In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring the availability, protection, and recovery of data and applications is paramount. Organizations need robust solutions to address the challenges of multi-cloud environments, cyber threats, and data loss incidents. Enter Zerto, and specifically Virtual Replication v10, a leading data protection and disaster recovery platform. In this blog, we will delve into the numerous benefits that Zerto offers, empowering businesses to achieve data resilience and peace of mind.
Last week, Zerto announced v10 to the Virtual Replication solution and really doubles down on the security of the platform. For years, Zerto has really been the product I lead with for any customers needing a simple and feature-rich solution for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) with VMware and Hyper-V environments, as well as Microsoft Azure or AWS.
With the v10 announcement, Zerto is really extending its capabilities with new ransomware resilience, rapid recovery, and simplified architectures! Let’s go with my three favorite announcements from this release, but make sure you watch the announcement video yourself and enjoy Kevin Mitnick discuss how the threat landscape for organizations is changing – and what you can do to stay ahead of the wave!
#1 – Real-Time Detection
Easily one of my favorite items from the v10 announcement– Zerto is extending their visibility into journal data, providing real-time encryption detection built into the replication, providing visibility and giving organizations immediate warnings.
With the updates, Zerto will continue to provide best-in-class protection for every write action in real time for protected VMs, but now organizations will also be able to take immediate action (potentially even in mid-attack) rather than waiting days or weeks, or even remaining blind to activities.
The best part of this feature is there’s nothing new to do! It’s all part of the existing replication strategy with the existing Journal functionality that’s been a part of Zerto since day 1.
Adding this capability in conjunction with an Immutable backup solution from Rubrik or Cohesity provides organizations with a resilient and secure strategy for business continuity and recoverability.
#2 – Zerto Virtual Manager Appliance (ZVMA)
While this one is at #2 in the list, that’s mainly because while there are some new features to this one, the Linux-based appliance has been around since 9.7 (well, really 9.5 but let’s not go there…). What’s exciting with v10 is that the appliance not only has feature parity with the Windows-based version, but v10 now introduces a migration utility to transition from existing Windows ZVMs to the ZVMA. This utility will now allow customers to simplify and harden their Zerto deployment, which up until v10 required a full redeployment of Zerto to leverage the ZVMA.
I’ve been using the ZVMA for all my newer deployments with 9.7, and so far it’s been rock solid, upgrades are super easy and the customer get’s some peace of mind with security, and even can leverage the built-in MFA capabilities and RBAC of the ZMVA (coupled with KeyCloak – read more here).
One thing to note is that for customers who have NOT upgraded their Zerto licensing to the Enterprise Cloud Edition and are still utilizing the legacy licensing, the ZVMA is unfortunately not an option. So for all customers out there who want to limit the exposure to management components in their organization, the ZVMA is an import migration path, and thus licensing should be modified accordingly.
#3 – Better Protection for Azure
With v10, Zerto spent some time with Microsoft in the basement and reworked the replication architecture specifically with Azure, enhancing DR and mobility to handle larger and more complex replication scenarios; to, from, and within Azure regions.
One of the benefits with v10 will be the new cloud-based Virtual Replication Appliances, which will now leverage cloud-native scale sets rather than what they’ve traditionally utilized, allowing for faster bursts for failover events. What is still TBD to me is if v10 will also support the Linux-based ZVMA, or in Azure parlance ZCMA – I’m excited to see if that holds true with v10, or if we still need a Windows Server for the ZCA role.
Additional items:
There are a few additional items of note that really make v10 an exciting and welcomed release from Zerto.
- Cyber Resilience Vault – leveraging a highly secure, air-gapped environment supported by the extended HPE environment, including the HPE Alletra Storage system and HPE ProLiant servers. This gives the organization the ability for rapid recovery, in the event that their backup solution has been compromised.
- Immutable Incrementals – Scheduled copies from the Extended Journal can be made immutable on Azure Blobs, Amazon S3, or other S3-compatible storage. With Zerto 10, incremental retention sets, not only full copies, can be locked as well. A nice feature for organizations leveraging this feature.
While this post was specifically around some exciting announcements of Zerto v10, let’s just do a quick recap of WHY Zerto.
Continuous Data Protection (CDP):
Zerto’s hallmark feature, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), revolutionizes data recovery. By capturing and replicating every write I/O in real-time, Zerto minimizes data loss, enabling near-zero Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Organizations no longer need to worry about losing critical data during disasters or malicious attacks, ensuring business continuity and uninterrupted operations.
Multi-Cloud Capabilities:
As businesses embrace the versatility of multi-cloud environments, Zerto v10 shines with its robust support for multi-cloud resilience. With Zerto, organizations gain the flexibility to protect and migrate applications and data seamlessly across various public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms. This empowers businesses to optimize resource utilization, choose the best-fit cloud provider, and leverage the scalability and agility offered by different cloud ecosystems.
Ransomware Protection:
Ransomware attacks continue to threaten organizations worldwide. Zerto v10 addresses this challenge head-on by incorporating built-in ransomware protection mechanisms. By utilizing journal-based recovery and immutable backups, Zerto adds an extra layer of defense against ransomware attacks. In the unfortunate event of an incident, organizations can roll back to a clean point in time before the attack, swiftly recovering their data and mitigating potential damages.
Simplified Management and Orchestration:
Zerto v10 offers a user-friendly, centralized management interface that simplifies data protection and disaster recovery operations. IT teams can efficiently monitor and manage protected assets across diverse environments, ensuring consistent policies and configurations. Furthermore, Zerto’s orchestration capabilities enable organizations to automate recovery processes, streamline workflows, and reduce manual intervention, saving valuable time and resources.
Testing and DevOps Support:
Zerto v10 empowers organizations to test, validate, and refine their recovery plans without disrupting production environments. Non-disruptive testing enables confident decision-making, ensuring the effectiveness of recovery strategies. Moreover, Zerto facilitates the creation of isolated clones of production environments for development and testing purposes, streamlining application lifecycle management and supporting agile DevOps practices.
So, let’s wrap up here. In summary, I’m really excited (and hopefully you are as well!) about the upcoming release of v10, and will immediately be able to add value to not only our customer’s existing deployments, but also for new opportunities with organizations.