Exciting Announcements from ZertoCON 2018
ZertoCON is happening in Boston this week and although I’m tied up on the other side of the country at a different user conference, I’m following the news out of ZertoCON closely. The big topic of discussion at ZertoCON is IT resilience, which is an idea that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. As digital transformation in the enterprise takes hold and businesses come to rely on technology more heavily than ever before, downtime is simply not an option for many organizations. Gartner is talking about this idea under the moniker “IT Resilience Orchestration Automation (ITRO)” and they define it this way:
IT Resilience Orchestration Automation (ITRO) solutions provide improved IT service availability, recovery and integrity through automation of application workload failover and failback. In addition, they also support improved data integrity and consistency between a primary production data center and a secondary recovery site. The recovery site may be an internal data center, a provider-managed data center or a virtual data center in a public cloud. ITRO technology has been fundamental to delivery of DRaaS, supporting physical and virtual server image replication, startup and shutdown within a provider-specific cloud. In addition, it also supports isolated recovery exercising that can be conducted in parallel with production operations, as well as selective failover of individual servers or groups of servers that support specific applications. (Source: https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/it-resilience-orchestration-automation)
With this notion of designing for increased service availability and integrity in mind, I’m excited to see some of the announcement coming from Zerto at the event this week. A brief summary of the announcements follows if this is also a subject that interests you!
Announcement Summary
Zerto today opened its annual user conference, ZertoCON 2018, with the announcement of its IT Resilience Platform™ to empower its users to build resilient, always-on businesses with backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility converged in a single, simple, scalable platform, which is available now. The company also unveiled its vision for the future of backup with continuous journal based protection to change the way backup gets done.
To realize this vision, Zerto pre-announced Zerto 7 and its plans to add an Elastic Journal along with additional features to support this continuous protection. The IT Resilience Platform increases the availability of data and applications, while reducing complexity and meeting the challenges of today’s digital customers.
The Zerto IT Resilience Platform
Embracing digital transformation allows organizations to harness the power of technology to drive efficiencies, create new experiences and ultimately beat the competition. This transformation is adding many layers of complexity to IT and is coupled with an increased need for data security and protection. IT resilience is the ability to seamlessly adapt to new technology and drive IT transformation, while mitigating the risks of downtime, ensuring an “always-on” business and the best customer experience.
The Zerto IT Resilience Platform, with Zerto’s proven continuous data protection (CDP) technology at its core, will solve many of these challenges by converging backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility solutions into one single, simple and scalable platform. Orchestration and automation are built in, giving organizations the ability to modernize and innovate. Analytics and control provide complete visibility across multi-site, multi-cloud environments to ensure business SLAs are met. As a result, companies no longer need separate backup, replication, orchestration and migration tools – with the associated complexities and costs.
The future of backup – Zerto’s vision
With digital transformation comes the need for speed, performance and an expectation of no downtime, no data loss and no interruption. However, today’s backup technologies do not meet these expectations because they are cumbersome to use and rely on periodic backups. Zerto is unveiling its vision for the future of backup to meet these specific demands and solve the complexities of legacy technology. The foundation of this vision is the IT Resilience Platform and the future of backup will be based on:
- Best of breed CDP technology, which is at the core of delivering IT resilience
- Continuous journal-based protection with a new Elastic Journal that delivers recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds at scale for short and long-term data retention eliminating the need for legacy periodic based backups
- New data protection workflows to automate recovery from any point in time across on-premises and cloud repositories
Previewing Zerto 7
Building on its expertise with continuous data protection, Zerto 7 will add new capabilities to its IT Resilience Platform to change the way that backup is done. Specifically, the new key features to be included in Zerto 7 are:
- The Elastic Journal, a new concept in data protection, merging granular journal technology with long term repositories allowing for a continuous stream of recovery points with search and recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time from 7 seconds to 7 years
- Intelligent indexing and search across on-premises or cloud to enable recovery for short and long-term retention
- Data Protection workflows to automate the recovery from any point in time ensuring application consistency across repositories for short and long-term data retention
Zerto 7 will also introduce incremental, synthetic and full copies to increase efficiency and reduce storage needs, enhancements to its scale out architecture and new on-premise and cloud repository targets.
Additional new capabilities to be added are:
- Prescriptive Analytic capabilities to analyze past performance to determine optimized business outcomes and answer the “what” is likely to happen with new “what if” capabilities
- GUI and simplified workflows to further enhance and simplify the user experience
Learn More
If you’re interested in finding out more about ZertoCON, it’s probably too late for you to fly over to Boston to check it out, but you can certainly dig deeper at https://www.zerto.com/zertocon/ and investigate the IT Resilience Platform™ page here: https://www.zerto.com/zerto-it-resilience-platform.