Zerto was based in 2010 by a team of storage business
veterans. Ziv Kedem, Zerto’s founder and corporate executive, antecedently
co-founded Kashya (acquired by EMC in 2006). Backed by 83North (formerly
Greylock IL), Battery Ventures, Harmony Partners, RTP Ventures and USVP, Zerto
is dual-layer Cloud Technology which provides enterprise-class disaster
recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and
cloud environments.
In the event of a disaster, recovering your company’s
terabytes of data and the business processes you rely on is something you may
rarely think about, but something your IT department deals with every day.
Today, enterprises of all sizes are deploying applications
on virtualized IT infrastructures and clouds. The values of virtualization
including flexibility, scalability and mobility complicate business continuity
efforts in times of disaster. To realize the benefits of virtualization,
organizations need to optimize IT processes for virtual environments. Business
Continuity / Disaster Recovery is difficult - because to date there have been
no virtual-ready replication methods that scale for large data centers.
Traditional physical replication tools are complex & manual, while virtual
replication tools are not built for scale and reliability. With
hypervisor-based replication, all that changes. Zerto is storage agnostic,
simple to install, intuitive to use, & is suited for both data centers and
cloud.
Founded by a team of storage industry veterans, Zerto
provides large enterprises with business continuity and disaster recovery
solutions designed specifically for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud.
Zerto Virtual Replication is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication
solution for tier-one applications, replacing traditional array-based BC/DR
solutions that were not built to deal with the virtual paradigm.
This is the third installment of a series by Systems
Team Lead Matt Peabody to begin to answer a question he hears all the time:
“Why vendor X?”
We are going to make a change from the originally planned
“Why VMware?” and talk about a newer partner with whom we are working.
Zerto is a Disaster Recovery product built for virtualization. We had
quite a few customers asking us how they could close the gap for their data
loss in the event of a total failure. Many of them were relying on
offsite backups and realized the time to restore all of their data would be a
large loss of productivity. We had looked at Continuous Data Protection
backup products before and were largely unimpressed with the complexity, and we
didn’t like the performance hits the VMs took when they were being
protected. We found Zerto after talking with a few of our customers who
had just deployed it to protect their virtual infrastructures.
We did our normal testing of the product and found there
were a few things that stood out for Zerto as a leader in Business Continuity.
1. Deployment
During our initial conversations with customers and throughout our testing, we found the deployment to be one of the simplest installs. We rant through the install on a Windows VM, deployed the replication appliances with a few clicks and had a replication infrastructure ready to go in about 30 minutes. We then created a few protection groups and watched our VMs replicating in real time to our DR site. This was all done without any reboots to hosts and no downtime to install guest agents in our VMs.
During our initial conversations with customers and throughout our testing, we found the deployment to be one of the simplest installs. We rant through the install on a Windows VM, deployed the replication appliances with a few clicks and had a replication infrastructure ready to go in about 30 minutes. We then created a few protection groups and watched our VMs replicating in real time to our DR site. This was all done without any reboots to hosts and no downtime to install guest agents in our VMs.
2. Automation
Zerto can protect VMs in Virtual Protection Groups (VPG). These groups are similar to VMware’s VApp entities. The VMs in a VPG are all kept in sync and make up a business application. This allows for single click testing and automated recovery when needed for DR purposes. Since Zerto can keep all the VMs in sync across hosts and is WAN friendly, the business critical apps can be recovered extremely quickly and to points in time down to the second. Testing of the groups is a few clicks away and will keep the production workload from going down. VMs can have IPs changed in software so layer 2 networks don’t have to be stretched across WAN links.
Zerto can protect VMs in Virtual Protection Groups (VPG). These groups are similar to VMware’s VApp entities. The VMs in a VPG are all kept in sync and make up a business application. This allows for single click testing and automated recovery when needed for DR purposes. Since Zerto can keep all the VMs in sync across hosts and is WAN friendly, the business critical apps can be recovered extremely quickly and to points in time down to the second. Testing of the groups is a few clicks away and will keep the production workload from going down. VMs can have IPs changed in software so layer 2 networks don’t have to be stretched across WAN links.
3. Fault Tolerance
Many of the complaints we found with CDP products focused on what happened when the network or backup repository was offline. With in-guest agents, many of them built up queues of data, filling up disk space, slowing down performance and bottlenecking memory. With Zerto, they handle all of these gracefully. Each hosts has its own small replication proxy, which listens to the SCSI stream from the VMs it is protecting. If the WAN connectivity is failing, those VMs build up a queue on their disks, not affecting the production application VMs’ performance. They can also recover from long outages with ease by reprotecting a VM and only sending over changes from the last protected point in time. Since the management architecture is distributed across datacenters, failure of one side does not impact the protection or recovery of the protected VMs.
Many of the complaints we found with CDP products focused on what happened when the network or backup repository was offline. With in-guest agents, many of them built up queues of data, filling up disk space, slowing down performance and bottlenecking memory. With Zerto, they handle all of these gracefully. Each hosts has its own small replication proxy, which listens to the SCSI stream from the VMs it is protecting. If the WAN connectivity is failing, those VMs build up a queue on their disks, not affecting the production application VMs’ performance. They can also recover from long outages with ease by reprotecting a VM and only sending over changes from the last protected point in time. Since the management architecture is distributed across datacenters, failure of one side does not impact the protection or recovery of the protected VMs.
4. Hardware Agnostic
With array-based replication, a customer needs nearly identical hardware in production and DR. This cost was not an option for many customers that had a single datacenter and a smaller remote DR site. 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 datacenter.
With array-based replication, a customer needs nearly identical hardware in production and DR. This cost was not an option for many customers that had a single datacenter and a smaller remote DR site. 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 datacenter.
We have been very happy with the results Zerto has shown in
the Business Continuity space. They help our customers close the gap for
their DR from days down to minutes. Next will definitely be “Why VMware?”
Today, enterprises of all sizes area unit deploying
applications on visualized IT infrastructures and clouds. The values of
visualization as well as flexibility, measurability and quality will complicate
business continuity efforts in times of disaster. The benefits of
virtualization may be in conflict together with your ability to recover the
business within the event of disaster. Not therefore with Zerto’s
virtual-friendly continuous information replication.