U.S. Based Designer and Marketer of Children’s Apparel Grows Into Better Fitting IT Solutions

“As we move closer to continuous data protection, Zerto seems to have it figured out, and that’s why we want to be part of this early adopter program.” – senior manager, IT engineering services

The highly anticipated launch of Zerto 7 is on the horizon and we’re excited to share the experience of some of our customers in the early adopter program. Throughout this blog series, we’ll share what is energizing our customers about Zerto 7, what they want to get out of the experience, and their perspective on what this release will mean to their business.

Our first featured customer is a leading brand of children’s clothing, gifts and accessories in North America.

Established in 1865, this U.S. based designer and marketer of children’s apparel is recognized and trusted by consumers all over the world. But in today’s retail landscape, it also has to have reliable IT initiatives to reach customers where they shop. Its current focus is on:

• Expanding the reach of its brands domestically and globally
• Streamlining operations in a rapidly changing retail space
• Maintaining a balance between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce

From an IT systems perspective, the team is asked to do a lot: expand its reach globally, interreact with the cloud in support of physical sites, and e-commerce platforms and maintain a growing number of integration points. They are also challenged to integrate acquired environments into the corporate environments as the portfolio continues to expand.

As the business grows and IT rides the wave of its expansion model, they are trying to consolidate and do more with less of a footprint. Yet, with each step they need to be able to protect data, be resilient, and avoid going down for any reason.

The first action the company took with Zerto was to move its two production data centers to co-location facilities. The move involved hundreds of systems over a single weekend. It worked flawlessly and established significant credibility for the IT team within the organization, not to mention putting them in a more robust and resilient infrastructure state by moving to a co-location facility.

“We originally came to Zerto to migrate out of our own data centers into co-locations and were immediately won over by the ease of use,” said senior manager, IT engineering services. “Using Zerto we don’t need to have a backup person that has to be tied down with training. Instead, Zerto has been intuitive for our team and we don’t have to rely on one expert. We’ve also made several people on the team happy because we don’t have to have someone on call 24-hours a day to take those 2 a.m. phone calls when something happens like an A.C. unit going down.”

Looking beyond the data center migrations and stabilizations, they plan to implement Zerto as a DR tool to provide continuous data protection and recoverability for core applications. They will also be able to refocus on the backup and retention space and support more strategic business initiatives, such as offsetting the management of other tools with a single tool from Zerto.

The team tells us they are excited about the new backup functionalities that are part of Zerto 7 and are ready to put the orchestrated DR layer and continuous data protection to use as part of the early adopter program. The integration is already there, but this will simplify the overall solution for them since they won’t have to turn to another product set in the data protection space to do restores or long-term retention. Zerto 7 unifies the company’s overall data protection plan and moves them toward a continuous data protection model instead of running log backups every few hours.

Beyond just functionality there are financial benefits that come from quickly getting the technology tested, vetted and incorporated into the overall strategy. There are savings from moving to one tool versus the cost of using multiple tools as they did in the past. Maintaining all those tools is not nearly as efficient as unifying those workloads into an enterprise tool and strategy with orchestration and automation.  This frees the team up to focus on initiatives that are more strategic to the business.

This U.S. based designer and marketer of children’s apparel has shown that it is willing to invest in the technology that protects its business and we are certain there is a lot more to come with further testing and support from Zerto and Zerto 7.