It’s Not Backup, It’s Better: Why Jay Peak Uses Zerto’s Continuous Journal-based Recovery

When management realized that Jay Peak, a prominent ski resort in the Northeast, could lose millions during peak season if their datacenter were to go down, Craig Russell, IT manager at Jay Peak quickly decided they needed to improve their IT resilience strategy.

Jay Peak partnered with Zerto for cloud-based disaster recovery to achieve the recovery times and granularity of recovery needed to ensure their resort operations remain up and running in the face of any disruption. Soon after deploying, they saw a dramatic reduction in RPO and RTOs.

“The ability to recover our critical application in hours vs. days is a game changer from a business standpoint.” said Russell.

In addition to the benefit of having a DR strategy they have confidence in; Jay Peak has quickly realized the value of leveraging Zerto’s Journal File Level Recovery (JFLR).

In the case of file deletions, the IT team has realized significant time savings both from a standpoint of the recovery but also because they can go back to a specific time combined with seconds granularity.

For example, if an employee has been working on a file all day and they make a mistake at 4 PM, traditionally they would have to go to the previous night’s incremental.  Now Jay Peak can go back to 3:30, or 3:51, or 3:58.  It is faster for them to recover and saves the user a day of work. Because of the ease and granularity of recovery, Zerto has become Jay Peak’s go to solution for 90% of its recovery needs. They are now able to offer their end users an experience they would never be able to achieve with legacy backup. Even files create 15 minutes ago and deleted 5 seconds ago are now recoverable. How cool is that!

“We have relegated our backup to archiving only. We also don’t have to replace our onsite backup appliance in the short term saving us a capital expense. Instead, we can acquire cloud storage as we grow.” added Russell.

“With Zerto 7 and beyond, we plan on moving backups to Zerto and will probably go to AWS because of Zerto’s ability to replicate to multiple clouds. We’ll continue to leverage our local appliance for quarterly archiving.  This will finally get us where we have wanted to be for a long time with three backups: two offsite, and one on different media”

Jay Peak Backup Environment – Future State