After Frustration, Baron Capital Gets a Disaster Recovery Win from Zerto
Guest Blog Post by Serge Kovarsky, Manager Systems Administrators, Baron Capital
Investment firms like ours, Baron Capital, are intimately familiar with risk. And we really hate to take unnecessary risks, like disaster recovery (DR) solutions that don’t help us meet our SLAs. Baron Capital is an asset management firm that focuses on growth equity investment solutions. Nearly 40 years old, Baron is known for taking an active approach to growth investing. Research has always been (and continues to be) central to the business strategy. For that reason and others, it was incredibly frustrating to keep trying DR solutions that ultimately failed to deliver.
Before Zerto we tried it all and we were frustrated
All our previous attempts with solutions such as Double-Take and VMware SRM just led to failure and frustration. We also tried to use Compellent SAN replication, and it was good in the sense that we could get everything on DR, but the time commitment and manual intervention still left something to be desired – Zerto delivered the best of both worlds.
With Zerto we beat the 30-minute SLAs with ease
We tried a lot of VMware and third-party solutions to reach our DR objectives before Zerto. All of these solutions required a tremendous amount of programming and tunings, and they still couldn’t beat the 30-minute SLAs our business demanded. When we installed Zerto, we were surprised that all those heavy configurations are done behind the scenes with minimal effort to set up the full environment. We were up and running on our DR site after just 20 minutes.
If you’re looking for simplicity and reliability, Zerto can’t be beat
We chose Zerto for simplicity and reliability. The first time we used Zerto was after developers screwed up our main SQL server. I was able to pick up a proper time from journaling, just before it happened. The rest of the week, front and back offices were running on DR SQL. Over the weekend we used reverse Zerto (meaning we tapped into the DR server and did a failover to bring SQL back to the primary production site). On a similar note, during Covid we moved 40% of users VDIs to the DR site to spread the load with ease.
My manager said he does not need me anymore, since even he could make one click on Zerto to run DR!
Next Stop: Backup
We are currently looking at using Zerto for backup to help fulfill our compliance needs. We like the idea of one solution for DR and backup and feel this will be a proactive way to fight possible ransomware attacks.
If you’d like to see the Zerto solution in action, click here to see a 3-step failover and access an interactive tour of the Zerto platform.
Serge Kovarsky 
