Introducing Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0: Solve Multi-Cloud Your Way

Hello everyone and welcome to Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0! There are so many exciting new features in this release, it’s sure to be a popular download!

There seemed to be no better way to celebrate the release of Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 than with a glass of Cardhu single malt (the code name for this release) and a chat with the SVP of Product, Rob Strechay.

Strechay discussed his thoughts about the new release stating the three major focuses: cloud mobility, the strengthening of our partners and CSP community, and the goal to reshape backup beginning this release with changes to the architecture of journal file level recovery (JFLR).

Any2Any Cloud Mobility

The first major focus in 6.0 is cloud mobility.  Get ready to solve for multi-cloud. You’ll hear this a lot.  But what does that really mean? “It means no more vendor lock-in with to, from and between public clouds and private”, said Strechay.

What about rolling your own to the private cloud and using Azure, IBM Cloud or AWS as a secondary site?  We’re got you covered.  Maybe you’d rather use a MSP / CSP to get to the cloud; no problem.  Your cloud, your freedom to choose and to interoperate among and between the clouds.  Zerto is the only single platform that can deliver all of that with no agents.  As Strechay likes to say, “we are not just flopping a bunch of puzzle pieces that don’t fit together and hoping you are happy.”  We give you an IT Resilience Platform that provides data protection from unplanned and planned disruptions.

The exciting new key features of Any2Any cloud mobility are:

• Azure to Azure intra-region replication
• Public Cloud Bi-directional mobility to and from Azure, IBM Cloud and AWS
• Orchestrated failback from AWS

These days no one has a single cloud provider.  It’s all about hybrid cloud and multiple clouds.  But how do you operate between those clouds? Zerto can help.  In this release you can replicate workloads easily within different Azure regions allowing for Azure to truly be an option as a secondary DC.

Added benefit is that VMs created in Azure can simply and easily be protected and replicated within Azure never having to touch on-prem. Did you move to AWS and now want to migrate back?  Before this release, that was difficult.  Now with a few clicks, your VMs can failback back to on-prem.  Have several cloud solutions within your organization?  Want to migrate and protect workloads within those different clouds? No problem.  With Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0, VMs in Azure can be moved and protected in IBM Cloud, AWS or one of over 350 Cloud Service Providers (CSP).  It becomes your cloud, your way with the freedom to choose the cloud you want and still offer mobility and resiliency between those clouds.

Service Provider Partners

Another large part of the new release is strengthening and supporting our partners.  We’ve done that by upgrading and enhancing our APIs; increasing scalability and offering a new upgrade manager to allow remote upgrade for our CSPs. With this release we look to make our partners more effective and make their operations more efficient.  We value their continued support and look to continue to further our collaborative efforts to go to market together.

Some of the API enhancements include use of new enhanced integration with VMware vCloud Director (vCD) Guest Customization and using both vCD SDK and the vCD REST API. For our partners, this strengthens our commitment to supporting and expanding RESTFUL API capabilities and integration. Scalability enhancements result in support for 10,000 VMs per ZVM/vCenter pair.  That’s an amazing amount of VMs that we now support!

The new cloud management portal for CSPs provides a centralized view of all the CSPs end users environments. This portal allows for enhanced visibility and a new Upgrade Manager for easy remote upgrades of CSP customer sites to ensure continued availability and support. This enables CSPs to provide better managed services with continuous availability and ensure the solution is always up to date.

Rethink Backup

Rearchitecting the offsite backup infrastructure making offsite backup more efficient, that’s part of a continuing goal to strengthen our long-term retention strategy.  “We are not going to chase the tails of other vendors, we are going to solve for these use cases in the Zerto innovative and disruptive way”, says Strechay.

In this release JFLR has been redesigned from the ground up.  With the redesign comes some key new features worth noting.  New features include improvements to mount and download performance, the addition of Linux file system support and the removal of the 2 TB file limitation mounted file systems. Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 is the first step toward expanding and improving Zerto’s overall long-term retention strategy.

The changes and improvements to JFLR provide some great short-term backup uses cases such as file recovery or ransomware attacks.  Zerto provides many more restores points than traditional once a day backups and even more than storage snapshots which offer restore points in 10s of minutes.  Zerto with the new JFLR improvements can provide restore points in increments of seconds for Windows and Linux VMs.

Change the Playing Field

And don’t forget Analytics that provides multi-site and multi-cloud visibility.  “We continue to bring out new and innovative SaaS delivered features and applications, like the Cloud Portal, to make our customers and partners more operationally efficient” said Strechay.  New in Zerto Analytics are expanded dashboards with new dynamic analysis reports for network troubleshooting and optimization. Zerto Analytics gives access to information from multiple ZVMs and allows CSPs to view more environments with less effort.

New reports include:

• Network throughput and performance
• Monitors site-to-site and outbound traffic
• 30 days of network, journal and RPO history metrics for any site
• Public API’s for RPO, Journal and monitoring metrics

There’s a lot to be excited about. And that’s just a peek at the clouds!  Please view the press release and the What’s New in Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 datasheet for even more new features and enhancements!

“This release is a stepping stone on the path to true IT Resilience for our customer and Partners.  We have laid the foundation for some incredibly innovative things to come in the future … stay tuned!” says Strechay.

Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 is now available in myZerto under the software section. Please contact us for additional information, a demo or a free trial!

Care to join us for a drink and chat about Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0?