Some of the new enhancements are part of the forthcoming Zerto 9.0 release, which Zerto also previewed to customers at the virtual event.
The smart search Capability in Zerto Backup for SaaS powered by Keepit
Today, Zerto kicked off its annual ZertoCON event with a trio of significant news announcements. They announced the general availability of Zerto for Kubernetes, something that was first unveiled a year ago at this event, and which went into beta late last year. Zerto also announced the availability of Zerto Backup for SaaS powered by Keepit, a new solution with key technology obtained through a partnership with a Danish company. Finally, Zerto also extended its partnership with AWS, with new cloud tiering into Amazon S3 Glacier for cost-effective long-term storage, and with new immutability for backups to AWS. Much of this is part of the Zerto 9.0 release, which is scheduled for availability in July.
“We put ourselves in the cloud data management and protection category – but our focus is to bring continuous data protection, with scale and simplicity to anywhere, regardless of where it sits,” said Andy Fernandez, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Zerto. “That’s the overarching vision behind these messages around workloads and our multi-cloud approach.”
Zerto for Kubernetes [Z4K] provides continuous data protection-based backup and disaster recovery, that integrate into the application deployment lifecycle for containerized applications to enable data protection as code.
“A lot of technologies still bring an antiquated snapshot approach to Kubernetes, which is not appropriate for a DevOps audience,” Fernandez said. “Z4K is native Kubernetes with built in tooling and API. The way we are packing and licensing this is also extremely important. Many limit based on nodes. We give the customer the ability to scale up or scale out based on clusters. It’s the same flexibility we provide for the virtualized world, extended to the containerized world. It’s meant to improve DevOps instead of slowing it down.”
Z4K supports Microsoft AKS, Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Red Hat OpenShift.
“We have been seeing a high surge in Kubernetes usage, and I consider that it has reached the stage where it is growing rapidly,” Fernandez said. “I do expect to see a lot of volatility, with acquisitions and things getting consolidated.”
Zerto also announced the availability of Zerto Backup for SaaS powered by Keepit.
“This demonstrates our continued dedication to building a leading backup use case,” Fernandez said. “Backup with Zerto is different, in that it brings the trust we have established from DR to backup in an easy-to-consume way. A lot of organizations thought at first that ‘we have these SaaS applications and we can just use Microsoft backup.’ But it’s up to customers and users to protect their data.”
Keepit is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, was founded in 2007 and then bootstrapped by its founders for years, serving the enterprise backup market. They took their first funding round – 25.3 million Euros – in September of last year.
“We chose them because they had the simplest, best protected platform we had seen,” Fernandez said.
Keepit’s focus is on the most widely-used SaaS solutions, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace.
Zerto Backup for SaaS integrates the Keepit technology within a Zerto-branded UI, which has been purpose-built for simplicity, powerful scalability, and security. It features ease-of-use capabilities like smart search, which lets users search across levels, providing relevant results even for misspelled or incomplete searches. And it offers the expected complete granular recovery, data availability outside the normal production data centre, and an independent secure backup of data at a different location for added ransomware recovery protection.
“Ultimately people want one single solution for both DR and backup,” Fernandez stated.
Zerto also announced new data protection solutions for AWS workloads, including backup and DR for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services [EKS], DR for EC2 across AWS Regions or Availability Zones, and new backup capabilities for AWS focused on cost optimization and security to safeguard companies from malicious intent. These are all part of the forthcoming Zerto 9.0 release, which is scheduled for availability in July.
“We had been partnered with AWS around EC2 for DR and failover,” Fernandez said. “When we released Kubernetes we got into EKS, but you can now tier to Glacier, and that’s new. Glacier allows them to hold large amounts of data at a much cheaper rate.”
The cloud-native DR on the Zerto platform that automates the orchestration of failover and failover testing across AWS Regions and Availability Zones is now available in beta.
“We are designing this for speed and scale,” Fernandez said. “The focus of this first beta is DR, with plans to deliver for backup in the future.”
Also new as part of Zerto 9.0 is additional long term retention options for AWS including Cloudian, and new immutability support on AWS S3.”
“For service providers and MSPs, with Zerto 8.5 we added long term retention and one-to-many replication to allow them to consolidate DRaaS and BaaS into a single solution,” Fernandez indicated. “With Zerto 9.0 we are adding easier and better process for backup within the service portal, and have also worked on recovery workflows to make them as low RTO as possible.”
Zerto 9.0 will also have more recovery and restore scenarios, which include ones for VMs and files and folders from Journals.
“All of this is aimed at giving customers the ability not to have to use legacy backup to deliver solutions they want,” Fernandez said. “We see one scenario for moving or managing their data.”
