Zerto, setting the standard for disaster recovery in virtualised and cloud environments, today announced that its customer the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital has been awarded “Best Virtualisation for Disaster Recovery” at the Best of VMworld Europe 2014 User Awards, which took place in Barcelona this week.

The hospital, which is a major specialist cardiothoracic facility that performs 60,000 outpatient appointments and 12,000 inpatient procedures every year, used Zerto for an innovative project that delivered non-disruptive disaster recovery testing and simple installation, together with automated failover, failback, recovery and testing to meet aggressive service levels and minimise the impact of DR processes on patient care.

The judges of the fifth annual Best of VMworld Europe awards assessed the entries and selected the winners based on overall innovation, systems performance improvement, cost reduction, easing the management burden, new use in the market and improved efficiencies and business processes.

The awards, hosted by Computer Weekly, SearchServerVirtualization.com and LeMag IT, covered virtualisation and server consolidation, desktop virtualisation, hybrid cloud computing, disaster recovery and a private cloud computing project.

“Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital is a great example of how our technology can help organisations protect their mission critical IT infrastructure without having to compromise or dramatically modify established processes,” says Ziv Kedem, CEO and co-founder at Zerto, “The team at the hospital deserve all the credit and we would like to thank the judges for recognising the innovation demonstrated by the project and its clear benefits.”

The implementation uses a Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM), which plugs directly into the hospital’s VMware vCenter management software to manage replication for its entire vSphere domain to keep track of applications and information in motion, in real time. The advantages of the virtual replication solution include a completely hardware-agnostic approach allowing the hospital to replicate from any source storage to any target storage. In addition, instead of doing bandwidth hogging snapshots, the solution replicates only what is needed as each virtual machine writes new data. Also, as the replication is continuous, the new information is compressed and moves over the network just as it is created, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements and avoiding the any application slowdown.