Zerto Aims For Simplification Of Back-up, Disaster Recovery, Multi-Cloud Mobility With New Platform, Products

Zerto says it is redefining the way businesses approach data back-up with its new IT Resilience Platform strategy and several enhancements to its product suite designed to bring back-up, disaster recovery and cloud mobility into a single system.

The Boston-based data protection software firm unveiled the new platform and product enhancements during its ZertoCON conference in its home city Tuesday.

"You don't want point solutions," Ziv Kedem, Zerto CEO, said during a keynote. "You don't want solutions from multiple vendors. You want one platform. Simple. Scalable. Something that addresses all of your IT resilience needs. This takes everything we have been working on in the past years and everything we're continuing to build. This changes the way disaster recovery, back-up and cloud mobility are going to be used."

[Related: Zerto Touts Multi-Cloud Data Protection, Automation With Zerto Virtual Protection]

Matt VanderZwaag, director of product development at U.S. Signal, a Grand Rapids, Mich., solution provider that's been working with Zerto for about four years, said offering a turnkey platform is a key strength for Zerto. VanderZwaag said U.S. Signal expects to grow its Zerto business at least fivefold in the next couple of years.

"It's really turnkey, really easy, and it complements our own cloud practice as well," VanderZwaag said. U.S. Signal has about 180 customers that use Zerto currently.

The ease of integration between Zerto and the hypervisors it works with helps differentiate, and win deals from, its competitors, VanderZwaag said. "It's easy to stand up," he said. "It's easy to test, which is really important. You push a button and you're able to fail-over. No other product really has that capability."

Zerto is a key player in U.S. Signal's growing cloud services practice. The platform's simplicity means U.S. Signal can simply and seamlessly integrate disaster recovery, back-up and the ability to move those services between clouds without overwhelming customers with products or configurations.

"Customers don't really know what to do," VanderZwaag said. "C-level people say, 'we're going cloud,' but then the people below that don't know what to do. We've been adopting the service side. We do assessments and help companies make that transition based on their goals."

IT Resilience Platform is the name Zerto is giving its overarching strategy. That includes the company's history as a hypervisor replication player, as well as advancements it's made since its 2009 founding, including data resilience, orchestration and automation capabilities.

Also included under the IT Resilience Platform is the convergence of Zerto's back-up and disaster recovery solutions. "Back-up is no longer really back-up," said Mariah West, Zerto director of global partner marketing. "It's really one conversation: What do you need to keep your business up and running effectively both for shorter-term and long-term retention?"

The third announcement being made at the conference is Zerto 7, the actual product that brings together several key features within the IT Resilience Platform. Zerto 7 is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2019.

Zerto 7 includes Zerto's Elastic Journal data protection capability, which the company says allows for a continuous stream of search and recovery points across files and virtual machines from seven seconds to seven years in the past.

The Zerto 7 product will also include intelligent indexing and search across on-premises and cloud environments while allowing for recovery of data retained for either the short or long term, as well as the automation of recovery from any point in time. Zerto 7 also includes incremental, synthetic and full copies of data to increase efficiency and reduce storage needs, as well as enhancements to its scale-out architecture and new on-premises and cloud repository targets.

Offering a single product that covers a range of back-up, recovery and automation functions for both on-premises and cloud environments helps Zerto put space between itself and other players in the market, especially traditional back-up solutions, West said.

"We embrace our customers that have some of those legacy back-up use cases, but those are going away over time," West said. "Take ransomware, for example. Ransomeware is what I would consider a new-world back-up use case. The reality is before you had something like ransomware, it was OK to have 24-hour SLA to bring your apps back up. DR, continuous data protection and the ability to spin something back up quickly is the new way of how to do back-up. You're seeing the maturity of the customer, and they're saying, 'Maybe my Oracle apps I'll never virtualize because of compliance reasons,' but when they have an issue, they need quick recovery and continuous data protection is really the best way to do that and keep their own customers up and running."

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