Accelerate Migrations to the Cloud or Anywhere – What Can Zerto Do For You?
A datacenter migration is a huge and incredibly complex project. You have spent months planning it, thousands of dollars acquiring the resources for it, and you aren’t even sure if your team is going to pull it off! The idea is simple enough – take my applications and data I have on premise and move them elsewhere. What’s so hard about that?
Well, migrations are like icebergs. On the surface, they seem simple and straightforward enough. But lurking beneath the calm waters is a disaster waiting to happen. For one, a migration by its very nature introduces periods of extended downtime, meaning users will be unable to access critical applications during the move. Those applications may have inextricable ties to certain hardware or software components of your infrastructure – ones you haven’t touched in years! Furthermore, a migration is nothing like a refresh cycle that happens every few years. These are often a once in a lifetime event and your IT team may not have the experience required to migrate your applications seamlessly. One solution is to leverage professional consultants, but these services can cost thousands of dollars per day! Taking all this into account, it’s no shocker that 50% of migrations exceed budget, exceed migration windows, and result in disruption.
Just to recap, we have spent countless hours planning, thousands of dollars making sure the new target infrastructure can accommodate the incoming applications, and guess what – we haven’t even moved a single byte yet! So, you ask yourself the age-old question; there’s got to be a better way?!
With Zerto’s Virtual Replication (ZVR), there is. ZVR was born in the ‘Golden Age’ of technology and was purpose-built for virtualized and cloud environments. A migration with ZVR is as simple as selecting the applications you want to move, pointing them to the target datastore of choice, and migrating them. They key to a seamless migration with ZVR is the Virtual Protection Group (VPG). A VPG is a group of VMs that comprise a particular application. Within the VPG, several labor-intensive steps such as IP-reconfiguration and VM-boot order are automated, allowing for a fully orchestrated move that results in no data loss and only minutes of downtime.
“But wait, there’s more!”
When migrating applications server-by-server, you are bound to miss something along the way. This can cause extended unplanned downtime, adding significant costs and labor. Test the migration ahead of time with ZVR, without disrupting the production workloads, and have peace of mind knowing the migration can happen successfully in minutes.
Finally, ZVR was designed to support heterogeneous environments. This means mobility to different storage arrays, cloud platforms, versions of hypervisors, or even hypervisors altogether. With installation and initial replication in under an hour, ZVR is so simple that anyone can use it. At Zerto, we believe the hardest decision you should have to make is the decision to move your datacenter in the first place. Let us take care of the heavy lifting – your IT team has enough to worry about!
– Ryan Siegel, Zerto Technical Marketing, focuses on creating and delivering the latest innovations and solutions in the IT Resilience space, including disaster recovery, datacenter migrations, and driving the adoption of new technologies and solutions. Find Ryan on LinkedIn. – See more at: https://www.zerto.com/blog/data-protection/ransomware-new-billion-dollar-industry/#sthash.euWpOI55.dpuf
