Other new features include Azure support, one-to-many replication capability and a mobile app to enable remote access to Zerto environments.
Mariah West, Zerto’s Director of Global Partner Marketing
Availability and disaster recovery vendor Zerto has launched the 5.0 version of their flagship Zerto Virtual Replication solution. It features four major new enhancements. Support has been announced for Microsoft Azure. Continuous data protection journal capability, allowing short-term rollback capability, has been extended from 14 days to 30. One-to-many replication capability has also been added. Finally, a mobile app for Apple and Android has been introduced to let admins access Zerto environments remotely.
“A couple of these enhancements are major game changers for partners,” said Mariah West, Director of Global Partner Marketing at Zerto.
One is the introduction of support for the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
“Before we just had support for AWS, which came in in our last major release,” West said. “AWS still has the largest market share, but Azure is growing so it was essential to add this.”
West said that this was one of the new features which would most appeal to partners.
“They have customers asking for advice on cloud, and this lets them broaden out what they can offer there,” she said. “Azure presents a phenomenal opportunity to add another revenue stream to the business.”
West indicated that the second new feature likely to appeal to the channel is extending the capacity of their continuous data protection journal.
“The continuous data protection journal lets you wind back to before the disruption happened,” she said. “That’s been a huge value point for the channel, because it lets customers reduce backup constraints and storage costs by replacing short-term solutions for data protection and retention. The actual backup is thus used for longer term storage and archiving. Customers have been asking for the last couple of versions to have the time that the journal covers extended. So it has been extended from 14 to 30 days of rollback capability.”
Zerto has also introduced “One-to-Many” replication with this release.
“Before, you could replicate from the production site to one target,” West said. “Some customers, whether for compliance reasons or personal preference, want to replicate to two or three places simultaneously.” They can now replicate VMs to a secondary datacentre or one of over 300 hybrid and public cloud services.
“There are no geographic restrictions on this,” West added. “We have a customer who replicates from New York City to Australia, and another who replicates from an oil rig in the ocean to other continent.”
A Zerto Mobile mobile app has also been added to facilitate “anywhere, anytime” monitoring of Zerto environments. It lets admins view real-time RPOs, SLAs, alerts and journal retention policies for all VMs in a hybrid cloud from any Android or IOS mobile device without being connected to the datacentre.
“We are ‘on the go’ people now,” West said. “The mobile app is easy to download from any Android or Apple store, and makes it easy to review what’s happening. That’s not something that’s common in DR. Most DR products are not easy to orchestrate and access, and mobile is not something that most traditional DR can use. Because Zerto is software only, it is easy to access from the web.”
Zerto Virtual Replication version 5.0 is available now.
