Zerto provides a business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) solution in a virtual environment, providing near real-time replication, with write-order fidelity, with minimal impact on product workloads. Fully automated orchestration delivers failover, failback, and reverse protection in one click. Non-disruptive disaster recovery testing gives you confidence that your DR solution will work predictably and consistently. Consistency groups ensure all virtual machines that comprise an application are protected in the exact same manner no matter where they are in the environment.

With support for different hypervisors such as vSphere or Hyper-V, and public cloud sites such as Azure, workloads can be protected, migrated, and recovered, either within the same hypervisor environment or across hypervisor environments.

Zerto is installed in both the protected and the recovery sites. The disaster recovery across these sites is managed by a browser-based user interface. Managing Zerto is also possible programmatically, either via a set of RESTful APIs or PowerShell cmdlets.

Recovery that does rely on native replication functionality, such as recovery available with Microsoft Active Directory or SQL Server, can also be replicated using the Zerto solution, and whether the native replication functionality is used or not is determined by site considerations, such as increased complexity of having multiple points of control and possible additional costs incurred when using vendor native replication.

You configure replication by first pairing the site with the virtual machines to be protected, with a recovery site. You then define what virtual machines you want replicated in consistency groups, where the virtual machines in a group comprise the application and data you want to protect. You can group different virtual machines together or keep them separate. By creating different replication groups, you can customize the replication requirements for each group to better optimize the recovery plan.

Disaster recovery is based on the premise that you will want to recover with a minimum RPO. In Azure environments only, the minimum RPO for recovery from Azure is 1 minute. However, to enable full recovery in cases such as virus attacks, Zerto provides the ability to recover to a point in time up to 30 days prior to the disaster. When recovery earlier than 30days is required, Zerto provides an extended recovery, using a Long Term Retention process mechanism that enables you to recover to a recovery site based on daily, weekly or monthly retention sets, going as far back as a year. The majority of the processing for both disaster recovery and extended recovery is done at the recovery site, minimizing the impact on the production site.