An alphanumeric text string that uniquely identifies the AWS account owner. No two accounts can have the same AWS Access Key.

A collection of remote computing services, also called web services, that make up a cloud computing platform by Amazon.com. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. The service is advertised as providing a large computing capacity (potentially many servers) much faster and cheaper than building a physical server farm.

See Replication, Asynchronous.

See Extended Recovery.

A computer system or network in which a virtual machine is installed directly on hardware rather than within the host operating system (OS).

A change tracking mechanism of the protected machines during a disconnected state when Zerto Virtual Replication starts to maintain a smart bitmap in memory to track and record changed storage areas. Since the bitmap is kept in memory, Zerto Virtual Replication does not require any LUN or volume per VPG at the source side.

The bitmap is small and scales dynamically, containing references to the areas of the source disk that have changed but not the actual I/O. The bitmap is stored locally on the VRA within the available resources. For example, when a VRA goes down and is then rebooted.

During the synchronization, new checkpoints are not added to the journal but recovery operations are still possible. If a disaster occurs requiring a failover during a bitmap synchronization, you can recover to the last checkpoint written to the journal.

Amazon buckets are like a container for your files. You can name your buckets the way you like but it should be unique across the Amazon system.

An organization’s ability to recover from a disaster and/or unexpected event and resume or continue operations. A disaster recovery, DR, plan is a subset of a Business Continuity plan. Organizations should have a business continuity, BC, plan in place that outlines the logistics and business operations. The key metrics to be measured in a disaster recovery environment are the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations that those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities. (ISO 22313, formerly BS 25999-1).

Contains the instructions, procedures and guidelines that are developed and maintained in readiness for use during and after any potentially disruptive event in order to enable the organization to continue to deliver its critical activities at an acceptable, predefined level.

The process of analyzing business functions and processes and the effects that a business disruption might have upon them.

Zerto Virtual Replication ensures crash consistency by writing checkpoints to the journal every few seconds. These checkpoints ensure write order fidelity and crash-consistency to each checkpoint. During recovery you pick one of these crash-consistent checkpoints and recover to this point. Additionally, checkpoints can be manually added by the administrator, with a description of the checkpoint. For example, when an event is going to take place that might result in the need to perform a recovery, you can pinpoint when this event occurs as a checkpoint in each journal.

A service provider that offers customers storage or software services available via a private (private cloud) or public network (cloud). Usually, it means the storage and software is available for access via the Internet. Typically Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS) – are offered to their customers. Zerto enables them to offer Disaster Recovery As A Service (DRaaS) and In-Cloud DR (ICDR), too.

Provides the overall coordination of the organization’s response to a crisis (which is a critical event that needs to be handled appropriately to prevent a damaging impact to the organization’s profitability, reputation or ability to operate).

A specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data.

The Delta Sync uses a checksum comparison to minimize the use of network resources. A Delta Sync is used when the protected virtual machine disks and the recovery disks should already be synchronized, except for a possible few changes to the protected disks, for example, when the target recovery disk is defined as a preseeded (not available in the cloud) disk or after a VRA upgrade, or for reverse protection after a move or failover.

During the synchronization, new checkpoints are not added to the journal but recovery operations are still possible. If a disaster occurs requiring a failover during a delta synchronization, you can recover to the last checkpoint written to the journal.

It is not possible to perform a move during a delta sync.

The occurrence of one or more events which, either separately or cumulatively, activate disaster recovery.

The ability to restart operations after an interruption to the business according to a plan that ensures an orderly and timely restoration.

The disaster recovery, DR, plan is a component of the Business Continuity plan that details the process and procedures to recover the organization’s resources to continue business operations. The Technology DR plan focuses on the IT disaster recovery. Also see Business Continuity Plan.

A disaster recovery solution that incorporates a service provider to replace or augment the organization’s data protection implementation. In a DRaaS scenario, the customer may manage and have complete control over the production data. The Cloud Service Provider (CSP) may provide a partial or completely managed service. In either case, the CSP must ensure the availability of the data and adapt as the customers infrastructure changes. An advantage of this model is the CSP has dedicated resources skilled in DR operations.

Enables balancing computing workloads with available resources in a VMware vCenter cluster.

Covers the immediate response to a situation or set of circumstances that present a clear and present threat to the safety of personnel or other assets of the organization.

This is the estimated timings based on full resource provision available during a live invocation. This time typically sits between the Net Recovery Time and the Recovery Time Achieved (RTA) time.

Bare-metal hypervisor from VMware, meaning it installs directly on top of the physical server and partitions it into multiple virtual machines that can run simultaneously, sharing the physical resources of the underlying server. ESXi is the most recent version.

Extended DR includes the ability to configure both disaster recovery and offsite backups for the protected virtual machines in the VPG, according to a user-defined data retention policy.

VMware high availability decreases downtime and improves reliability with business continuity by enabling another ESX/ESXi host to start up virtual machines that were running on another ESX/ESXi host that went down. High availability is automatically disabled by Zerto Virtual Replication while updating recovered virtual machines in the recovery site from the VRA journal. After the promotion of the data from the journal to the virtual machine completes, high availability is automatically re-enabled. The HA configuration can include admission control to prevent virtual machines being started if they violate availability constraints. If this is the case, then a failover, test failover or migration of the virtual machines in a VPG to the cluster with this configuration will fail, if the availability constraints are violated when the virtual machines are recovered.

A hybrid hypervisor, which is installed in the operating system. However, during installation it redesigns the operating system architecture and becomes just like a next layer on the physical hardware.

The host for multiple VMs in a virtualized environment. vSphere, ESX/ESXi, is the VMware brand hypervisor. The hypervisor is the virtualization architecture layer that allows multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer.

The tool used to manage the host. For example VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft SCVMM.

Describes any operation, program, or device that transfers data to or from a computer. Typical I/O devices are printers, hard disks, keyboards, and mouses. In fact, some devices are basically input-only devices (keyboards and mouses); others are primarily output-only devices (printers); and others provide both input and output of data (hard disks, diskettes, writable CD-ROMs). In computer architecture, the combination of the CPU and main memory (memory that the CPU can read and write to directly, with individual instructions) is considered the brain of a computer, and from that point of view any transfer of information from or to that combination, for example to or from a disk drive, is considered I/O.

A disaster recovery solution that incorporates a service provider to replace or augment the organization’s data protection implementation. When customers leverage an ICDR service, the CSP hosts the production and DR sites. The virtual machines (VMs) are typically replicated from one CSP datacenter to another CSP datacenter as a managed service or as managed co-located datacenters. The customers have the ability to interact with their applications as if they were locally hosted.

Synchronization performed after creating the VPG to ensure that the protected disks and recovery disks are the same. Recovery operations cannot occur until after the initial synchronization has completed.

Adding a virtual machine to a VPG is equivalent to creating a new VPG and an initial synchronization is performed. In this case, any checkpoints in the journal become unusable and only new checkpoints added after the initial synchronization completes can be used in a recovery. The data in the journal however remains and is promoted to the recovered virtual machine as part of a recovery procedure.

An Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances.

Every write to a protected virtual machine is intercepted by Zerto Virtual Replication and a copy of the write is sent, asynchronously, to the recovery site, while the write continues to be processed on the protected site. On the recovery site the write is written to a journal managed by the Virtual Replication Appliance. Each protected virtual machine has its own journal.

Each journal can expand to a size specified in the VPG definition and automatically shrinks when the expanded size is not needed.

Disk drives are the foundation of data storage, but operating systems cannot use physical disk storage directly. The platters, heads, tracks and sectors of a physical disk drive must be translated into a logical space, which an OS sees as a linear address space comprised of fixed-size blocks. This translation creates a logical entity that allows operating systems to read/write files. Storage networks must also partition their physical disks into logical entities so that host servers can access storage area network (SAN) storage. Each logical portion is called a logical unit number (LUN). A LUN is a logical entity that converts raw physical disk space into logical storage space, which a host server's OS can access and use. Any computer user recognizes the logical drive letter that has been carved out of their disk drive. For example, a computer may boot from the C: drive and access file data from a different D: drive. LUNs do the same basic job.

The reduced level of service that has been agreed if there is an interruption to business operations.

See Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

The maximum tolerable data loss an organization can endure without compromising its business objectives.

The maximum time after which an outage will compromise the ability of the organization to achieve its business objectives.

The duration after which an organization's viability will be irrevocably threatened if product and service delivery cannot be resumed.

A network-attached storage (NAS) device is a server that is dedicated to nothing more than file sharing. NAS does not provide any of the activities that a server in a server-centric system typically provides, such as e-mail, authentication or file management. NAS allows more hard disk storage space to be added to a network that already utilizes servers without shutting them down for maintenance and upgrades. With a NAS device, storage is not an integral part of the server. Instead, in this storage-centric design, the server still handles all of the processing of data but a NAS device delivers the data to the user. A NAS device does not need to be located within the server but can exist anywhere in a LAN and can be made up of multiple networked NAS devices.

The net time achieved in recovering one or more VPGs after a disaster.

See Extended Recovery.

The agreement between the service management and the Service Provision Partners. It defines the responsibilities for support and delivery of the services provided.

Zerto Virtual Replication can be installed at one or more sites and each of these sites can connect to any of the other sites enabling enterprises to protect virtual machines across multiple vCenters or within the same vCenter. Two sites connected to each other are considered paired. Also see Replication to Self.

A virtual disk (a. vmdk flat file and descriptor or a .vhdx file) in the recovery site that has been prepared with a copy of the protected data. Using this option is recommended particularly for large disks so that the initial synchronization is much faster. When not using a preseeded disk the initial synchronization phase has to copy the whole disk over the WAN. Zerto Virtual Replication takes ownership of the preseeded disk, moving it from its source folder to the folder used by the VRA.

Pausing or altering the state of running processes on a computer, particularly those that might modify information stored on disk during a backup, in order to guarantee a consistent and usable backup. Critical applications, such as databases have quiescent mechanisms that Zerto Virtual Replication can use to get application consistent checkpoints.

Role-based Access control, available in the Zerto Cloud Manager via the Permissions tab.

RDM is a mapping file in a separate VMFS volume that acts as a proxy for a raw physical storage device. The RDM allows a virtual machine to directly access and use the storage device. The RDM contains metadata for managing and redirecting disk access to the physical device.

The file gives you some of the advantages of direct access to a physical device while keeping some advantages of a virtual disk in VMFS. As a result, it merges VMFS manageability with raw device access.

Zerto Virtual Replication supports both physical and virtual mode RDMs.

The maximum amount of data that may be lost when the activity or service is restored after an interruption. Expressed as a length of time before the interruption.

The actual times achieved during a DR test.

Related to downtime. The metric refers to the amount of time it takes to recover from a data loss event and how long it takes to return to service. The metric is an indication of the amount of time the system's data is unavailable or inaccessible, thus preventing normal service.

Technique for replicating data between databases or file systems where the system being replicated does not wait for the data to have been recorded on the duplicate system before proceeding. Asynchronous Replication has the advantage of speed, at the increased risk of data loss during due to communication or duplicate system failure.

When a single vCenter is used, for example with remote branch offices, when replicating from one datacenter to another datacenter, both managed by the same vCenter Server, you have to enable replication to the same vCenter Server and pairing is not required.

The elements (such as staff, site, data, IT systems) that are required to deliver an activity or service.

Contains the instructions, procedures and guidelines to recover one or more resources and return conditions to a level of operation that is acceptable to the organization. Recovery Plans include detailed recovery procedures for IT equipment and infrastructure.

Rolling back to an initial status, for example, after canceling a cloning operation on the VPG.

See Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

See Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

A storage area network (SAN) is any high-performance network whose primary purpose is to enable storage devices to communicate with computer systems and with each other. A storage device is a machine that contains nothing but a disk or disks for storing data. A SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN. As more storage devices are added to a SAN, they too will be accessible from any server in the larger network. In this case, the server merely acts as a pathway between the end user and the stored data. Because stored data does not reside directly on any of a network's servers, server power is utilized for business applications, and network capacity is released to the end user.

Acronym for Small Computer System Interface. SCSI is a parallel interface standard used by many servers for attaching peripheral devices to computers. SCSI interfaces provide for faster data transmission rates (up to 80 megabytes per second) than standard serial and parallel ports. In addition, you can attach many devices to a single SCSI port, so that SCSI is really an I/O bus rather than simply an interface.

A Microsoft management solution for the virtualized datacenter, enabling you to configure and manage your virtualization host, networking, and storage resources in order to create and deploy virtual machines and services to private clouds that you have created.

A password. The Secret Access Key with the Access Key forms a secure information set that confirms the user's identity.

A virtual firewall that controls the traffic for one or more instances.

The continuity plan that acts as an umbrella document for a service, referencing other plans as required and providing service-specific emergency management and recovery plans.

The agreement between the customer and service provider which defines the service that is to be delivered to the customer.

A predefined set of default properties to use when VPGs are defined or edited. Zerto provides a default service profile and the option for the organization to specify their own requirements. The cloud service provider can define service profiles to manage specific service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers.

Detailed plan defining the activities required to test the recovery of an individual IT service to meet business requirements documented in the RTO and RPO.

During normal operation, a VRA might require more disks than a single virtual machine can support. If this situation arises, the VRA creates new shadow VRA virtual machines, used by the VRA to maintain additional disks. These virtual machines must not be removed. A VRA can manage a maximum of 1500 volumes, whether these are volumes being protected or recovered.

A snapshot is a block device which presents an exact copy of a logical volume, frozen at some point in time. Typically this would be used when some batch processing, a backup for instance, needs to be performed on the logical volume, but you don't want to halt a live system that is changing the data. Zerto does NOT use a snapshot mechanism, but is constantly replicating data writes.

Storage accounts re like a container for your files. You can name your storage account the way you like but it should be unique across the Azure system.

A logical, visible subdivision of an IP network.[1] The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting.

The description uses information derived from the following site:

An Azure subscription grants access to Azure services and Platform Management Portal. A subscription has two aspects:

See SCVMM.

A virtual machine (VM) is an environment, usually a program or operating system, which does not physically exist but is created within another environment. In this context, a VM is called a guest while the environment it runs within is called a host.

A virtual network dedicated to an Azure subscription.

An on demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as users hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a Private IP Subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per user.

See VPG.

See VRA.

Virtual Machines created with VMware products typically use virtual disks. The virtual disks, stored as files on the host computer or remote storage device, appear to the guest operating systems as standard disk drives.

Synchronization when only delta changes for a volume needs synchronizing, for example, when a virtual machine is added to a VPG using a preseeded disk.

During the synchronization, new checkpoints are not added to the journal. Also, recovery operations are not possible during a Volume Delta Sync.

For the synchronization to work, the protected virtual machines must be powered on. The VRA requires an active IO stack to access the virtual machine data to be synchronized across the sites. If the virtual machine is not powered on, there is no IO stack to use to access the source data to replicate to the target recovery disks.

Synchronization when a full synchronization is required on a single volume.

During the synchronization, new checkpoints are not added to the journal. Also, recovery operations are not possible during a Volume Full Sync.

Synchronization when a full synchronization is required on a single volume, for example, when changing the target datastore or adding a virtual machine to the VPG without using a preseeded (not available in the cloud) disk.

During the synchronization, new checkpoints are not added to the journal. Also, recovery operations are not possible during a Volume Initial Sync.

For the synchronization to work, the protected virtual machines must be powered on. The VRA requires an active IO stack to access the virtual machine data to be synchronized across the sites. If the virtual machine is not powered on, there is no IO stack to use to access the source data to replicate to the target recovery disks.

Virtual machines are protected in virtual protection groups. A virtual protection groups (VPG) is a group of virtual machines that you want to group together for replication purposes. For example, the virtual machines that comprise an application like Microsoft Exchange, where one virtual machine is used for the software, one for the database and a third for the Web Server, require that all three virtual machines are replicated to maintain data integrity.

A virtual machine installed on each hypervisor hosting virtual machines to be protected or recovered, that manages the replication of protected virtual machine writes across sites. A VRA must be installed on every hypervisor that hosts virtual machines that require protecting in the protected site and on every hypervisor that will host the replicated virtual machines in the recovery site.

VMware’s server virtualization platform for building a cloud infrastructure.

A virtual machine installed on the cloud side, one for each customer organization replication network. The Zerto Cloud Connector requires both cloud-facing and customer-facing static IP addresses. The ZCC routes traffic between the customer network and the cloud replication network, in a secure manner ensuring complete separation between the customer network and the cloud service provider network. The ZCC has two Ethernet interfaces, one to the customer’s network and one to the cloud service provider's network. Within the cloud connector a bidirectional connection is created between the customer and cloud service provider networks. Thus, all network traffic passes through the ZCC, where the incoming traffic on the customer network is automatically configured to IP addresses of the cloud service provider network.

A Windows service, which enables managing all the cloud sites offering disaster recovery using a single interface. The ZCM manages the DR either as a service (DRaaS) or completely within the cloud environment, protecting on one cloud site and recovering to a second site (ICDR).

Recovery using Zerto Virtual Replication is managed via a user interface: in a browser via the Zerto Virtual Manager Web Client, or in either the vSphere Web Client or vSphere Client console in the Zerto tab.

An out-of-the-box DR portal solution with a fully functioning browser-based service portal to enable cloud service providers to quickly introduce disaster recovery as part of their portal offering.

A Zerto Virtual Replication service that manages the offsite backup.

A Windows service, which manages everything required for the replication between the protection and recovery sites, except for the actual replication of data. The ZVM interacts with the vCenter Server to get the inventory of VMs, disks, networks, hosts, etc. The ZVM also monitors changes in the VMware environment and responds accordingly. For example, a vMotion operation of a protected VM from one host to another is intercepted by the ZVM so the Zerto User Interface is updated accordingly.

Cloud customers are defined to Zerto Cloud Manager as Zerto organizations, ZORGs. A ZORG is defined with the cloud resources it can use, the permissions that it has to perform operations, such as testing a failover or defining a VPG.