Data rescue lifeguard Zerto surfs in on single pane of glass

Recovery-ware upstart Zerto is riding the cloud wave with improvements to its management side – with a point release that provides a single-pane-of-glass approach.

The firm's VMware hypervisor-based replication enables disaster recovery for virtualised server applications, which it claims is more flexible than relegating replication to storage arrays – and hence more useful to cloud service providers.

Zerto's Virtual Replication product is VMware hypervisor-resident and provides a replication facility for virtual machines (VMs) which is VM-aware and enables VM disaster recovery.

The development history looks like this:

• Version 1.0 ZVR did its magic in a single site.
• Version 2.0 in late summer 2012 introduced a multi-site function with replication between locations plus:
  • Multi-tenant functionality so you could replicate to a shared infrastructure from multiple customers without network conflicts,
  • VMware vCloud Director integration.
• Version 3.0 came in March this year and extended ZVR functionality Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) environments and managed by a single vCenter.
• V3.0 also added the the Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM), providing a single view of all customer (or department) resources and service levels across physical locations.

The ZVR journal enables recovery to multiple points in time, enabling DR to get around logical data corruptions. The V3.1 release nine months later:

• Extends ZCM capabilities to give Cloud Service Providers extends a single pane of glass approach for management, orchestration, reporting and monitoring of BC/DR operations across multiple sites.
• ZVR Journal size automatically increases or decreases based on the amount of changed data.
• Increased manageability of alerts and events with a new centralised tab for better cause/effect analysis.
• Expanded REST API capabilities for orchestration, events and alerts.
• Better environment maintenance using new VRA tabs and workflows.

Overall Zerto says v3.1 centralises and simplifies disaster recovery with improved scalability, maintainability and alerting capabilities. This should help it to continue growing fast, with a current base of 100 cloud service providers, reached via 200 per cent customer growth in 2013.

There is a group of VMWare hypervisor-level software startups like Pernixdata and Zerto that have made a hypervisor real estate land-grab. As long as they can keep their technology relevant as VMware develops its hypervisor's extent and reach – such as its Site Recovery Manager functionality – then they are virtually guaranteed business growth through riding on VMware's magic carpet. The threat is that VMware extends its own functionality and customers reject their add-on and plug-in functionality.

Zerto has it VM-aware replication trick pony. Now it has a hypervisor-resident gig with VMware will it try to extend that to other hypervisors, such as KVM and Hyper-V? On the other hand it could try and extend its technology reach inside the VMware hypervisor... caching anyone?

ZVR v3.1 is available now for all ZVR customers. ®