Zerto Goes Full-in On Continuous Data Protection, Long-term Retention Over Backup

‘Our goal is a package not just for 10 percent, 20 percent, or 30 percent of applications. We want to work with any application using Zerto’s continuous data protection for all recovery requirements in a cost-effective way to provide long-term data retention,’ says Andy Fernandez, Zerto’s product marketing manager.

Cloud data management and data protection technology developer Zerto on Thursday made the case for a significant change in how businesses protect their data, calling for continuous data protection to replace traditional backup with the introduction of its new Zerto Data Protection offering.

Zerto also unveiled the latest version of its Zerto data management platform with new support for public cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services and support for VMware on several public clouds.

Zerto is also renaming its data protection and data management platform, previously known as the Zerto IT Resilience Platform, to Zerto Platform to emphasize the management part of its overall capabilities.

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The new offerings come as businesses still struggle with legacy architectures, said Andy Fernandez, product marketing manager of the Boston-based company.

Those architectures on the one hand use data replication to provide disaster recovery protection against infrastructure failures or natural disasters impacting mission-critical applications, and on the other hand use periodic snapshots to backup other applications to protect against potential user errors or corrupted data or to meet legal or compliance requirements, Fernandez told CRN.

The new Zerto Data Protection offering replaces both replication and periodic snapshots with continuous data protection as a way to protect data for all a customer’s applications, he said.

“Our goal is a package not just for 10 percent, 20 percent, or 30 percent of applications,” he said. “We want to work with any application using Zerto’s continuous data protection for all recovery requirements in a cost-effective way to provide long-term data retention.”

Zerto Data Protection uses continuous data protection to provide disaster recovery, data backups, and long-term data retention for on-premises and cloud data, all with a price that makes it competitive with more focused backup technologies, Fernandez said.

“We’re providing a competitive backup offering with continuous backups, instance recovery, application-consistent recovery, short-term SLA (service level agreement) policy settings, intelligent indexing and search, and long-term retention of data based on policies,” he said.

Zerto’s focus on long-term retention combined with its security capabilities are an intriguing offering for Sungard Availability Services, said Michi Schniebel, senior product manager for cloud recovery for the Wayne, Pa.-based managed services provider and long-term Zerto channel partner.

“It provides an opportunity to improve protection against ransomware,” Schniebel told CRN. “To be protected, a business needs long-term data retention. Otherwise, your long-term data can be corrupted so disaster recovery doesn’t work.”

Businesses are increasingly moving data to the cloud, and having a good long-term retention capability like Zerto is offering reduces the need for capital expenditures and infrastructure, Schniebel said.

Sungard will need time to integrate the latest Zerto capabilities into its customer-facing services, Schniebel said.

“But in general, Zerto’s focus on long-term retention as a way to back up data is something I have been pushing Zerto to do for some time,” he said. “Customers want to consolidate their backup and disaster recovery into one solution. This is a new direction for Zerto.”

Zerto Data Protection, like Zerto’s existing mainstream Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition, is a licensed version of the company’s Zerto platform, which is being updated with version 8.5. The difference is Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition includes advanced disaster recovery capabilities including disaster recovery orchestration, Fernandez said.

“Zerto Data Protection is a secondary license type with a focus on backup and long-term retention,” he said. “So if a company has 20 percent of its environment where they need failover, they can purchase Enterprise Cloud Edition for that 20 percent. But for the other 80 percent of the environment, they can use Zero Data Protection.”

Zerto Data Protection provides backup for both short-term and long-term data retention, analytics, and orchestration and automation for backup functions, Fernandez said. Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition adds disaster recovery for on-premises and cloud data, movement between clouds, and orchestration and automation of both disaster recovery and backup functions, he said.

Both are managed in the same console, he said. However, moving as much of the data backups to Zerto Data Protection as possible results in significant cost savings versus competing products, although he was unable to provide numbers to illustrate actual cost savings.

In addition to the new Zerto Data Protection offering, the company Thursday unveiled significant changes to the technology underlying its Zerto Platform

Zerto 8.5 now comes with enhanced capabilities for backing data up to public clouds in addition to on-premises appliances, Fernandez said.

This includes the ability to do long-term data retention from existing storage appliances or cloud storage to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, with support for the Google Cloud Platform coming later, he said.

Also new is instant file and folder restore, separate backup vs. disaster recovery role-based administration, long-term retention data compression, and audit trail logging, he said.

Another new offering is support for VMware on public cloud, including VMware on Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Support for VMware on AWS is planned for a future release, he said.

And coming soon is region-to-region disaster recovery over AWS with RTO (recovery time objectives) and RPO (recovery point objectives) measured in minutes, he said.

For managed service providers who work with Zerto Virtual Replication , or ZVR, disaster recovery-as-a-service, Zerto is expanding their licenses to add one-to-many replication, continuous backups, and long-term data retention at no extra cost, Fernandez said.

“This will let us displace Veeam, Commvault, and other competitors for backup-as-a-service,” he said.