VMworld 2021 digital.  Will you be in attendance?  Make sure you check out Zerto!

VMworld, the world's largest virtualization and cloud computing event hosted every year by VMware, is back again for 2021 in a digital setting.  And one of the show sponsors this year is a company called Zerto.

Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation through a single, scalable platform for cloud data management and protection. Built for enterprise scale, Zerto’s simple, software-only platform uses continuous data protection to converge disaster recovery, backup, and data mobility and eliminate the risks and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. Zerto enables an always-on customer experience by simplifying the protection, recovery, and mobility of applications and data across private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Are you gearing up for VMworld 2021?  Get started now by reading this exclusive interview with Caroline Seymour, VP, Product Marketing at Zerto, to learn more, and start getting excited for what's to come!

 

VMblog:  Zerto is once again sponsoring this year's VMworld 2021 digital event.  Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like?

Caroline Seymour:  Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a Gold Level sponsor this year. As such, we will have a virtual booth where you can live-chat with our zExperts, and anyone that visits will be entered to win a $250 Amazon.com gift card.

There will also be an on-demand session with our Technology Evangelist Gene Torres that will focus on how Zerto can help organizations protect virtual environments from ransomware, natural disasters, outages, or deletions.

VMblog:  What type of things will people be able to do and find at your virtual booth this year? 

Seymour:  Attendees who visit Zerto's virtual booth will be able to engage with our zExperts to ask any questions they have about Zerto technology or the HPE acquisition. They can also learn more about Zerto 9, its powerful new immutability and automation features, enhanced cloud data management and protection capabilities for end users and managed service providers, new backup capabilities including support for additional cloud platforms, and cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management.

VMblog:  And do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Seymour:  Absolutely, Zerto will be featured in three sessions over the course of the event.

Technology Evangelist Gene Torres's session, No VM (or Container) Left Behind with Zerto 9, will focus on how Zerto can help organizations protect virtual environments from ransomware, natural disasters, outages, or deletions. During his session, Torres will also provide a sneak peek into what's new for Zerto for Kubernetes with VMware Tanzu.

Session attendees will gain insights into how Zerto 9 delivers ransomware resilience for VMware vSphere environments on premises and in the cloud, simple protection and recovery of VMs-just a few clicks with automated protection and orchestration-and continuous data protection for VMware on public cloud users.

Zerto will also be featured in an HPE session with John Blumenthal, Defend and Protect your data from Edge to Cloud with HPE GreenLake. In the session he will be discussing HPE's VDI and Container Storage solution. Session attendees will learn how Zerto and HPE deliver ransomware protection, disaster recovery, and cloud-native data protection services for VMware customers that eliminate complexity and ensure data is recoverable and secure across hybrid cloud environments.

Additionally, Microsoft's Principal PM Ramprasad Gowrishankar will discuss Zerto's integrations with Azure for disaster recovery and backup in a session entitled, Azure VMware Solution: Platform Deep Dive.

It's a lot of great content, and we're excited to share the stage with HPE and Microsoft.

VMblog:  Are you giving away any prizes at your virtual booth or participating in any prize giveaways?

Seymour:  We are. As mentioned above, if you visit our booth, you can be entered to win a $250 Amazon.com gift card.

VMblog:  Many attendees are chomping at the bit to get back to a physical VMworld event. Is your company ready for the same?

Seymour:  Yes, absolutely! While we understand the event industry is evolving and taking precautionary steps due to COVID, we are eager to get back to face-to-face events again and start making those connections with attendees during the shows. The physical VMworld event has always provided an opportunity to not only engage with new customers but to connect with our existing VMware customer base. We have missed connecting with them and we are looking forward to seeing everyone again!

VMblog:  What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at VMworld 2021 digital?

Seymour:  As much as I am keen to get back to a physical VMworld event, the digital event provides the advantage of attending many more sessions via the on-demand format. It's important to hear about new technology solutions and engage with customers about how they are using technology to solve their business problems. And of course, hearing insights from executives and industry experts about emerging trends are things I think about all year.

VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings? What kind of message would a virtual attendee hear from you?

Seymour:  Our exciting news in recent months is that HPE acquired Zerto to accelerate its transformation to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business. We are thrilled to be part of the HPE family and to help them solve the challenges in data management and protection through HPE GreenLake cloud services.

We will continue to offer the best hybrid, multi-cloud data management and protection platform available.

Zerto is the only cloud data management and protection platform that can fully support any organization's cloud journey and strategy. Whether that's enabling hybrid cloud deployments by moving and protecting workloads from private to public cloud, enabling workload mobility between private clouds, or allowing enterprises to remove private cloud and completely migrate to public cloud to support a shift to a multi-cloud environment.

VMblog:  Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?

Seymour:  It's our Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology.

Too many solution technologies rely on snapshots, which work like a still camera in that they only take a picture of your environment at a specific time. This type of legacy backup technology offers RPOs measured in hours, resulting in too many downsides, including data loss.

Zerto's CDP uses always-on replication to ensure protection of every change to applications as they occur. Unlike the snapshot approach, it more closely resembles a video camera continuously recording changes in your environment. This means RPOs measured in seconds not minutes or hours.

The benefits are that there is zero impact on the production environment, no scheduling required, minimal data loss, and customers save on storage because there are no snapshots created that need to be archived.

VMblog:  For those individuals attending the VMworld 2021 digital event, or those who have attended VMworld in the past, why should they be interested in your company and solutions? 

Seymour:  They might want to take a look at their peers who are our customers. McKesson, a Fortune 10 company, uses Zerto to protect its critical applications from datacenters to Azure and IBM Cloud. Maritz uses Zerto to protect and migrate workloads to AWS. We're also trusted by over 9,500 customers globally and are powering offerings for Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud, along with more than 350 managed service providers. 

In fact, in the first half of 2021 we saw significant growth and cloud technology trends among our customer base. Zerto customers continued their adoption of DR to cloud technology with expansions representing nearly half of the business, and the average number of VM growth nearly doubled. Zerto customers also increased their use of Zerto for datacenter migrations with migration deals increasing to nearly 10% of the business with a 42% increase of licenses.

Our solution is proven to be trusted, reliable, and on the cutting edge of technology.

This year we were thrilled to be a new entrant into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Solutions, challenging the status quo of traditional backup,. We were named an overall vendor champion in the 2021 SoftwareReviews 2021 Backup and Availability Emotional Footprint Awards, and we won the prestigious IT Central Station Peer Award for 2021.

Expert Insights just Announced their Fall Best-Of Cybersecurity Awards: and Zerto was awarded Best-Of Microsoft Office 365 Recovery and Backup Solutions

VMblog:  What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or VMware implementation?

Seymour:  Zerto protects VM workloads for backup, disaster recovery and mobility across on-premises and cloud. Customers benefit from a unified user experience, simplifying the management, protection, recovery, and mobility of their VM workloads and reduces TCO by replacing point solutions, tools, and required hardware with Zerto's scalable, software-only platform.

For Customers using VMware on public cloud Zerto offers support for Azure VMware Solution, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine. As customers extended their datacenter to public cloud platforms, they encountered the challenge of utilizing new tools and a lack of skill sets in public clouds.  Zerto provides support for these platforms allowing customers to experience on-prem like RPOs and RTOs in their hybrid cloud with VMware in the public cloud.

Attendees at the event will get a sneak peek of updates in Zerto for Kubernetes including new support for VMware Tanzu for those developing and deploying containers. 

VMblog:  How does your company work with VMware?  Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Seymour:  Zerto's always-on replication engine for VMware vSphere enables users to replicate any server in VMware to automate data recovery, failover, and failback. 

Our strategic alliance with VMware unlocks the full potential of VMware tools with deep integration to provide support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) to achieve storage savings, increased visibility, and additional workload control. It offers the most interoperable experience made possible with VMware Cloud Director integration, including tenant self-service capabilities, such as disaster recovery and data protection operations for MSPs. It also provides support for all VMware features used in day-to-day management, such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, DRS, Storage DRS, and more.

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