Zerto is another company I have known for a while. At VMworld they announced a new release of their Zerto Virtual Replication. With some cool new features. I’ve written before that the biggest challenge in writing about Zerto’s products is that they just work. New versions just work like the old versions and add new features without a huge learning curve.
My favourite new feature is the ability to replicate VMs to Azure as an off-site DR location. This is in addition to the ability to replicate to AWS. Azure is a desirable DR destination as a lot of customers have Microsoft Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) that include Azure credits, even if the customer didn’t want Azure. A result of these credits and Zerto’s new feature is free DR to the cloud. A nice part is that the achievable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) on Azure is very similar to using on-premises hardware. RTOs of under an hour are achievable with Zerto on Azure.
Also in the new version is support for one-to-many replication. This enables using two data centers on a campus as well as replicating to a cloud, or more remote, data center. There is a whole host of natural disasters that would affect a campus. Floods, earthquakes, tornados, wildfire and the like could all shut down an entire campus. The ability to have an additional DR to the cloud strategy is hugely beneficial.
The final part that I found interesting is the mobile application for monitoring your Zerto environment. There have been many attempts to bring infrastructure management to mobile devices, I still haven’t seen it stick. Most IT infrastructure management is still done from a large screen device. I will be interested to see whether Zerto has built something that does deliver what IT managers and operations staff want on mobile devices. For me, the most interesting part was that the mobile app came out of an internal hackathon that Zerto’s engineering team runs periodically. I plan to find out more about these hackathons as innovation happens in these intense, small group activities.
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