Recovery-ware upstart Zerto: From Hyper-V to VMware and back again

In a blow against hypervisor lock-in, Recovery-ware startup Zerto has extended its VMware hypervisor-based technology to embrace Hyper-V, providing cross-hypervisor replication from VMware to Hyper-V or vice versa.

Virtual machines can now be continuously protected by Zerto's changed block-level replication to a second server or migrated to one running a second hypervisor, with restoration from the replica taking seconds and being to any point in time.

It makes the point that other replication products from, for example, NetApp, are based on snapshots and don't offer continuous data protection while having more of a performance impact on the source server than Zerto's low-touch replication.

The second server can be in the same data centre or a a remote one. The replication is independent of the underlying storage infrastructure; any storage can be used at the source and target site.

The first time that replication is switched on for a VM (virtual machine) or group of VMs, the time to complete protection will be longer – as all the data blocks are new to the replication process. Once that is done, then only changed blocks are replicated. You could think of this as being equivalent to the difference between full and incremental backups, for example.

The target data centre can be a disaster recovery site and the software can take account of grouped VMs needing to be treated as entities.

Zerto says it is embracing the idea of a cloud fabric and Hyper-V support is a first step. The idea is to have its replication support "any type of workload on any hypervisor or any cloud, regardless of underlying infrastructure".

It reckons its 700-plus customers in 29 countries will like the idea as well as its 150 cloud provider partners. It has not been called software-defined replication yet but we may not have long to wait before some analyst or marketeer uses the phrase.

It will extend its Virtual Replication to support the Amazon, Azure and Google public clouds as replication targets and, we understand, KVM will become another supported hypervisor, meaning you will be able to replicate to/from/between ESXi, Hyper-V and KVM giving you three-way VM mobility and private, public and hybrid cloud support.

Zerto Virtual Replication for Microsoft Hyper-V is being demonstrated at TechEd Europe in Barcelona - booth 47. Price and availability information should be announced shortly. ®

Comment

Zerto was founded in 2008 and has been shipping product since 2010. It is funded to the tune of $59m raised in four rounds, the latest being a $25m D-round earlier this year. It's seeing 200 per cent year-on-year growth and from the Vulture's eyrie, that looks set to continue. The cross-hypervisor replication is not something that hypervisor vendors will likely support and coming broad public cloud support will also likely become unique to Zero for a while.