Part 1 – Don’t Hate, Replicate: The Benefits of One-to-Many Replication

Imagine what we could achieve if we could be multiple places at once. Think about the downtime that we’d avoid while guaranteeing uptime. Though we can’t exist everywhere at once, your business applications sure can.

With Zerto’s one-to-many replication functionality, you can ensure consistent application uptime against any threat.

What is One-to-Many Replication?

One-to-many replication works by protecting application components (e.g., virtual machines, EC2 instances) in multiple virtual protection groups. Virtual protection groups allow you to logically group and continuously replicate all virtualized components that make up an application. In doing so, the application is restored as a single entity rather than many different components. Zerto’s journal tracks restore points for each component and contains a history of compressed, block-level changes that enable recovery to thousands of checkpoints. With application-centric recoverability, you can recover an application to an exact point in time.

This allows each virtual protection group to have individually definable service-level agreements (SLAs), with the option to automate and orchestrate continuous replication and recovery to multiple target platforms, whether on-premises or in the cloud. To do this, Zerto configures unique journal data retention policies across the different virtual protection groups that are protecting the application. With Zerto, applications can be replicated to each target concurrently, each with recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds with no performance impact.

What is Possible with One-to-Many Replication?

The possibilities of one-to-many replication are endless because it adds layers of data protection and recoverability to any disaster recovery strategy. For example, consider a strategy in which local replicas are stored on separate local storage with 30-day journals for local file and application restores. In this scenario, you could simultaneously have a remote replica and three-day journals for disaster recovery, all being continuously updated with block-level changes to within seconds from the production data.

Regardless of the strategy, one-to-many replication protects your applications with layers of recoverability, preparing you against any threat at any time. So, don’t hate—replicate!

The top use cases of one-to-many are:

1. 1. Local continuous disaster recovery
   2. Multi-site disaster recovery
   3. Protection during migrations

What’s Next?

In part 2 of this blog series, we will explore how one-to-many replication works across these three use cases. Part 3, the final installment of the series, is going to discuss how to protect and migrate on-premises VMs to AWS EC2 instances with Zerto. Keep reading to discover how Zerto protects all your applications, all the time, with industry-leading RPOs and flexible data protection strategies.

Anthony Dutra