Recently, I was invited to attend vRetreat, a bloggers’ event aimed to have a good honest chat with vendors about their products and while at it, have some fun too. Think Tech Field Day but without the streaming (it’s a new event so I am sure that will also come with time). If you want to know more, I spoke about it in our Episode 10 of OpenTech Cast and my dear friend Barry has also written a great post about it.
In this post, I’ll talk briefly about Zerto’s recently-released Virtual Replication 6.0. Trying to explain everything that it does would be futile as I can’t possibly do that in a single blog post but I can certainly introduce you to it if you haven’t heard about it already.
You may have heard a lot about Zerto as it’s been a major player in the disaster recovery space for a while. However, with the advent of “Multi Cloud”, there’s a need for products that make it easy to move protected workloads between the various cloud offerings. Zerto’s Virtual Replication 6.0 is the “IT Resilience Platform” that does just that and significantly improves the capabilities provided by its predecessor.
In Zerto’s own words, it aims to provide a
Single platform for continuous availability, data protection and workload mobility to, from or between multiple clouds
What this means is that Zerto Virtual Replication can move protected machines back-and-forth not only between private and public clouds but also between public clouds e.g. Azure and AWS. All that capability comes with Zerto’s usual ease of use, efficient replication and agentless technology.
A point to note here is that it’s a “one to many” solution so the targets can be more than one destination, which is great for a belts and braces approach. There’s great integration with Azure by providing intra-cloud (region to region) replication, which efficiently uses bandwidth by replicating only the changes and also takes advantage of Azure’s peering infrastructure for security and speed.
This version introduces support for migration and orchestrated failback options for AWS but more capabilities are being worked on. It is good to know that replication between Azure and AWS is already available in this version and I am sure, more integration capabilities will be introduced in coming versions.
But that’s not all! In a multi-cloud environment, it is very important to have just one tool that provides visibility into all of them. Zerto’s answer to that question is Zerto Analytics.
It provides new dynamic analysis reports for network troubleshooting and optimization. Data is aggregated from all the different cloud sources and displayed in real-time. You can also drill down directly into the reports to focus on specific issues.
Another area of improvement is data protection. With these multi-cloud options, data protection is greatly enhanced by providing long-term retention options for protected assets and of course in doing so, externalization is already taken care of.
Enhancements include support for Journal File-Level Recovery (JFLR), file-level recovery for Linux EXT and Windows file systems and major performance improvements in point-in-time restores of Linux and Windows 2016 operating systems.
In addition to all that, there many other improvements e.g. enhanced APIs, Hyper-V VRA Upgrade enhancements, Azure Pre-seed Support etc. but I’ll leave you to check out the “What’s New in Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0?” paper to learn more about the exact details for them.
In conclusion, I’d say there are lots of new features and enhancements in this version to be excited about and it’s good to see that Zerto is not standing still and is committed to evolve with the ever-changing landscape of public cloud offerings.
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