Microsoft Ignite: Zerto IT Resilience Platform Leverages Microsoft Azure Data Box Edge

Zerto Inc. announced Zerto 6.5 which continues to build out the company IT resilience platform.

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This release accelerates cloud adoption, lays a foundation for backup capabilities within the platform and provides deeper analytics insight across all clouds. These enhancements are integrated with the growing Microsoft Azure storage solution portfolio. This provides data protection at scale, simplified enterprise application mobility and fast migration.

Zerto 6.5 will take advantage of newly announced Microsoft Azure Data Box Edge to deliver a fast, scalable hybrid cloud solution for its on-premises backup capabilities. It integrates with Data Box Edge using standard storage protocols. The combined solution will enable fast local storage access and unlimited storage offload to Azure.

“Recent research conducted by IDC and Zerto found that 90% of respondents plan to use the cloud for data protection within the next twelve months. Almost half of these same respondents are also looking to modernize their backup solution in that same timeframe,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto. “This tells us that their legacy backup solutions are not equipped to meet the business and IT resilience needs of organizations who are in the midst of a digital transformation journey and looking to fully embrace the cloud. Zerto 6.5 will enable enterprises to simplify IT with one platform to replace backup, DR and cloud mobility solutions.”

Accelerating cloud adoption
Customers are demanding the control and flexibility to combine cloud and data protection strategies. Building upon the introduction of support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments with mobility to, from and between multiple clouds and on-premises, Zerto 6.5 introduces key features to achieve this in a cost-effective way.

Zerto 6.5 includes features that will accelerate adoption:

• Expanding the cloud control panel

• Enhancing RTOs and recovery point objectives

• Supporting Azure Premium SSD Managed Disk

The company’s integration with Azure Premium SSD Managed Disks enables customers to run enterprise intensive workloads on Azure during live and test failover events. With support for Azure Premium SSD Managed Disk, the firm lays the foundation to support announced Azure Ultra SSD Managed Disks which will deliver sub-millisecond latencies to mission critical workloads traditionally only available on-premises.

“Our airline HQs, based in Miramar, FL, and more than 15,000 Spirit team members are responsible for safely moving our guests on more than 400 flights a day to 60 destinations. IT is a major component of making it all work, and with our complex and growing data center environments, protecting our IT applications and services from myriad complex risks, including South Florida’s unpredictable weather is a top priority,” said James Nolin, senior director, IT, Spirit Airlines, Inc. “Application mobility to and from the cloud is a critical part of our resilience strategy and Zerto’s tight integration with Microsoft Azure enables replication to Azure Premium SSD Managed Disk quickly and at scale. These advanced capabilities give us the protection, readiness and assurance needed to continue business-critical operations even in the face of hurricanes that can threaten our data centers.”

Foundation of backup
Zerto 6.5 introduces enhancements to the backup capabilities in the IT Resilience Platform, including:

• Incremental backups that reduces the amount of data to be written, time to write backups and storage capacity required

• Scale-out backup and restore capabilities

• Enhanced journal file-level recovery support for Linux

• Support for Data Box Edge using standard storage protocols

Features enable organizations to move away from legacy backup technology towards a comprehensive IT resilience strategy.

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Deep analytics functionality:
As part of the ongoing journey to true IT resilience, organizations need to continually evaluate results in order to ensure quality and performance. With expanded intelligent dashboards, 6.5 provides organizations with deeper insight and a 90-day history on the health and compliance of protected multi-site, multi-cloud environments.

The rich analytics content will provide:

• Data for quarterly reports, including SLA compliance

• Troubleshooting of monthly data anomalies

• Enhanced data about VMs including journal size, throughput, IO/s and WAN

• Cloud service provider client organizational filter with enhanced visibility to create customer reports and automatically deliver real-time analysis to clients

“Zerto can help support customer’s journey to Microsoft Azure. With Azure Premium SSD Managed Disk support shipping in Zerto 6.5, our joint customers have additional options for high-end application workloads for DR in and migration to Azure,” said Tad Brockway, GM, Azure storage, Microsoft Corp.