A recent IDC survey of small and medium-sized business (SMB) users revealed that 67% have a recovery time requirement of less than four hours, and 31% have a recovery time requirement of less than two hours. Additionally, IDC estimates that as many as half of all organizations have insufficient business continuity and disaster recovery plans to meet business requirements, or to even survive a disaster.

Although business continuity is perhaps the top use case for cloud computing, simply focusing on this one use limits the broad potential of cloud, especially in a hybrid cloud context.

Zerto’s innovative, hypervisor-based replication is a technology developed to provide a true enterprise class, yet fully virtual-aware disaster recovery solution, to protect virtualized, mission-critical applications. This document outlines the fundamental differences between Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication and other current and legacy technologies.

Compared Technologies

The current and legacy disaster recovery solutions compared in this document include:

• Zerto Hypervisor-based Replication

• Array-based Replication with and without SRM

• Host / Guest-based Replication

• Snapshot-based Replication

• VMware Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication

Until now the most common data replication technologies and methods essential to mission-critical BC/DR initiatives have been tied to the physical environment. Although they do work in the virtual environment, they aren’t optimized for it. With the introduction of hypervisor-based replication, Zerto elevates BC/DR up the infrastructure stack where it belongs: in the virtualization layer.

Challenges:

• If a data replication solution isn’t virtual-ready, management overhead could be more than doubled.
• Customer data is always growing, so a company can find its information inventory expanding exponentially and not have a data replication solution to keep pace.
• Some replication methods remain firmly tied to a single vendor and hardware platform, limiting the organization’s ability to get the best solutions – and service – at the best price.

Benefits of Hypervisor-Based Replication:

• Granularity - The ability to replicate at the correct level of any virtual entity is critical. Zerto’s solution can replicate all virtual machines and all of the meta data as well.
• Scalability - Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication solution is software-based so it can be deployed and managed easily, no matter how fast the infrastructure expands.
• Hardware-agnostic - Zerto’s data replication is hardware-agnostic, supporting all storage arrays, so organizations can replicate from anything to anything. This allows users to mix storage technologies such as SAN & NAS, and virtual disk types such as RDM & VMFS.

Zerto protects virtualized applications with the same robust and effective recovery previously available only with complex and expensive array based replication solutions. With Zerto you get:

•         Scalability
•         Ease of management
•         A Hardware agnostic solutions

Zerto Offsite Backup in the Cloud

What is Offsite Backup?

Offsite Backup is a new paradigm in data protection that combines hypervisor-based replication with longer retention. This greatly simplifies data protection for IT organizations. The ability to leverage the data at the disaster recovery target site or in the cloud for VM backup eliminates the impact on production workloads.

Why Cloud Backup?

• Offsite Backup combines replication and long retention in a new way
• The repository can be located in public cloud storage, a private cloud, or as part of a hybrid cloud solution.
• Copies are saved on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule.
• The data volumes and configuration information are included to allow VM backups to be restored on any compatible platform, cloud or otherwise.

Can mission-critical apps really be protected in the cloud?

Introducing: Cloud Disaster Recovery

Today, enterprises of all sizes are virtualizing their mission-critical applications, either within their own data center, or with an external cloud vendor. One key driver is to leverage the flexibility and agility virtualization offers to increase availability, business continuity and disaster recovery.

With the cloud becoming more of an option, enterprises of all sizes are looking for the cloud, be it public, hybrid or private, to become part of their BC/DR solution. However, these options do not always exist. Virtualization has created the opportunity, but there is still a significant technology gap. Mission-critical applications can be effectively virtualized and managed; however, the corresponding data cannot be effectively protected in a cloud environment.

Additional Challenges for Enterprises with the Cloud:

• Multi-tenancy
• Data protection & mobility
• Lack of centralized management

Solutions with Zerto Virtual Replication:

• Seamless integration with no environment change
• Multi-site support
• Hardware-agnostic replications

Protect Applications, Not Data

How-to Guide: Application Protection and Recovery for VMware

When organizations are considering a business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) solution, they need to look for a solution that not only protects and recovers the data, but also protects and recovers the application. Virtualized applications typically span multiple VMs and are more complex in terms of dependencies and infrastructure. They require recovery with write-order fidelity, something most replications solutions do not supply

Zerto Application Protection Features:

• VM-level consistency grouping
• Crash-consistent application recovery
• Recovery of specific application objects

Why Rely on Backup Shipping as Your VMware DR Solution?

Some people think, if you want to protect data in your virtual VMware environment, your easiest solution is to backup VMware using snapshots or agents.  However, solutions like this, such as Veeam, can slow down your production environment, and they are difficult to scale.

However, many of us understand that backup is not disaster recovery. The right approach to a BC/DR solution is hypervisor-based replication.

With hypervisor-based replication you receive:

• Continuous data replication
• Recovery capabilities built specifically for VMware datacenters
• Full consistency between and among all application components
• Zerto’s Offsite Backup for VMware

• Communication: Maintain clear, and regular communication with everyone.
• Scoping: Understand what makes up the application. Get rid of the unknowns to ensure nothing breaks.
• Ownership and permissions: Who owns the server and application and who will test and validate pre and post migration?
• Priority: Are there other projects in your way?
• Organization: Checklists and spreadsheets: How are you tracking all of this?
• Execution: How is the migration happening? How will the servers and data be moved?
• Contingency: If something goes wrong, how do I back out and reschedule if necessary?
• Tracking: Prepare for change. Track what changes need to occur on machines, applications, and infrastructure.
• Data Hygiene: Cleanup the source environment