By Jennifer Gill, Director of Global Product Marketing

CNBC has reminded us that hurricane season is almost here. The report states that if a hurricane were to hit downtown Miami, it could cause up to $250 billion in damages; and if a hurricane hit Houston, it could cause almost $100 billion in damages. This gets the IT team thinking, “hmmm, when was the last time we tested our DR plan? I better start digging out the 3 inch binders and see if anything needs to be updated.”

Then the hunt for the results of the last test begins. Most likely, the practice run was done over a year ago. Zerto recently conducted a survey and found that almost 70% had run their last test over a year ago – or never!

So, what are your options for hurricane preparedness?

• Stay with what you have: Well, you can run the DR test based on your current plan and see how it goes. If it has been a while, it probably won’t go well and aren’t you just a little concerned that executing a 300 page plan in the event of a disaster might yield a low success rate? Too many steps equal too many opportunities for errors.
• Don’t fool yourself! Backup is not DR! As we all know, backup is not disaster recovery. If you are trying to recover your environment from a backup you aren’t recovering, you are building. Most backup solutions have very little automation and waiting for a VM to hydrate can be a painfully slow process.
• Could DRaaS help? Yes it could! Cloud providers are experts in DR – they execute tests and failovers all the time. It can also be nice moving from a really big capital cost to a more reasonable monthly operational cost. We have many cloud providers here who can have you up and running fast.
• What about redoing your own plan? I know you are thinking, there is no way I am doing that! The days of building, installing, testing are just too much. However, a hypervisor-based replication solution, like Zerto Virtual Replication, can be installed in 30 minutes. Seriously. I run our customer reference program and have the pleasure of speaking to all our great customers. The simplicity is overwhelming. When I say we are simple – I mean it! But don’t listen to me – listen to our customers Zerto Virtual Replication is simple and easy!

Finally, you are probably reading this because you might get hit with a hurricane, but did you know that most data center service interruptions are caused by hardware failures, software upgrades and power outages (not related to weather)? Check out our latest infographic to learn more.

Welcome to the “Get to know your Zerto Ecosystem”  video series. Over the course of this series we will hold interviews with different cloud service providers that use Zerto’s Cloud Continuity Platform to provide disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The videos will highlight some interesting news and features of these cloud service providers as well as some fun things about the person we are interviewing.

For our first video in the series we would like to introduce, we would like to introduce Mike Warstler, Solutions Engineer at Virtacore. Mike is an avid cooker, and also enjoys spending time with his kids..

Enjoy the video below, and some excerpts from the interview.

Zerto: Can you give us a little background on Virtacore and the services you provide?

Mike: We are an infrastructure and service provider, we were established in approximately 2000. We are built on what we consider best of breed technology, so Equinix data centers, Cisco USC Compute platforms, Nimble storage and VMware enterprise plus.

Customers that we are working with typically are looking to do a handful of things: production environments, test and development, virtual desktop instances, offsite data protection, colocation, and, really our sweet spot, disaster recovery services. We are really focused on disaster recovery and the inside joke here is that we refer to ourselves at Zertocore.

Zerto: How are your customers using Cloud-based DR?

Mike: …..So one, protecting from a disaster, obviously. They are looking at, is it the 500 year flood they are protecting against, is it the power outage, or the constructions crew that dug up the fiber connections, or maybe that oops moment that comes with human error; so one is obviously protecting from a disaster.

Two is huge, which is compliance. Organizations looking to meet any compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley or HIPAA, organizations that really need to check that box to meet compliance requirements.

Thirdly, migration. We use Zerto quite a bit for migrations; either from an on premise solution or another hosted or colocation facility into the Virtacore environment.

What I think is most important about using the Zerto tool for all these solutions is not only the ability to perform tests but also the ability to generate reports, and be able to show people the results of the test before we go into a disaster, or to meet compliance requirements, or before migration. So upfront we can know, is this going to be successful or not.

Zerto: What in particular do you like to cook?

Mike: I am a griller, I love to grill. Anything, whether it is seafood or anything. I host a pig-roast every year, and I like that because I get to cook with garden tools and that is not something many people get to say.

By Ian Perez Ponce VP, Product Management & Strategy

For decades, the practice of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) in the IT industry has been relegated to the domain of data center infrastructure, be it physical or virtual. More recently, developing trends have transformed IT Service Continuity technology solutions and operational best practices to extend into the world of hybrid and public clouds. Enterprise organizations around the globe continue to expand their adoption of virtualization, testing the waters with the hybrid cloud. Yet, for many of them the adoption of both mission-critical and business-essential applications running on third-party hosted SaaS and PaaS platforms began several years ago. The thought-provoking question we pose in this article is one of risk and exposure — does data (as a primitive) warrant any less safeguarding or protection by businesses when residing on SaaS or PaaS?

The answers to that question may be as numerous as the number of SaaS and PaaS providers that exist today. Some would argue that well-established (X-aaS) providers such as Salesforce, Google (Apps) and Microsoft (Office 365), are not only liable under contract to safeguard tenant data, but also have the means by which to guarantee that safeguarding. Others would argue that when reading the fine print of any given provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) and/or terms and conditions, there is rarely a clause under data assurance or data protection that guarantees the integrity and recoverability of customer data. Not to mention offering some form of indemnification if that data were inadvertently lost or corrupted.

Somewhere wedged between these views lie the virtues of security and compliance. Whether regulated by external authorities or otherwise, seasoned practitioners of security, compliance and IT Service Continuity Management acknowledge that an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality when it comes to corporate data assets does not bode well in the era of distributed everything. There has been increased M&A activity (e.g., the Datto acquisition of Backupify and the EMC acquisition of Spanning) as well as increased, regular analyst coverage by firms such as Gartner. By inductive logic, this would suggest a recognition by the IT industry as a whole of a gap in the market, and the need for a more robust approach to SaaS/PaaS-stored data.

To allow us to look at the challenge in more detail, first we should make an important distinction. Issues of data availability and access happen — caused due to service outages for example – and administrators should be savvy enough to choose those providers that have the best track record as well as the best performance feature set for their companies or teams, be it around offline caching, latency or other parameters. Data integrity is another issue altogether. In a 2013 report from The Aberdeen Group it was claimed that 32% of companies had experienced loss of critical data in the cloud, 64% of which was due to user errors. In summary, data integrity seems like a much larger problem, one that is potentially tougher-to-solve.

3 Examples: Salesforce, Office365 and Google Apps

How can this be addressed? In a recent research report, Gartner has gone on record to recommend third-party backup tools as good complements to the leading vendors’ own solutions — potentially solving both the data availability and data integrity challenges.

For Salesforce, for example, Gartner highlights additional functionality as a benefit of using third-party solutions, focusing on automation and simplicity. But this does not address an important finding: Salesforce claims a four-hour recovery point objective (RPO) and a 12-hour recovery time objective (RTO), which may be too long for some. Furthermore, each restore request sets customers back $10k, per Gartner.

For Office365, more control and flexibility is touted as the key feature. Gartner claims that Microsoft’s approach is a bit inconsistent between the different services, and so control and flexibility — specifically, the ability to set similar rules for different services —  become useful features when offered by external solutions.

Finally, in the case of Google Apps for Work, robust backup/recovery and a longer retention period take center stage as something third-party solutions could provide.

4 Tips

Here are a few best practices when using third-party BC/DR solutions for PaaS/SaaS:

1) Ease and speed of use: Sounds obvious, right? But what if your PaaS/SaaS vendor quotes you hours or days for data recovery? Data is business-critical, and as such needs to be safely stored at only a few clicks away. Otherwise the business won’t run.

2) Customization: Whether you’re deciding on backup frequency, a pre-determined archival platform, or which users in your company require secured online data, customization is at the core of third-party solutions.

3) Safety and security: Trusting a provider with your data means looking out for providers that have ISO certifications, are HIPAA-compliant, and ideally also take regional or national data privacy laws into account when giving you a choice of backup locations.

4) Cost-effectiveness: By and large, the bulk of on-prem BC/DR costs lie in hardware and hardware maintenance. If your external provider uses large-scale public cloud resources for backup, it means that for once, you can rely on a pay-as-you-go, utility model and introduce significant efficiencies.

In summary, our recommendation is to avoid complacency regarding safeguarding and preservation of your business-critical data, whether you use PaaS/SaaS or not. It’s common-sense risk hedging — with an added layer of tangible technical benefits — to use a mix of models, such as on-prem and the public cloud, and PaaS/SaaS backup and third-party backup. At the end of the day, your business needs to keep running no matter the composition of your IT landscape and application services.

As Hurricane Sandy gathered steam near the East Coast of the US, businesses in the line of sight of the hurricane scrambled to address the complex issues of disaster recovery. With their virtualized infrastructure, managed as a private cloud by Integrity Virtual IT, companies like Affigent were able to continue working through the storm, with no impact on business operations.

Back up to a few months prior; Affigent requested that their IT consultant, Ron Offer at Integrity Virtual IT, go search for a disaster recovery (DR) tool which would have the ability to protect all of their business-critical company processes and tools. A local incident in which a truck accident inside a tunnel cut all fiber connections to some area data centers helped Affigent realize that they needed a secondary data center for recovery and a solid DR tool.

Affigent LLC is a government contractor and therefore has a large sales force that is spread across the United States with a smaller international presence. For Affigent, IT is business critical. When a US government agency requests a bid or proposal from Affigent, a deadline is given and agreed upon. If IT systems are not available when deadlines approach, proposals & orders cannot be made or sent, resulting in large revenue loss.

Affigent hosts their ERP and CRM solutions at Integrity Virtual IT’s Tier 1 CoreSite data centers in Reston, VA and Chicago, IL. Both data centers run on VMware infrastructure. Ron suggested Affigent look at hypervisor-based replication for disaster recovery. Ron looked into the features of cloud-based DR in the hypervisor with Zerto and found it could provide some features that other DR solutions did not include:

Hardware-agnostic – so customers can replicate data from any type of storage to any other type of storage. Without this, a customer has to match the hardware brand and technology of their cloud provider, an expensive proposition.

Simplicity – many of the manual tasks associated with a typical BC/DR solution are automated with hypervisor-based replication that sits within the virtualized infrastructure, reducing or eliminating errors.

Hypervisor-based replication from Zerto was approved and put into place at the Affigent hosted data center. As the hurricane approached, Ron recommended that Affigent move its primary private cloud platform from Reston, VA, which was predicted to be in harm’s way, to a data center in Chicago, IL. Actual failover to the Chicago site was performed during Monday lunchtime. Servers were shutdown cleanly, latest changes were replicated and then servers were restarted in the DR site. It took 35 minutes to move and another 20 minutes to fully test all applications that were failed over to the Chicago site.

Affigent continued to fully operate without any data loss in the secondary data center until the storm passed. Affigent was able to conduct business during the storm and provide its customers with timely responses across its entire sales force.

We are excited to announce to launch of the new Zerto forum, MyZerto. The purpose of the forum is to provide a community for people to ask questions, start conversations and connect with other IT minded people all around the topic of disaster recovery and Zerto.

Users are invited to come:

• Take part in our Public Form
• Gain access to our knowledge base
• Download technical documentation

The MyZerto forum will help customers access communicate and share issues and solutions, in addition to the documentation and knowledge base that will now be at their fingertips.

Here are some good conversations and articles to get you started:

Migrating DR Environment

Manual Upload to Zerto FTP Servers

We look forward to seeing you in our community, please feel free to join, poke around, learn more and have fun!

In honor of Father’s Day, Sunday, June 21, we asked Ziv Kedem, Zerto’s CEO and co-founder, to tell us about his father’s influence on his career. Ziv’s father, Nadav Kedem, is a technologist and entrepreneur with 40 years’ experience in the storage and software industries. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree it seems.

Question: How did your father influence your love of technology?

ZK: Both of my parents had careers in high tech, but my father played an undeniable role in my love of technology, which set me on the path I’m on now. I started learning to code when I was just 11 years old with my dad’s encouragement and guidance. I came to love coding, the beauty of it and how it can be used to solve complex problems. My dad was my guide at first. He showed me what coding could accomplish and helped me solve the problems I encountered. I was hooked and – as I grew older and learned more about the power of technology – I knew that I’d pursue a career in a technical field.

Question: Do you turn to your father for advice or counsel?

ZK: Of course! I’m very close with my father, so we talk about everything, including Zerto’s successes, challenges and the road ahead. My dad’s advice is especially valuable, because he has both an outsider’s perspective, as well as an entrepreneurial mindset. He has faced many of the same challenges that I encounter, so I very much appreciate that I have a resource like him I can call on for feedback and advice.

There are times too when my dad turns to me for advice on challenges he’s facing, and I’m so grateful that he values my opinion and I’m able to return the favor. All my life, he’s supported my pursuits in high tech. I’m proud that he trusts me enough to turn the tables and ask me for advice.

Question: What fed your entrepreneurial mindset? How did your family contribute to that?

ZK: With my father’s encouragement, I developed a strong foundation in technology. I built on that foundation when I joined the military, which provided me with the opportunity to expand my experience, and demonstrate how technology has the potential to change lives. When I left the military, I saw that I was part of a large and growing network of technical professionals, and a group of us set out to identify opportunities for solving some of the deep technical problems that exist in enterprise tech.

My father of course supported my path, and he and his brothers had deep roots in data storage technology. They were all involved with various data storage companies over the years, and I’m sure that their love for the storage industry rubbed off on me and my brother Oded!

Question: If you could draw on the entrepreneurial experiences of both yourself and your father, and share advice with the next generation of entrepreneurs, what would you say?

ZK: First, vet your idea for a product or service before launching the company. We followed this prescription for Zerto and it set us up for longer term success. Next, hire a veteran sales and marketing executive with a strong pedigree early on in the life of the company. Bring this person in before building the engineering team, before writing the first line of code, before even raising funds. This person will ensure that you’re creating a product that has appeal to your target markets from an early stage and position it for success down the road. Last, think big and think long term. Don’t just focus on the next product release or the next event. Take a macro view and focus on creating an organization that’s “built to last.”

In this session of our Get to know your Zerto Ecosystem video series, Pat O’day, Chief Technology Officer of Bluelock. In Pat’s free time he is a 3d printing and twitch streamer enthusiast.

Enjoy the video below, and some excerpts from the interview.

Zerto: Bluelock offers a great cloud hosting and recovery as a service product, can you give us an example of a customer using your product in a unique way?

Pat: We have started to do a lot of work with Goodwill Industries of Central Indian. Most of you probably have a Goodwill office in your home town. If you are not familiar with them, they are a not for profit where you can drop off used goods to one of their offices, they will clean them up and repair them, and they try to find someone in need who can use them: baby clothes, toys, furniture, anything like that .

They found themselves getting into the retail, or ecommerce, business online. That was when we first met them because they realized they went from a standard IT shop to someone hosting a revenue critical application, think in terms of eBay or an amazon.com. They realized they needed disaster recovery in order to make sure that application was available, all the time….

Zerto: Can you give us any insight, or information into big news coming out of Bluelock in 2015?

Pat: ……If you think about a typical DR environment, most people would judge it based on whether or not you can recover, but when you look at the idea that you might need security services, you might need to be in a compliant environment, you might need backups to work, those are things that people don’t typically invest in, in a DR site, because it is seen as sort of a temporary or necessary evil, maybe even insurance.

We already have many of those services that are immediately available when you power up your DR environment, but we are adding to that service portfolio so that your DR environment looks more and more like production, maybe even a little bit better.

Zerto: What is the supernatural talent you would like to be gifted with the most?

Pat: I l would love to be able to heal people. I know we have all been affected, extended family, friends and family. You hear a news report about how one day we will all live to be 150 and then the next minute you hear about someone you know or in your extended family, your work ecosystem that is not doing so well. The idea that you could in some way make the pain go away, maybe even fix it; I think that would be pretty awesome.

We are now a month into the 2015 hurricane season and wanted to further display how hurricane preparedness can save your company. See the infographic below and learn how Woodforest National Bank per-empted the dangers of a hurricane and protected their most critical financial applications.

Join our webinar on July 14, along with the Red Cross, City of Coral and GA Telesis to learn how to ensure your data, your organization and most importantly, the safety of your employees in case of disaster.

By Joshua Stenhouse, Zerto Technical Evangelist 

Snapshots are often used to replicate Virtual Machines (VMs) from a specific point in time and to maintain multiple recovery points in order to recover from a disaster. Snapshots can be performed at the VM level or at the Storage Area Network (SAN) level.

VM level snapshots are created in the hypervisor and they incur the biggest performance impact.It is therefore not recommended to create, remove or leave VM level snapshots running on production VMs during working hours for this reason. Any VM level snapshot-based replication system is usually configured to replicate daily or weekly, outside of working hours, to ensure no performance impact. Additionally, it can only replicate as often as the snapshots are configured to run. This often introduces complexity in trying to manage schedules so as not to conflict backup and replication schedules of the same VMs.

Some VM level replication solutions offer the feature of “continuous replication.” But this simply refers to a constantly running replication job that is forever creating, reading, consolidating and removing snapshots, and stunning the protected VM which nobody would want for production VMs.

Storage level snapshots incur less performance impact than VM level snapshots, but still require processing power in a storage controller and at scale can still start to degrade performance. The frequency at which storage level snapshots can be created is therefore still very much limited by the potential for performance impact. This means that storage snapshots are often taken every few hours to give a restorable point in time of the data which is then replicated to a recovery site.

With both types of snapshots, the recovery points available are often limited at best. Below is an example of a typical storage snapshot schedule with nightly backups which represent VM level snapshots:

The main problem with snapshots is not only the potential for performance impact, it is the granularity of the points in time for recovery that they offer. If we take the above example of a data corruption at 15:43, then a VM level 24 hour snapshot based replication solution means you are going to potentially have nearly 16 hours of data loss, as you would have to restore a replicated snapshot from last night. The same example with storage based replication would result in data loss of nearly 4 hours. Both of which could result in a significant loss of valuable data for an organization.

With hypervisor based continuous data protection (CDP) no snapshots are created on the protected VM, so no performance impact is ever introduced. Hypervisor based CDP also utilizes journal technology to keep a log of all of the changes occurring in a specified journal time frame, allowing recovery to points in time every few seconds for the length of the journal. This means that in the above example, the data could be restored to 15:42:50, just before the corruption occurred, significantly reducing the data loss and impact to the organization.

By utilizing journal technology, rather than VM level snapshots for point in time recovery, there are multiple benefits beyond simply the sheer number of points in time available.

They are:

• Storing multiple snapshots on replica VMs incurs a significant VM performance penalty if you attempt to power on the replica VM. Full performance can only be achieved once all of the snapshots have been consolidated, which significantly increases the RTO. With journal based protection, the journal is only used until you commit to the point in time selected, without the performance impact of many snapshots.
• Using snapshots on replicated VMs gives no way of controlling the total space used for snapshots, or the ability to store the data change on a separate datastore. This makes it un-scalable in terms of being able to set SLAs and define maximum limits on the data space used by the snapshots. Furthermore, the data is always stored with the replica VM. With journal based protection you can place the journal on any datastore and place a maximum size limits and warnings; so as not to fill the datastore which could otherwise break replication and recover.
• With storage based replication there is often significant overhead on the storage arrays for replication reserves; which can be 20-30% on both source and target storage in many cases. With journaling technology, no extra space is used in the source storage as no snapshots are created.Only 7-10% of the target storage is typically used for the changed data. freeing up significant amounts of disk space. This is due to journals being able to dynamically reclaim unused space and only use what they need. If the journal becomes full then it simply starts to reduce the number of recovery points available, or increases the journal space usage depending on your configuration. In contrast, storage based snapshots running out of replica reserve which can often break production performance, will cease replication operations and render the recovery broken.

I hope this has given you a good insight into snapshots and covered the main points you should take into consideration when evaluating whether to use snapshots or CDP for replication and point in time recovery.

By Shannon Snowden, Zerto’s Sr. Technical Marketing Architect

One size does not fit all. Different workloads can have completely different priorities and demands. Most infrastructures have tiers or different performance levels of storage for this very reason. Yet, most replication solutions force a choice of one platform that might be good for some percentage of the workloads, but certainly not all of them. Storage vendors make it painful to deploy a replicated solution and expensive to go elsewhere.

Instead of having to choose only one platform for DR and migrations, there is a better way with ZVR. Some workloads need to stay on-premise or in the company owned data center while other workloads are great fits for a managed service cloud. There are always workloads that would be perfect for a public cloud DR or migration solution.

Zerto Virtual Replication brings flexible protection to the data center

Zerto is all about flexibility. Being completely agnostic to hardware as well as being software based allows for ZVR to meet whatever data protection or migration scenario presented. The source site can be Microsoft or VMware based, and the destination can be AWS, to the cloud as in a DR as a Service solution or completely hosted at a managed service provider with DR in cloud from one service provider site to another. Or it can be a combination of all of them.

This is all accomplished without adding complexity or in-guest agents. The same management interface is used, irrespective of the underlying platform. – Private, public or a hybrid of the two. Now that’s flexible!

All workloads don’t fit into a nice, clean box; but many DR solutions force a design and deployment that makes for a sub-par experience for many of the workloads. For the most effective disaster recovery or migration capabilities, the tool being used must be flexible and able to work with heterogeneous underling platforms and allow for private, public and hybrid solutions.

For this month’s Hear from your Peers webinar, we decided we wanted to do something a little different, something with a little more of a  “social” feel. With that in mind we are co-hosting a tweet chat with Marc Fernandez, IT Manager for the Red Cross.

The tweet chat will be a live Q&A session, where you can get your most pressing questions answered around how to prepare for disaster (floods, hurricanes, monsoons, and other weather related events. Ask the panel about disaster preparation for everything from, protecting your data center to making sure you and your co-workers stay safe.

After the tweetchat we will be giving away limited edition Zerto t-shirts to 10 of the participants and helping someone hone their flying skills by giving away a drone!. The more questions, the better your chances of winning!

These experts will be standing by to answer your questions:

• Marc Fernandez, IT Manager for the Red Cross
• Shannon Snowden, Senior Technical Marketing Architect at Zerto
• Joshua Stenhouse, Technical Evangelist at Zerto
• Jennifer Gill, Director, Global Product Marketing at Zerto will be your moderator

Please join us @ZertoCorp and @RedCrossMA on Tuesday, August 4^th from 1 – 2 PM EST and look for the hashtag #DRCodeRed.

Feel free to start asking your questions in the comments below or by tagging us with the #DRCodeRed hashtag on Twitter,

Click below to add the event to your Google Calendar!

By Jennifer Gill, Director of Global Product Marketing

When a natural disaster occurs (hurricane, monsoon, flooding tornado etc), many IT teams panic. They wonder, when was the last time we tested our DR plan? Did it work? Where is the binder with the fully documented process? Has it been updated to reflect the new storage? Applications?

Typical disaster recovery solutions don’t make it easy to test the plan. The plan is typically many pages long, complicated, and requires many different people to execute it fully. Extensive situations, like flooding and hurricanes, mean the IT team needs to stay in the data center for the duration of the event, just in case they need to start the cumbersome failover and recovery process.

Zerto customers do not worry about their data center when a monsoons, hurricanes and other natural disasters hit, and do you know why?

1) Non-disruptive DR testing. Zerto customers can test their DR plan at any time so they know it will work in the event of a hurricane or ANY other disaster. During the test, replication is still happening and the environment is still protected. Production doesn’t need to be taken offline and the applications are still available. This makes it much easier to test regularly again, giving our customers the confidence that Zerto Virtual Replication will work and properly.

2) Simple failback and reverse protection. We hear from many customers that they don’t want to failover because although they can failover, they can’t failback! So, what do they do after the data is at the DR site? Zerto Virtual Replication enables data and application to failback with a few simple clicks greatly simplifying the decision to failover.

3) Execute the plan from anywhere. With Zerto’s web-based interface, the IT team is not trapped in the data center. Failovers can be executed from a tablet in advance of the impending event, from your home, so you can be sure that your family is safe.

These are the top features if you have flood waters rising or a hurricane barreling down on you, but there are many, many other reasons why Zerto Virtual Replication is a great disaster recovery solution, contact us to learn more!

We are looking forward to a great time at VMworld 2015, and we know you are as well! But we don’t just want to know it, we want to hear it.

With that in mind, we are asking you to tell us what you are looking forward to most at this year’s VMworld 2015. Simply just tweet your answer along with the our Twitter handle, @ZertoCorp and the #VMworld hashtag.

For your tweet, we will set aside for your one of our infamous Master of Disaster Zerto t-shirts(sneak peek below). Additionally, you will get an extra raffle ticket for our RedWed contest which allows you an extra chance to win some of our big prizes.

Visit our booth, 623, by the end of the day Monday at VMworld, to claim your t shirt and extra raffle ticket.

You can also read more about our “We Will Rock You” party as well as Zerto activities during VMworld.

By Shannon Snowden, Zerto’s Sr. Technical Marketing Architect

Award Winning from the Beginning

When Zerto introduced Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) in 2011, it was a completely unique product that quickly captured the attention of the IT world. It won Best of Show at VMworld that year and it continues to win multiple awards every year since.

In a matter of months, ZVR went from an unknown technology to the standard that other disaster recovery (DR) products were measured against. It is amazing how quickly customers, partners and cloud service providers embraced Zerto Virtual Replication.

A New Approach to an Old Problem

How did this all happen?

The reason is pretty clear when you think about it. Pre-Zerto legacy DR solutions are counterintuitive. As an organization, you invest heavily to achieve the freedom that virtualization provides. Benefits like moving live workloads around in the datacenter virtual machine host clusters; lower outages at the site, hardware repairs with no VM server downtime are all products of the power of virtualization.

Yet, pre-Zerto DR solutions depend on outdated backup applications, or something with agents that are invasive to your VMs or you once again have to rely on hardware as critical path for disaster recovery. That makes no sense in a world virtualization

In reality, Zerto has a bit of an unfair advantage versus legacy solutions. It goes back to the very beginning, before the first line of code was written. The features and functionality in Zerto Virtual Replication are there because when Zerto designers started, they started with a blank canvas.

Zerto didn’t have to beat to fit and build on top of a foundation of a legacy solution designed for something else like storage or backup.

That’s not how breakthrough products are created.

Design Fruition: Data Portability Through Flexibility and Federation

Starting fresh enabled the Zerto designers to use a systematic approach of discovering what the real productions needs were for replication, disaster recovery and recovery orchestration and then design a product that meets or exceeds the requirements.

Zerto focuses on being more flexible than other solutions that, in fact are more are interested in locking you in to their infrastructure solution.

Data protection should be able to change and grow with whatever infrastructure is underneath the data. It may be private, managed or public clouds. It could be something entirely different that doesn’t even have a name yet.

The core building blocks of ZVR include:

• Hardware Agnostic – Leverage the server hardware or storage that you have.
• Software-Only installation – Zerto is 100% software solution that performs like expensive hardware replication, plus ZVR has complete orchestration capability.
• Federated Management: Work with dissimilar private and public cloud infrastructure management platforms (vCenter, SCVMM, AWS Console, and whatever comes next)
• Robust APIs: Has an ever-growing, robust set of APIs that allows for deep integration into existing management, monitoring and reporting systems, or empower DevOps solutions.
• Recover Quickly: Have a 14 day Point in Time recovery capability at a granularity level of every few seconds
• Protect and Recover VMs in Logical Groups: Virtual Protection Groups – allow for Tier, application or the entire datacenter to fail or migrate together, with full workload orchestration
• Non-disruptive testing – know that the failover or migration will work because you can test it anytime with no production environment impact.

It’s that kind of visionary thinking and design methodology that makes the next steps in the evolution of Zerto so exciting. With these foundational elements in place, very interesting things are possible.

You should be able to replicate and orchestrate between any platform and any cloud. You see this starting to happen in our hypervisor-agnostic release of ZVR 4.0 that adds in Hyper-V along with VMware. Other hypervisors are on the roadmap and will be added.

You should be able to break completely free of hypervisor only solutions because for many organizations, the public cloud is the best solution for their disaster recovery solution. The challenge with public cloud providers is you may not even know what hypervisor they use; yet our design approach allows for them to be included. ZVR 4.0 has our first step into supporting the public cloud as another infrastructure. Now you can use AWS as a target environment for DR and migration. More public clouds are on the roadmap too.

With all of the possible iterations of data protection Zerto now offers, having a product called Zerto Virtual Replication is only telling you a small part of the story.

More than DR: The Cloud Continuity Platform

Zerto has arrived at a tipping point where we have evolved past a point product for Disaster Recovery (DR) for a single hypervisor. We are now something more. We are more than DR.

So we gave this “something more” a name. We call it the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform (CCP).

The Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform is the idea of having an enabling data protection technology to start thinking about your VMs and the underlying infrastructure in a different way.

It shouldn’t matter what the infrastructure is if your machines are virtual. The solution should make the data portable between completely dissimilar infrastructures and keep the same, easy to use interface to manage it all. It should be able to span across private, managed, and public clouds. ZCCP does that.

It also extends a DR solution to “something more”. Most IT teams think of DR as a high cost insurance policy for a low probability event – and that’s it. With ZVR and the CCP you get a tool that simplifies migrations, helps you mobilize and migrate applications, increase the usefulness or replicated data and extend the life of older assets.

Future-Proof Your Investment

The Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform is designed down to the core to be powerful enough to support current virtualization infrastructures, yet be flexible enough to include whatever comes next like SaaS and Containers.

With every new version released, we see ZVR grow in capability and grow into the Zerto Cloud Continuity design concept. In version 4.0, we added public cloud as a DR and migration target and Hyper-V as a supported hypervisor. Future versions will continue to add more platforms, more options and more power.

With that 2011 VMworld recognition in our rearview mirror, we look forward to VMworld 2015. Come to booth 623, experience “More than DR” in action and see how much it’s grown.

This post is the first in a series that we are calling “More than DR”. In this series of blog posts, we will share the different elements and features that make up the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform.

By Shannon Snowden, Zerto’s Sr. Technical Marketing Architect

The theme for VMworld 2015 is Ready for Any. This is a familiar theme to Zerto because “Any” has been our theme for a couple of years now. In fact, “Any” was the theme of the Zerto booth at VMworld 2014. So it must have been a great idea.

Reading the VMworld theme’s description, it seems you’ll need to substantially change your data center operations to be ready for any, and do a lot of consolidating to a single vendor platform to achieve the vision.

This may make perfect sense and might be right for some organizations. But our idea of being ready for any is based on the concept that most organizations aren’t going to want to boil the ocean and totally change their IT environment. They want to maintain different options from different vendors to avoid lock-in.

In our More than DR series of blogs, we lay out the Zerto design philosophy and our vision of how you can systematically protect, recover or move your data using whatever platform you currently have or wish to use. We also explain how our design approach can work with totally disparate platforms while presenting a single management user interface and simplified experience.

We call it the Cloud Continuity Platform (CCP) and we’re not saying you can use every hypervisor, private or public cloud today, but you can already use VMware, Hyper-V and AWS today and we are busy adding more public cloud and hypervisors.

The CCP vision is as important as what is currently supported because it allows you to future-proof your investment in data protection. Having a platform that is designed to support any hypervisor or any cloud truly gets you ready for any.

By Jennifer Gill, Director, Global Product Marketing

So, Day 1 at VMworld 2015 for Zerto was fantastic!! Great conversations at the booth – lots of customers looking for easy, simple disaster recovery. I spoke with several customers who had a “hit by the bus book”. (Note: A hit by the bus book is a DR plan that consists of 300 pages and if you were to get hit by this book, it would feel like you got hit by a bus).

VMware sure is liking a lot of our message…..like from a year ago :). Simple, affordable disaster recovery has been achieved with Zerto with thousands of customers and partners. Zerto has supported any storage, any cloud and we are on our way to any hypervisor with the addition of Microsoft Hyper-V. The cost savings that cheaper storage and a less expensive hypervisor has prospects excited.

As usual our t-shirts are a big hit!!! Be sure to stop by our booth, 623, to get a t-shirt and wear it on Wednesday for prizes! We have some cool ones like an iWatch, GoPro camera and more.

Tonight, we are very excited for our party! We will Rock VMworld tonight! (Ahem, this is another copied message) The party starts at 8:30 and the “show will go on” with the Killer Queens at 9. We are so excited because “Tonight we are gonna have ourselves a real good time.”

Yesterday Matt Larson, Senior Manager of Business Development for WOW! Business stopped by at VMworld 2015. WOW! Business, a member of our Zerto Cloud Ecosystem (ZCE) shared with us a little bit about WOW!’s transformation into a service provider which now offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), and how delivering low RPO and RTO and extending simplicity to their customer base has changed their business.

Watch below and enjoy.

Scott McIsaac, CTO for Secure 24 joined us at VMworld 2015 to talk a little bit about Secure 24 and their journey to join the Zerto Cloud Ecosystem (ZCE).