If you are running a virtualised infrastructure (who isn’t?) and either your Disaster Recovery software is not meeting targets or just not meeting expectations then you need to know what Zerto is and how it can improve your solution. If you haven’t heard of Zerto yet, it is the first hypervisor-based replication solution to offer enterprise-class data protection and workload mobility from on premise VMware and Hyper-V environments to AWS, extending hypervisor-based replication to the public cloud. It supports continuous replication of workloads irrespective of hypervisor, storage or cloud.
So why Zerto over other Disaster Recovery and replication software solutions? If it’s a host/guest based replication setup then software needs to be installed on every server, it won’t be storage agnostic and your RTOs and RPOs options are limited. If it is snapshot based replication then your production environment resources are probably being drained, again your RTOs/RPOs are high and automatic failback options are lacking. Array based replication like many others is complex and expensive to install, deploy and manage, requires the same storage at all sites and renders DR to the cloud nearly impossible.
Unlike legacy solutions Zerto includes complete virtual awareness and full integration and coexistence with virtual and/or cloud environments, coupled with ‘one-click’ automation of failover, failback and testing. The company exclusively build disaster recovery solutions that offer all of the enterprise class features necessary to protect and replicate mission critical applications such as scalability, granularity, extremely low RTO/RPOs and simplified management. Take a closer look at some of Zerto’s benefits:
Deployment
You can have the Zerto infrastructure ready to go in under 30 minutes. It requires a simple application install on a couple of Windows VMs plus replication appliances on your hosts which can be done with a few clicks and most importantly without any reboots to hosts and no downtime to install any guest agents on servers. You can then create your protection groups and watch your VMs replicate in real time to your DR site.
Non-disruptive DR Testing
Zerto offers the feature to test your DR plan at any time with a single click while replication still runs and the environment is still protected. This means that Production doesn’t need to be taken offline and the applications are still available. Since Zerto keeps all VMs in sync across hosts and is WAN friendly, business critical applications can be recovered extremely quickly and to points in time down to the second. Testing of the groups is a few clicks away and VMs can have their IPs changed in software so layer 2 networks don’t have to be stretched across WAN links.
Simple failback and reverse protection
Testing failover might not be a big issues for some software vendors but what happens when you need to failback? All you data is at the DR site and what is left at Production is already out of sync. Zerto Virtual Replication enables data and application to failback with a few simple clicks so there is no data loss and no downtime for your DR tests.
Hardware Agnostic Solution
With array-based replication a customer needs nearly identical hardware in Production and DR. This cost is not an option for most companies. With Zerto, the replication can happen from an array based production cluster to different disparate hosts with local storage, different arrays or to the cloud. Since the replication happens above the array in the hypervisor, DR becomes easier and older hardware can be reused rather than thrown out. With all the options for targets, DR becomes a commodity rather than an expensive, unused datacentre.
Storage Savings
Migrations with 0 data loss, continuous data protection delivering RPOs of seconds with no snapshots, recovery to previous points in time every few seconds up to 5 days in the past – how does this affect storage, typically one of the largest cost items in your datacentre?
With Zerto all of the replication is managed in the hypervisor, removing any reliance on the underlying storage so there is no need for configuring any snapshots or replica reserves at the storage array level. By utilising journal based protection for point in time recovery, which uses a thin virtual disk on a per-VM basis stored in the recovery site, this significantly reduces the storage usage of the replication as it typically uses 7-10% of additional space. This enables an immediate disk space saving of at least 20%+ over any storage based replication solution which is a significant cost saving that allows for future storage growth with existing storage capacity.
For example, protecting 30TB of VM data would consume 33TB in the recovery site and uses no production storage at all, saving up to 18TB total storage requirements in comparison to SAN based replication.
Execute a DR plan from anywhere
With Zerto’s web-based interface, the IT team is not trapped in the data centre. Failovers can be executed from a tablet in advance of the impending event, from your home, so you can be sure that your staff are safe.
Conclusion
Zerto has become the standard for protection, disaster recovery and migration of applications in cloud and virtualised data centres so it is no surprise that they have enjoyed a more than 300 percent sales increase in the Asia Pacific and Japan (AJP) markets over the past year, driven primarily by its success in Australia and New Zealand. They also boast numerous award wins including Best of Show at VMworld 2011, Best of VMworld Europe 2014, as well as 2011, 2012 and 2013 Product of the Year Awards for its innovative hypervisor-based replication approach.
Diaxion are an Australian Services Partner for Zerto so contact us to discuss how Zerto can be instrumental in keeping your business relevant as we progress through the cloud based technical revolution.
