Zerto Touts Multi-Cloud Data Protection, Automation With Zerto Virtual Protection

Cloud-based data protection software developer Zerto this week unveiled the latest version of its software which is focused on multi-cloud capabilities.

Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 provides inter-cloud and intra-cloud data protection and workload mobility between Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, and others to give customers a single platform to tie customers to their cloud of choice, said Rob Strechay, senior vice president of the Boston-based company.

Zerto broke ground in 2011 with hypervisor-based backups but is now moving beyond VMware-to-VMware or Hyper-V-to-Hyper-V replication, or between hypervisors, Strechay told CRN.

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"We're focused on the fact that we live in a multi-cloud world today, and need a single platform that can bring it together for customers," he said. "If a customer wants to use any of 350 cloud service providers with Azure or another cloud, they can now do it."

With Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0, customers get an any-to-any data protection offering that will bring them back after data loss to where they want to be, Strechay said.

"The can bring data from Azure to Azure, from Azure to AWS, from AWS to on-premises, from the IBM Cloud to a cloud solution provider like SunGard [Availability Services] or iLand," he said. "We really think we're unique in our support of multi-cloud needs."

Strechay admitted that Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 is not yet available for Google Cloud Platform. "We haven't seen a lot of traction with Google in our customer base," he said. "But watch this space. We have it on our roadmap."

Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 takes advantage of Zerto Analytics, a monitoring and measure tool the company released about a year ago. The new ZVR 6.0 release takes advantage of Zerto Analytics to look at bandwidth usage and help customers understand potential bottlenecks, bandwidth issues, and other issues in multi-cloud environments, Strechay said.

The company is also enhancing the scalability of ZVR with the new 6.0 release to let customers use it with 10,000 virtual machines and 10,000 virtualization protection groups, he said.

Zerto also has enhanced APIs to bring ZVR to VMware vCloud Director environments, Strechay said. "VMware is a great partner, especially on the vCloud Director multitenant side," he said.

Zerto has been a big part of eGroup's transformation from a traditional solution provider to one that can now solidly compete with born-in-the-cloud partners, said Mike Carter, founder and principal of the Mt. Pleasant, S.C.-based solution provider and Zerto channel partner.

Just a few years ago, eGroup was relying on classic tools like EMC Recover Point and Storage Resource Manager (SRM) to add some level of automation to disaster recovery customers, Carter told CRN.

"Then Zerto hit our radar," he said. "What's not to like? The 6.0 release is fully embracing the cloud. Zerto provides a data motion automation tool that helps our customers embrace the cloud."

In 2017, eGroup started its new MSP practice on a combination of Microsoft Azure and Zerto, and discovered how Zerto really opens up opportunities, Carter said.

"I love the idea of choice," he said. "You create choice, and then you create competition. Zerto put themselves in a great position with a single platform for data protection and data availability with automated capabilities to send workloads straight to the cloud."

Zerto relies on a channel-only model for sales. Partners include disaster recovery-as-a-service providers, a large Zerto solution provider network, and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise channel network thanks to a relationship between the two vendors, Strechay said.