Zerto 6.5 has new feature enhancements, which will be of particular interest to Cloud Service Providers, but the most significant news here is more likely the continued moves towards their upcoming version, which they see as a massively disruptive offering.

Continuous data protection vendor Zerto has announced their Zerto 6.5 release. While it contains significant enhancements in cloud adoption and backup capabilities, and deepens analytics insight, the big news here is really its building out the foundation further for their upcoming Zerto 7 release, which they previewed with great fanfare at their ZertoCON event last May.

“Zerto 6.5 combines a couple of different things,” said Gil Levonai, CMO of Zerto. “It adds significant features, but it also serves as a bridge to our version 7, which is all about our one converged vision.”

That converged vision is all about an IT resilience platform which brings together three components of data protection – disaster recovery and replication, a multi-cloud hybrid strategy, and backup into a single platform. Zerto is emphasizing that it will eliminate the remove the need for separate backup, replication, orchestration and migration tools, and let Zerto 7 replace multiple solutions in the enterprise. Zerto 7 will also feature continuous journal-based data protection, which will provide RPOs of seconds at scale, disrupting legacy periodic-based backups.

“Zerto 6.5 is a building block for Zerto 7,” Levonai said. “We changed the architecture to make it more scale out, and you can now do incremental copies instead of having to do a full copy. There are use cases where a customer may sometimes only want to do a partial VM recovery. So you can now do a more granular recovery, where you can recover one VM and don’t have to do the whole group.

“Both the scale-out architecture and the incremental copies build towards Zerto 7,” Levonai stressed.

Zerto 6.5 will leverage Microsoft Azure Data Box Edge, which Microsoft just announced at their Ignite event. Zerto 6.5 integrates with Data Box Edge using standard storage protocols, to give on-prem Zerto deployments fast local storage access and unlimited storage offload to Azure.

“With this, we can now replicate in and out of Azure and recover in Azure,” Levonai said. “Zerto 6.5 also has an integration with Microsoft Azure Premium SSD Managed Disks.” That will let customers run enterprise-class intensive workloads on Azure during live and test failover events.

Support for Azure Premium SSD Managed Disk also lays the foundation for Zerto to support newly announced Azure Ultra SSD Managed Disks which will deliver sub-millisecond latencies to mission critical workloads traditionally only available on-premises.

“That’s extremely significant,” Levonai said. “The integration with SSD Managed Disk will be especially significant for our Cloud Services Partners.”

Another enhancement likely to advance cloud adoption is expansion of the Cloud Control Panel

Finally, Zerto 6.5 enhances the analytics dashboards, to provide deeper insight and a 90-day history on the health and compliance of protected multi-site, multi-cloud environments. The analytics data will now include data for quarterly reports, including SLA compliance, troubleshooting of monthly data anomalies, and enhanced data about VMs including journal size, throughput, IOPs and WAN.

“We also think that enhanced analytics will also specifically be of interest to the Cloud Service Provider community,” Levonai indicated.