Disaster-recoverer Zerto wades into Microsoft clouds

Zerto announced its Enterprise Cloud Edition with general availability of Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0 (ZVR), which has Microsoft Azure support.

Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition (ZECE?) can protect and recover any virtual machine (VM) in on-premises data centres and public clouds, each with different SLAs and retention policies using real-time, one-to-many replication. ZVR 5 provides recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds and automated recovery time objectives (RTOs) in minutes across different technologies, private clouds and hypervisors.

The company says it supports 300 Cloud Service Providers, or one of the leading public cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, AWS, HPE Helion (for now?) and IBM Cloud. The Google cloud is not listed, surely a temporary omission if ths startup plans to get anywhere with cloud replication targets.

A classic replication benefit is to shunt copies of VMs off to the cloud, from whence they can be recovered if disaster strikes at your source data centre, and so obviating the need to build and operate a DR site. Alternatively you can cross-replicate VMs between two of your own data centres so each protects the other.

ZVR 5.0 has a 30-day journal capability and Zerto claims it can recover files, VMs and applications from any point in time. Retention policies can be configured at VM group level. IT admins can check out ZVR 5 RPOs, SLAs, alerts and journal retention policies for all VMs in a Zerto replication environment via their Android and IOS mobile devices, says the firm.

Ziv Kedem, Zerto’s CEO and co-founder, seems keen on the public cloud, his canned quote claiming ZECE and ZVR 5.0 “gives businesses a fast on-ramp to the public cloud, giving them more flexibility and control over their … business applications and data”.

Zerto and WANdisco are both in the business of providing replication bridges from enterprise data centres to the public cloud and will tend to big up public cloud benefits because, without the public cloud, their replication target space is much reduced in size. Equally they need on-premises source data sites. Bridges always need both sides of the sea, river, road or railway they cross.

ZVR 5.0 is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and from Zerto’s channel of resellers and cloud service providers. ®