Zerto Updates, Expands Its Flagship Data Backup Platform with Zerto 7

Zerto has revamped its flagship data backup and disaster recovery platform, giving its latest Zerto 7.0 release new long-term data retention capabilities, support for purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) and the first redesigned user interface since Zerto 4.5.

Also integrated in Zerto 7.0 is a new Elastic Journal feature that gives businesses a  continuous stream of recovery points with indexing and search across data, files and virtual machines from any point in time. This upgrade allows companies to have long-term data retention capabilities, compared to the 30-day retention built into the previous Zerto 6.5 application.

Other features include automated data protection workflows that make recovery easier and more consistent across short- and long-term data retention stores and new retention policy settings for daily, weekly, monthly and annual cycles to copy the recovery data to cheaper long-term-release repositories, plus added support to accelerate the application recovery process for Microsoft Azure.

Zerto Analytics also gets a boost in Zerto 7.0, giving users additional resource planning and what-if scenarios, while continuously monitoring and analyzing compute, storage and network resources across on-premises environments and public, private and hybrid clouds, according to the company. Built-in support for PBBAs such as Exagrid also is now included in Zerto 7.0, along with new on-premises support for NFS and SMB targets and capabilities for automatic encryption at rest upon the recovery of EC2 instances when protecting workloads on Amazon EC2.

Zerto 7.0 brings together disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility into a single platform the company describes as its IT Resilience Platform.

Zerto’s Ziv Kedem

“Although it has evolved, backup technology hasn’t gone through any fundamental changes since it became a key part of IT infrastructure,” said Ziv Kedem, the CEO and co-founder of Zerto. “With this launch we intend to disrupt the dormant backup market and address today’s digital business requirements. Our focus on continuous resilience mitigates the risk of disruption shared by every connected business today.”

The company said it has more than 7,000 global customers and more than 1,100 channel partners, and that it provides services for about 350 cloud services providers.

Michael Sallie, a senior systems engineer for Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, said the ability to manage the company’s disaster recovery and backup configurations through Zerto 7’s single platform will be a game-changer for the business.

“DR and backup are both time-intensive and redundant tasks for our IT team,” said Sallie. “With the convergence of the two, we’ll see much less of our team’s time spent managing them separately, freeing them up to work on other important IT needs. We also anticipate significant efficiency increases through the ability to replicate once for both DR and backup, not only saving time but saving costs.”

Steve Blow, a technology evangelist for Zerto, told Channel Futures that plenty of customer feedback was taken into consideration when the latest product was engineered. Those requests included long-term data retention and other enhancements, which are now included in the application, giving customers new capabilities.

Zerto’s Steve Blow

Customers in the past had to use different products together to be able to enable long-term data retention, but that process has now been eased, saving them money and simplifying their IT architecture, he said. “Customers were only able to do that before with third-party products, but customer feedback helped drive this change.”

For the company’s channel partners, the latest release of Zerto’s platform provides …

… additional value to users and converges multiple use cases into a single product, making it easier to sell, said Blow.

“This is going to be a continual enhancement route for us” as the company further builds new features into the platform in the future, he said.

Steven Hill, a senior analyst with 451 Research, told Channel Futures that data protection nowadays is evolving beyond traditional backup to better address the much shorter recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) time frames needed and expected by customers for restoring their IT operations after a disaster strikes.

“Today the focus is on insuring availability, and the need for dynamic workload protection and rapid recovery is becoming table stakes,” said Hill. “Zerto’s journal-based approach to application protection gives customers the option of much tighter granularity — down to the minute, or even second — when it comes to recovering from an outage.”

Zerto has also adopted a model where there is a sizeable overlap of protection between short and long-term data retention models, which offers another layer of redundancy for data at a transition point which often involves multiple storage targets, said Hill.

“There is also the growing potential of disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) for channel partners and service providers who can leverage the enterprise-class capabilities of a platform like Zerto,” added Hill. That could be part of a deeper engagement with clients who are having difficulty navigating the complexities of business continuity and disaster recovery in a hybrid world, while meeting the evolving challenges of industry and privacy-based compliance, he said.