Switching to Zerto Helps Major Water Company’s Disaster Recovery Strategy Run Smoothly

What do water and data have in common? Quite a lot, actually. They both can be tricky to contain and manage, and they both require expert technology to manage on a large scale. One major water company needed to improve its disaster recovery (DR) solutions so it could confidently maintain its primary business, providing water technology in more than 150 countries, to customers from public utilities to residences, from commercial settings to industrial and agricultural ones.

This company’s DR needs were as large-scale as its international reach, but past solutions just weren’t doing the job the IT team needed them to do as smoothly as they needed it done. Zerto has managed to provide the DR solution they need in a very easy-to-use way.

The Zerto platform provides replication that doesn’t impact production

When dealing with DR, one of the biggest technical concerns is replication or what IT experts call the “split-write.” It’s important that the solution doesn’t interfere with production and is guaranteed to function at your remote site. Zerto is one of the few solutions that successfully negotiates the split-write.

Ease of use was another major priority for this company. People throughout the company expect that their senior team will be available when the disaster hits. Statistics show that too often, a critical team member is unavailable at the outset of a disaster, so it’s critical that anyone with the correct permissions can run the platform. To accommodate that accessibility, the solution has to be user friendly, and Zerto’s platform is just that.

Lag time and patch incompatibility vanished with Zerto

The water technology company has used many DR solutions over the years, including VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Although it was a good tool, it became difficult to keep everything at the same patch level. When vCenter required a patch, the IT team had to verify that the SRM server and the third-party storage replication adapter (SRA) were all compatible with that patch. Many of the patches required them to update SRM, and the SRA always seemed to lag. This was particularly concerning because security is such a hot topic today, and lag time can mean a data breach. The team was happy to replace SRM with Zerto not only for peace of mind but for ease of patching vCenter because Zerto’s technology-agnostic platform caused no lag time.

Low cost, easier updates, and better backup recovery made Zerto the right choice

It turns out that the company had several other reasons to choose Zerto over SRM. vCenter patching was easier, the cost was lower, and the interface was easier to use. With SRM, replicating datastores required multiple teams—Zerto did not.

Furthermore, recovering from backups that were nearly 24-hours old can be quite painful. Not only is the company at risk for data loss, but it also takes time to rebuild the data, and even that is sometimes impossible. Having Zerto makes a difference because their downtimes are reduced to minutes rather than hours, and restoring data is smooth and fast.

Support for your DR Strategy and much more

According to the company IT team, Zerto is a multi-use solution. They have used it to move datacenters, populate development environments, prevent DR failover, and for in-memory hot database backups that replace SAN backups. Because they have the data in hand going to their DR site, they found it sensible to copy to a backup solution there as well. This capability helps them meet off-site requirements, and they can replicate data back to production restores very quickly.

Take a hands-on tour of the Zerto DR and backup solution here.