor layer.
  • Replicate from anything to anything – this can allow an organization to save money and reduce the need to purchase new hardware (i.e. maybe place an out of warranty/lesser SAN at the DR site?)
  • Support for enterprise private cloud and public cloud replication.  Zerto takes a very flexible approach to location, which enables a business to choose from among many options to protect the environment.
  • Recovery Point Objectives measuring in the seconds with no application performance impact – near-sync continuous replication
  • Bandwidth optimization, WAN resiliency, built-in WAN compression and throttling
  • Built-in continuous data protection capabilities – recover from logical failures
  • Fully automated failover and failback of multiple VMs… RTO = minutes
  • Click to test. Anytime, immediate, automated failover testing while protecting production, also to previous point in time. Too many DR/BC plans fail because they’re not properly tested for fear of adversely affecting a production environment.  That problem is solved with Zerto.
  • Automated recovery – complete site recovery with IP reconfiguration and custom scripts
  • True multi-site, ulti-tenancy.  Support different storage, different VMware version, share infrastructure
  • “Virtual Protection Groups” enable VMware administrators to protect an application that may span across many virtual machines and across many different hosts.  As applications become more complex and more distributed,. this is critical functionality.

Other Virtualization Field Day 2 bloggers have also had some things to say about the Zerto solution:

Disclaimer: I was invited to attend Virtualization Field Day 2 by GestaltIT/TechFieldDay.  This is an all expenses paid event, which included flight, hotel, transportation and meals.  Further, vendor participants provided delegates (invitees) with swag, but nothing of great value.  Event attendance is always with the understanding that any and all opinions – good or bad – can be on the table.  There is no requirement to “be nice to” the vendors.

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