Zerto is already an established IBM partner, including a relationship with IBM Resiliency. The partnership is now being extended to the IBM Resiliency Orchestration DRaaS offering.
Today at the IBM Think 2018 event in Las Vegas, IT resilience provider Zerto is announcing an extension of its partnership with IBM. Zerto will partner with IBM Services around IBM’s Resiliency Orchestration Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service [DRaaS], providing the replication engine for the solution.
“IBM is an important strategic partner for Zerto, and we have a number of offerings for different parts of IBM,” said Mehran Hadipour, Zerto’s Director of Global Business Development. “There are two principal components to the relationship, one with IBM Cloud and one with IBM Resiliency.”
This particular IBM solution came from the 2016 acquisition of Indian firm Sanovi Technologies, which IBM acquired for its capabilities in automating IT recovery orchestration across a range of platforms, databases, and data replication technologies. It allows IBM to deliver a broader range of resilience services.
“The Resiliency Orchestration DRaaS offering is a fully managed one, where the customer gets a complete services software component from IBM and pays for it monthly,” Hadipour said.
Hadipour indicated that this DRaaS solution is a a unique offering, because it helps organizations recover their physical workloads as well as their virtual ones, on an IBM mainframe, IBM Power AIX, IBM System I, SUN Solaris or HP-UX system, while also ensuring coordinated application recovery throughout.
Mehran Hadipour, Zerto’s Director of Global Business Development
“Customers still have physical workloads,” he stated. “IBM’s orchestration product supports multiple replication solutions, restoring the physical first and then virtual, so the whole data centre can be recovered, not just its virtual component.”
The Zerto IT Resilience Platform will now be available to IBM customers as the replication engine within the DRaaS solution as a managed service or as a software option, and will be part of IBM’s single dashboard for management. The bi-directional replication is both to and from the IBM Cloud.
There are three potential go-to-market channels for the offering.
“One is IBM direct,” Hadipour said. IBM Resiliency has a sales team that sells this DRaaS globally. A second is a select set of IBM channel partners that are resiliency enabled, who will be able to sell the service. The third option is for the customer to acquire the Resiliency Orchestration software itself through the IBM channel.”
Hadipour noted that many Zerto partners are also IBM partners, because of the strong existing relationship.
“We have a reasonably good intersection of common partners,” he said. “It’s not 100 per cent, but there is a good overlap between the two channels.”
Hadipour also indicated that DRaaS is a strong option for partners who don’t already have a services practices.
“We believe that DRaaS is a great way to get into services,” he said. “Many people don’t want to have a secondary data centre any more ‘just in case,’ so this is a great way for the channel to engage in cloud- based services.”
Zerto and IBM will be showcasing this solution at the IBM Think conference this week, and Zerto is also presenting a session late Tuesday morning. Zerto can be found at booth #243.
