Enhanced relationships with Microsoft, VMware and HPE bring new capabilities to the Zerto platform, particularly around security.
Zerto Analytics Planning
Continuous data protection vendor Zerto has released the 7.5 version of their platform. The major enhancements stem from deeper integrations with key strategic partners VMware, Microsoft and HPE, and provide new security and cloud capabilities and advanced analytics. The expanded functionality with Microsoft Azure includes support for Azure Managed Disks, scale-sets and Azure VMware Solution (AVS). An HPE StoreOnce Catalyst provides source-side deduplication. The VMware partnership and platform security have been strengthened by Zerto’s joining the VAIO [vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering] program.
“We announced our new platform last year, and released Zerto 7.0 in April,” said Caroline Seymour, vice president of product marketing. “It delivers our vision of converging DR and backup and cloud mobility. This release further builds it out and goes deeper, particularly in our integrations with strategic partners, VMware, HPE and Microsoft Azure. The enhancements have four key pillars: enhancements to security; cloud mobility and increased cloud agility; core platform updates; and continuing analytics.”
The deeper integrations with Microsoft significantly enhance cloud agility.
“In 7.0, we did an integration with Azure to support recovery workflows,” Seymour said. “The further integration in this release now supports Azure VM Scale Sets, the scale-out architecture that Azure provides to improve performance around replication and recovery workflows.”
A second new pieces with Azure is a public preview of support for Azure Managed Disks to and from the cloud.
“We had supported unmanaged disks before, but support of Managed Disks was a recommendation from Azure that broadens out our whole intercloud or multicloud story,” Seymour stated.
Zerto 7.5 also has an integration with Azure VMware Solution (AVS) by CloudSimple.
“This is sold in the Microsoft marketplace, and allows a native on-prem VMware environment to run into Azure,” Seymour noted. “This is great for companies looking to move to the cloud and customer looking to replace on-prem deployments. It opens up more options.”
Security is beefed up with support for Azure Active Directory Managed Service Identity.
“This lets Zerto users authenticate to Azure services and have the Active Directory Managed Service Identity keep credentials secure,” Seymour said.
Zerto 7.5 provides a deeper integration with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst.
“This provides more efficient use of storage and networking resources through source-side deduplication,” Seymour indicated. “This makes the user experience easier, by simplifying the creation of StoreOnce as a long-term retention repository for converges DR and backup.”
The big VMware news is the new certification and support for VMware VAIO, with Zerto jointing the vSphere APIs for VAIO program, something the company previewed last month at VMworld.
“VMware has been a longstanding Zerto partner, and we have been a Technology Alliance partner since 2010,” Seymour said. “This new API certification with VMware unlocks more capabilities we can leverage, including support for Secure Boot for vSphere Hosts, the ability to provide clustered deployment for hundreds of clusters at a time, and storage policy-based management [SPBM] integration. From a platform perspective it provides different ways to support VMware workloads, and unlocks capabilities that are especially important for government and highly regulated industries.”
Analytics capabilities have also been deepened with this release.
“The UI interface now aligns with analytics, to create a custom view of dashboards out of the box,” Seymour said. “We have made improvements to the Zerto Analytics Resource Planner, which was introduced in Zerto 7.0. New journal sizing for storage capacity lets the user more fully determine future requirements, and trade them off with the amount of time data is protected.”
Seymour thinks that the enhanced Analytics Resource Planner capability will be especially useful for partners.
“They can use it as a presales tool and also as an expansion opportunity, because it provides an understanding of the full implications of what expansion would entail for the storage environment,” she said. “The deeper Microsoft integration is also important for CSP partners, who now have the assurance that we have this deep level of integration.”
