Benefits of Using Zerto

Datacenter optimization and virtualization technologies have matured and are now commonly used in IT infrastructure. As more applications are deployed in a virtualized infrastructure, there is a growing need for recovery mechanisms that support mission critical application deployments while providing complete BC and DR.

Traditional replication and disaster recovery solutions were not conceived to deal with the demands created by the virtualization paradigm. For example, most replication solutions are not managed in the hypervisor layer, considering the virtual machines and disks, but at the physical disk level. Hence they are not truly virtualization aware.

The lack of virtualization awareness creates a huge operational and administrative burden. It also results in operational inflexibility. The Zerto solution has been designed to resolve these issues by being fully virtualization aware.

See the following topics:

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(On-premise environments) Fully Virtual – Sits in the Hypervisor or Cloud

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Hardware Agnostic

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(On-premise environments) Hypervisor Agnostic

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Focus is on the Application, Not the Physical Storage

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Compatibility Across Virtual Environments – Cross-Hypervisor Platform and Version Agnostic

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(On-premise environments) Fully Scalable

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Efficient Asynchronous Replication

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One-Click Failover and Control of the Recovery Process

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One-Click Migration

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File and Folder Recovery

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(On-premise environments) Long-term Retention

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Policy-based

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Minimal RPO

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WAN Optimization Between Protected and Recovery Sites

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WAN Resilience on Both the Protected and Recovery Sites

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DR Management Anywhere

(On-premise environments) Fully Virtual – Sits in the Hypervisor or Cloud

Zerto software sits in the hypervisor level. Protection groups are configured with virtual machines and virtual disks, without the need to consider the physical disks.

Hardware Agnostic

Because the Zerto solution manages recovery of virtual machines and virtual disks only, it does not matter what hardware is used in either the protected or recovery sites; it can be from the same vendor or different vendors. With the Zerto solution, the logical storage is separated from the physical storage so that the vendor and actual type of storage hardware do not need to be considered.

Zerto provides a workload mobility and protection layer providing seamless connectivity, portability, protection, orchestration, and application encapsulation of workloads across clouds without vendor lock-in. High scale, mission critical applications, and data are encapsulated, as well as features, specifications, and configurations, and can be seamlessly migrated across different servers, storage, hypervisors, and clouds without any disruption to business services.

With Zerto, IT managers can choose the right infrastructure for the right use case for the right price. One application can leverage several different environments for disaster recovery, bursting, production, retention, testing, and development. With Zerto there is no vendor lock-in to a cloud, technology, or vendor. Any choice, any cloud, any technology, any price, any service level is available in minutes for any workload.

(On-premise environments) Hypervisor Agnostic

Zerto runs both in VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft SCVMM. It is compatible with VMware hypervisor management features, such as vMotion and Microsoft hypervisor management features, such as Live Migration.

Focus is on the Application, Not the Physical Storage

By considering the physical disk level and not the virtual disk level, traditional replication is not truly application aware. Even virtual replication recovers block writes at the SCSI level and not at the application level. Zerto is truly application focused, replicating the writes from the application in a consistent manner.

Compatibility Across Virtual Environments – Cross-Hypervisor Platform and Version Agnostic

Zerto enables replication across multiple hypervisor managers, such as VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft SCVMM, and to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. You can protect virtual machines in one hypervisor platform and recover to a different hypervisor platform. This feature can also be used to migrate virtual machines to a different hypervisor platform.

Also, virtual machines running in one version a hypervisor can be recovered in a different version of the same type of hypervisor, as long as Zerto supports the hypervisor versions, virtual machines can be protected across versions.

(On-premise environments) Fully Scalable

Zerto enables defining software-only Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) on each hypervisor host to manage the replication of virtual machines on that host. Increasing the number of hypervisor hosts is handled by defining a new VRA on each new host. There is no need to install additional software to the hypervisor management tool, such as VMware vCenter Server or Microsoft SCVMM, to handle additional hosts or virtual machines and no need to consider additional hardware acquisitions.

Efficient Asynchronous Replication

Writes are captured by the Zerto software in the hypervisor level, before they are written to the physical disk at the protected site. These writes are sent to the recovery site asynchronously, thus avoiding long distance replication latency for the production applications.

Also, because these writes are captured and sent to the recovery site, it is only the delta changes and not the whole file or disk that is sent to the recovery site, reducing the amount of network traffic, which reduces WAN requirements and significantly improves the ability to meet both RPO and RTO targets.

One-Click Failover and Control of the Recovery Process

ALL Platforms

When recovery is required, the administrator clicks on a button in the Zerto User Interface to initiate failover. This means that controlling the start of a recovery remains in the hands of the administrator, who can decide when to initiate the recovery and, by selecting a checkpoint, to what point-in-time to recover to.

One-Click Migration

Application migrations can be resource intensive projects that take weeks of planning, execution, and downtime. With Zerto migrations are greatly simplified and can be completed without extended outages or maintenance windows and across different types of hardware and even different hypervisors, such as VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V. Migrations across different versions within a type of hypervisor, such as from a VMware vCenter environment to a vCloud environment or even cross hypervisor migration, such as migration from a vCenter environment to a Hyper-V environment is as easy as a migration from one site to another using the same hypervisor infrastructure.

File and Folder Recovery

You can recover specific files and folders from the recovery site for virtual machines that are being protected by Zerto and running Windows or Linux operating systems. You can recover the files and folders from a specific point-in-time.

You can choose to recover one or several files or folders from the recovery site.

(On-premise environments) Long-term Retention

Zerto provides a Retention option that enables saving the protected virtual machines long-term in a state where they can be easily deployed. Because retention uses the same mechanism used for disaster recovery, there is no performance impact on the production site, since the processing is performed on the recovery site. The data copied for retention are fixed points saved daily, weekly or monthly.

Note:

Zerto recommends weekly retention sets.

Policy-based

In the protected site you define the virtual machines that you want to recover, either individually or as groups, as a virtual protection group (VPG). The virtual machines that you include in the VPG can come from one or more hypervisor hosts. In this way, you can protect applications that run on multiple virtual machines and disks as a single unit, in a single VPG.

Minimal RPO

The Zerto solution utilizes continuous data protection, sending a record of every write in the virtual protection group to the recovery site. The transfer of this information is done over an optimized WAN asynchronously. If recovery is required, all the data that was transferred to the recovery site is available resulting in recovery within the requested RPO.

WAN Optimization Between Protected and Recovery Sites

Using compression to minimize bandwidth and other techniques such as throttling to prioritize network traffic to reduce the impact on day-to-day operations, you can make sure that the communication between the protected and recovery sites is fully optimized.

The Zerto solution also uses signature matching to reduce the amount of data sent across the WAN. During synchronization of the protected site and recovery site for every virtual machine in a VPG, Zerto maintains a map of disk sectors so that if there is a need to resynchronize sites, the map signatures can be used to ensure that only data where changes occurred are passed over the WAN.

WAN Resilience on Both the Protected and Recovery Sites

The Zerto solution is highly resilient to WAN interruptions. In order to reduce storage overhead used for replication purposes, on WAN failure or when the load over the WAN is too great for the WAN to handle, Zerto starts to maintain a smart bitmap in memory, in which it tracks and records the storage areas that changed. Since the bitmap is kept in memory, Zerto does not require any LUN or volume per VPG at the protected side. The bitmap is small and scales dynamically, but does not contain any actual IO data, just references to the areas of the protected disk that have changed. The bitmap is stored locally on the VRA within the available resources. Once the WAN connection resumes or the load returns to normal traffic, Zerto uses this bitmap to check whether there were updates to the protected disks and if there were updates to the disks, these updates are sent to the recovery site.

DR Management Anywhere

With the Zerto solution everything is managed from a standalone browser-base user interface, enabling disaster recovery management from anywhere using any device.