Zerto Data Protection leverages new cloud and feature capabilities from their Zerto 8.5 release, also being announced today, to go after the backup providers who Zerto customers have been using for their non-mission critical applications.
Today, at their “New World. New Backup” launch event, continuous data protection [CDP] vendor Zerto is making a pair of announcements. One is a regular major upgrade of their platform, Zerto 8.5, which adds direct backup to the Azure and AWS public clouds, VMware support on public clouds, and instant file and folder restore. The other is likely to draw the most attention, however. Zerto Data Protection is a new offering, enabled by the 8.5 enhancements, which lets Zerto target the broad backup market underneath the mission-critical application space where they typically play, and attempt to displace traditional backup vendors with CDP at price points significantly lower than the backup market.
“The message of this launch is that this is a new world, and you need a new backup for it,” said Andy Fernandez, Product Marketing Manager at Zerto.
Zerto’s converged backup and disaster recovery platform is differentiated by the use of CDP instead of snapshots. CDP automatically captures and tracks data modifications, saving to a local journal file with thousands of restore points. Customers typically have used it for mission-critical applications – but not the broader tier of applications under that which are about 80-90% of the total and involve the day-to-day restore operations typically handled by snapshot-based backup providers.
“With Zerto Data Protection, we are now able to deliver CDP across all of the application tiers,” said Caroline Seymour, VP of product marketing at Zerto. “This new offering is made possible by the enhancements in Zerto 8.5 – the new public cloud capabilities that allow for long term retention in the cloud as well as on-prem, and the new instant restore capabilities. Before, we could not realistically support lower tier applications, and now we can. This will enable us to displace backup with CDP, because we can now offer a 50% TCO savings over traditional backup.” The TCO savings come from by reducing hardware needs, and enabling recovery of data without downtime or data loss.
Seymour said that Zero Data Protection is both aimed at present Zerto customers as well as net-new opportunities.
“Our existing install base had requested this,” she said. “They wanted to use Zerto as part of a platform that let them move and protect VMs for lower tiers as well. Before, we were used for data recovery for mission critical applications, but not broader applications. Zerto Data Protection moves us into lower-tiered applications at price points that are appropriate.”
Seymour said that customers can pair Zerto Data Protection with Enterprise Cloud Edition licenses for total coverage.
“They can now have offerings side by side with a single platform – one for mission critical, and the other for broader applications,” she stated.
For channel partners, Seymour asserted that Zerto Data Protection is huge.
“This release is significant because it provides our MSP and reseller partners with the ability to transform their businesses,” she said. “Zerto Data Protection lets an MSP build out new levels of transformational services for their customers.”
The Zerto 8.5 release is the less splashy of the two announcements, but its capabilities are a necessary component of Zerto Data Protection.
“The two most important things in 8.5 are the unlocking of Long Term Retention for Azure and AWS, and instant file and folder restore to production,” Fernandez said. “There are also new lifecycle management features, including audit trail logging, new auto-evacuate and auto-populate for recovery hosts, and new encryption capabilities.”
The 8.5 release also provides VMware on Public Cloud Disaster Recovery and Data Protection for the Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, and the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
“We are positioning this VMware on the public cloud as the fastest way to cloud for enterprises with heavy VMware policies who don’t have time for IaaS,” Fernandez indicated.
Google Cloud Platform is not one of the LTRs in this release, but it is on the road map.
“The plan is to bring this in the future,” Fernandez indicated.
“For MSPs, we are adding one-to-many replication and long-term retention into their existing license, at no additional cost,” he noted. “It’s still $30 per protected VM.”
Fernandez also emphasized the importance of these enhancements allowing CDP to be broadened out beyond mission critical apps through Zerto Data Protection.
“Service providers now have two products, one for mission critical, and one for the broader backup market that is served by companies like Commvault or Veeam. Now that we have those capabilities, we can fully penetrate the backup as-a-service market.”
