If you’ve ever attended a Tech Field Day or watched any of the presentations online, you know that a lot of really cool tech gets covered. Unfortunately, depending on your job, you may see solutions that you can’t take straight back to your 9-5 job and implement.
Let’s fast track to Storage Field Day 16 (SFD16), Day 2. Zerto, with its IT Resilience Platform, was up first. Immediately, I can see how beneficial Zerto and its “Continuous Data Protection” would be on a project for which I’m currently working.
In this project, the customer has prioritized availability in the form of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and a Microsoft SQL Cluster. With a SQL Cluster and its associated RDM-based storage, VMware SRM requires a storage replication adapter for your storage array. In this case, we are using a virtual appliance for “NetApp Virtual Storage Console, VASA Provider, and Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vSphere”. Lastly, a legacy backup solution has been added to the mix for data protection.
For replication, disaster recovery (DR), and backups, you are left with 3 separate vendors on which you have to potentially troubleshoot, maintain support, and coordinate compatibility for updates. All of this can be a chore for a consultant, let alone a customer whose core competency may not be storage or virtualization. With Zerto, replication, DR, and backups are covered with a single platform from one vendor not three.
Zerto backup and recovery is not as full-featured as the legacy backup solution that the customer will use. However, that is completely okay. Zerto’s recovery (VM or file-level) capabilities are more than adequate for this customer’s needs in their all VMware environment. Zerto’s user interface is a lot easier to use than the legacy backup software.
So. Yay! I found the perfect solution for my project at a SFD that I was fortunate enough to attend. Not quite. My excitement for Zerto is kind of tempered by the fact that all of the pieces of my project were procured and put in place before my arrival. It’s pretty much an “it is, what it is” situation. That’s okay, though. I may be able to find a future use for Zerto.