DR specialist Zerto is converging backup and disaster recovery (DR) and hopes to strengthen both sides of that equation with stronger backup and DR facilities, using an expanded continuous data protection engine, as well as previewing an in-AWS cloud backup service.
Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE) is its core a DR product providing DR facilities for on-premises and cloud applications. The DR can be provided to the cloud, from the cloud and in-between clouds. It features automation of both DR and backup functions and ECE includes the Zerto Data Protection (ZDP) continuous data protection technology.
ZDP
Gil Levonai, CMO and SVP of product at Zerto offered a quote: “We … are now delivering a new offering that I personally believe will change the backup market—an industry that hasn’t evolved in more than 30 years. ZDP gives businesses a data protection strategy for all of their applications with significant TCO savings tailored to their unique needs.”
ZDP delivers local continuous backup for day-to-day backup restores. Its local journaling technology enables customers to recover without the data loss, downtime, or production impact that Zerto says are inherent to traditional backup systems ensuring business continuity and availability.
In fact ZDP should, in Zerto’s view, displace traditional backup because it offers lower data loss rates and lower infrastructure costs in TCO terms, with an up to 50 per cent saving claimed. ZDP also provides long-term retention on-premises or in the public cloud; with both AWS and Azure as public cloud targets.
Positioning
Updated: Oct 16
Zerto has ZDP, ECE and Zerto 8.5. How do they fit together? Zerto told us: The core software, referred to as the Zerto platform has now moved from v8.0 to v8.5; “ZDP and ECE are the ways you consume/use the platform. They are the license types that you can have now with Zerto.”
Zerto told us “ZDP [which] is for backup and long term retention. … is a new offering, still based on Continuous Data Protection that is focused and priced for backup. The reason it’s priced for backup is because Disaster Recovery capabilities (failback, failover, DR testing, re-IP) are removed because customers don’t need those capabilities for “backup.”
In effect ZDP is ECE-lite. The company tells us: “This means that we will see most customers use ECE for the mission-critical applications and ZDP to back up the rest of their environment that only requires “backup’’ and not DR.”
Zerto 8.5
Zerto 8.5 is the latest version of Zerto’s core protection software, and is used in both the ECE and ZDP products. It follows on from the Zerto 7.0 and Zerto 8.0 versions. At the time of its release Zerto said v7 “converges backup and disaster recovery using hypervisor-based replication and journalling for short- and long-term retention.” And: “Its technology allows you to achieve RPOs of seconds using journal checkpoints up to 30 days ago, instead of a 24-hour recovery time frame.”
Zerto 8 advanced this, as it brought Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to VMware on Google Cloud. The company said: “Zerto’s continuous data protection (CDP) offers the most effective protection for your business applications and data. Zerto automatically tracks and captures modifications, saving every version of your data locally or to a target repository, short and long term.
Zerto claimed its “CDP and innovative journaling technology removes the need for snapshots and thus eliminates production impact and lengthy backup windows. Its … recovery granularity reduces data loss to just seconds.”
The 8.5 version takes this a step further as it expands the CDP applicability beyond VMware on Google’s Cloud. It is also now suited for for lower tier application backup, and not only DR for upper tier applications. Zerto 8.5 includes;
- Backup directly to Azure and AWS
- Instant file and folder restore to production
- VMware on public cloud disaster recovery and data protection for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, and the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution
- CDP capabilities
- Platform automation and lifecycle management features
- Zerto PowerShell Cmdlets Module
The Cmdlets enable performing specific tasks by using a script and not from within the Zerto User Interface. This could be for retrieving information like the Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) defined for a site, working with checkpoints and deleting a VPG.
Preview
Zerto also previewed an in-cloud data protection and DR product on AWS, which protects applications across regions with cloud-native resilience.
The company said it will extend its platform to offer more simplicity and orchestration across all use cases. This will cover businesses requiring a recent data restore due to user error or DR from an infrastructure outage, cloud-first businesses, or businesses just starting out in the public cloud.
It wants to be the one-supplier-fits-all use cases across the data protection spectrum from SMB backup to large enterprise DR covering on-premises virtual servers, containerised servers and in-cloud applications in multiple public clouds.
