Getting DR in the cloud

Disaster Recovery and the cloud are, in many ways, natural bedfellows, not least because it can be provided as an additional service with relative ease. That does, of course, mean that users still have to make some sort of provision for it. The depth and breadth of what is possible in cloud-based DR is, however, growing all the time.

Take Zerto, for example, which is using VMware’s VMworld conference to launch Version 3.0 of its Virtual Replication (ZVR) system, which it claims is the first disaster recovery solution built for public, private and hybrid clouds.

In addition to enterprise-class RPO and RTO, simplicity and scalability, ZVR 3.0 includes new functionality for effective disaster recovery, data protection and workload migration and mobility. The company has tag-lined the system as a `software-defined disaster recovery’ (SDDR) offering where the hypervisor-based replication decouples DR from storage hardware.

Previous versions of ZVR have already been deployed by a global network of more than 100 Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), which use it to leverage the benefits of hybrid and public clouds by automating the ongoing management and maintenance of customer environments. As DR is now often seen as an onramp for enterprises into the cloud, cloud DR is an essential piece of CSP service offerings, and is driving wider cloud adoption.

True hybrid cloud - with production workload mobility between private and public clouds - is now possible with ZVR 3.0. It provides a single automated solution that provides data protection and workload mobility both ‘to the cloud’ and ‘in the cloud’.

ZVR complements several other products from the company, including Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM), which provides a single, centralised view of customer resources and service levels across physical locations, as well as full management control, and Zerto Self-Service Portal (ZSSP), which can be quickly integrated into existing CSP portals to speed the availability of DR services to customers with a 100 percent multi-tenant solution.

This allows each customer to control only their own workloads, and is based on service profiles (or SLA Templates) which enable CSPs to define service offerings based on the recovery objectives of their customers.

Virtual Replication 3.0 also incorporates several new features for enterprise datacentres, and both  private and hybrid cloud environments. These include single VMware vCenter Support forDisaster Recovery for remote and branch office (ROBO) workloads; Recovery Validation, which tests a specific failover point before committing it, ensuring successful failover; Enhanced Reporting, which adheres to audit requirements with failover reports and provides additional reports for recovery resource planning and performance; web-based management from anywhere with a standalone browser-based UI; and full support of heterogeneous environments using different vSphere versions, different storage, or a combination of vCloud and vCenter.