Zerto, one of the companies I met during last Tech Filed Extra at VMworld and already well know for its Disaster Recovery solution, has recently announced Cloud Fabric.
This is the evolution of its DR&BC solution for VMware environments to a new platform capable of supporting different hypervisors (VMware and Hyper-V) and public cloud providers (Amazon AWS first, others later).
Two words on Zerto
The success of Zerto with service providers (more than 150 installations) and enterprises (600+ customers) comes from various reasons but, from my point of view, the most important are ease of use, reliability and hardware independency. In fact, to achieve this goal, the product uses a VSA to intercept all the VMs I/O and sends an optimized data stream to the DR site(s). The list of features is very long and includes many configurable options, consistency groups, automated failover and failback processes… all with an eye to multi tenancy (this is why it is widely adopted by ISPs).
The product, now at v3.0, has seen a lot of improvements in the last 3 years and it will be soon updated with a new backup functionality that will be able to make off-line copies of VMs and manage their retention. It won’t be the ultimate backup solution, but I think it will be appreciated by Zerto customers (especially the ISPs!).
Cloud Fabric
In practice, Cloud Fabric, will provide an abstraction layer capable of replicating data between different Hypervisors and clouds. For example, it will be possibile to replicate VMs from ESXi to Hyper-V (and viceversa).
Cloud Fabric will automatically convert virtual disks formats and apply all the necessary configurations, scripts and whatever to maintain the upper layers of the stack unaltered.
Cross-Hypervisor replication is a huge achievement and will open some interesting scenarios:
- from the ISP point of view there will be more technical and business options: freedom of choice about the hypervisor (Microsoft stack is cheaper), ability to sell DRaaS independently from hypervisor.
- from the large enterprise point of view it will be easier to manage a multi hypervisor infrastructure.
- Hyper-V end users will have access to more options for DraaS.
Why it is important
Zerto is continuing to implement interesting features year after year and its customers (at least the few a personally know) are usually very satisfied about the product. Cloud Fabric will open new opportunities to service providers and enterprise users, and I think there are some other use cases still to be discovered for a platform like this.
If you are curious, you can find all the video of this Tech Field Day session down below:
Disclaimer: I was invited to Tech Field Day Extra by GestaltIT and they paid for travel and accommodation. VMworld Pass was kindly provided by VMware.
I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku team.
