Zerto business continuity/disaster recovery for data center and cloud

Ziv Kedem, CEO of Zerto, reached out to me to discuss his company's efforts to reduce or eliminate the impact of disasters through the use of hypervisor-based data replication technology.  The company's technology is available both as software that can be loaded in a separate virtual machine on a host system or as a cloud service offering.

In either case, Zerto's technology is designed to offer the following capabilities:

• Zerto's BC/DR software works with VMware's management and storage frameworks to be aware of the operational state of all virtual machines being supported on a host system. This makes it possible for selected virtual machines to be replicated regardless of the storage logical units being accessed.
• Data and entire virtual machines may be replicated without regard to the vendor or type of storage array being utilized.
• The product has been designed to be simple to install.
  
• It integrates with VMware's vCloud Diretor and offers the capability to protect and recover vApps
  
• Zerto offers automated recovery that includes VM/vApp creation and network configuration
• Zerto offers the capability to automate and validate failover environments
• Zerto makes it possible to replicate virtual machines from VMware's vCenter to vCloud environments
• Zerto provides a complete API allowing integration with both proprietary cloud management systems
• Complete workloads can be migrated to the cloud, from cloud to cloud and back into the company's own data centers as required.
• WAN optimization – built-in WAN compression and application policies

Snapshot analysis

Disaster recovery should be a part of every organization's virtualization and cloud computing strategy. Unfortunately, this important task is often merely an afterthought rather than built in from the beginning. In my view, part of the reason for this important detail to be neglected is that there are so many different ways to address this need.

Replication tools are available that execute on the physical host, as a virtual machine, as a application appliance and as a cloud service. IT designers are often confused by the competing messages and capabilities offered by suppliers.

Zerto's approach isn't for everyone. It does, however, make good sense if:

• The organization has standardized on VMware and does not have a significant investment in Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer, Oracle VM, Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization, or one of a number of open source alternatives.
• The organization is willing to use different disaster recovery mechanisms for its mainframe, single vendor midrange systems and its industry standard systems running Windows, Linux or UNIX.

Zerto can be expected to support other virtual machine technology at some point. The addition of other virtual machine software technology is likely to be driven by customer demand.

If Zerto supports the technology you're using, it would be worth looking into what Zerto could do for you.