ZVR 6.0 extends bi-directional replication that Zerto had introduced in their previous release. Another highlight of 6.0 is a new management portal for Cloud Service Providers.
Zerto has announced the availability of Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 6.0, their new platform built uniquely for multi-cloud, to allow customers the ability to go back and forth between clouds. While Google is not yet supported, the other major public clouds are, including IBM. ZVR 6.0 also enhances file level recovery, improves analytics capability, and adds a new management portal for Cloud Service Providers [CSPs] who offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service.
“When we started out in 2011, it was all about hypervisor-based replication,” said Rob Strechay, Zerto’s SVP Product. “Now we are really fulfilling the promise of an IT resiliency platform, by letting customers be able to build cloud their way without vendor lock-in, and by giving the channel and service providers the ability to be their customers’ trusted partner around cloud.”
ZVR 6.0 provides continuous replication, automated orchestration and enterprise-class scalability between Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS and more than 350 CSPs, giving IT organizations a much greater degree to move between clouds than they have had previously. It extends Zerto’s strategy in its 5.5 release, which enabled bidirectional replication out of the Azure cloud as well as into it. Azure was the first cloud to be supported in this way, and has now been joined by others.
“AWS is a little bit less mature, and you can’t do quite everything coming out of it as you can for all the other platforms, but that is something that we will be enhancing,” Strechay said.
Google hasn’t been supported yet because it has been less of a priority for Zerto’s customers.
“Google is still somewhat figuring out their play with their enterprise,” Strechay indicated. “People use Google because of their Platform-as-a-Service analytics. You don’t go there for Infrastructure-as-a-Service like AWS, Azure or IBM. Those other companies also have relationships with the enterprise that Google lacks. Right now, we do not have significant traction with Google. The IBM cloud was a significantly higher priority for our customers.”
Support for Google is still likely at some point in the not-that-distant future.
“We are in talks with them,” Strechay said.”
The full potential of multi-cloud flexibility also awaits a method of dealing with the costs of exiting data from the cloud that are currently part of the public cloud pricing structure.
“Exit costs are still a real issue,” Strechay said. “We have some ideas on how to limit the costs, including a differentiated sync that limits the cost exposure, but you still wouldn’t want to run replication out of AWS constantly. Many CSPs are making tiering agreements with larger clouds to limit exit costs.”
Part of the selling feature of multi-cloud capability is its future-proofing capability, Strechay indicated.
“We are still at the front edge of the wave in terms of multiple clouds,” he said. “You can get to know the clouds better before you have to move things there. We have customers who use both Azure and AWS as targets for our software, and some apps run better on different clouds. One customer discovered, to his surprise, that a Linux application ran better on Azure.”
Strechay also said that some use cases encourage multiple cloud use today.
“We have a lot of dev-ops use cases,” he said “Instead of building out test-dev on-prem, they use the burstability of the cloud. We also had some that wanted PaaS in the clouds where the data is already there. We also see people using it for security, where they turn on VMs for a certain amount of time and use cloud-born security tools.”
While multi-cloud mobility is the feature announcement in ZVR 6.0, the release also has some other significant enhancements. Enhanced journal file level now restores support file-level recovery for Linux EXT as well as Windows file systems, which equates to faster restore times.
“File-level recovery for Linux was a hole in the portfolio,” Strechay said.
Zerto Analytics have also been enhanced to provide deeper into the health and compliance of protected multi-site, multi-cloud environments. This includes expanded dashboards with new live network analysis reports for troubleshooting and optimization, insights into network throughput and performance, the ability to monitor site-to-site and outbound traffic, and 30 days of network history metrics for any site.
“This simply provides them with better data about their monitoring and their network traffic,” Strechay said.
Finally, ZVR 6.0 introduces the Zerto CSP Management Portal, which lets CSPs remotely upgrade customer sites to provide them with continuous availability and latest software releases.
“This will really helps partners that do DRaaS,” Strechay said. “They used to have to do the upgrades live and manually. With this, it becomes a ‘point and click,’ and something that they can schedule and notify the customer.”
ZVR 6.0 is available now.
