Shawn Cannon

Zerto recently announced their latest release, Zerto 7.0 IT Resilience Platform.  Zerto is already well know for its backup/recovery product.  They have taken the next step with this release, replacing periodic backup with continuous data protection combined with powerful journaling technology for both short-term and long-term data retention. This release converges disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility into a single platform that allows organizations to combine historically siloed operations.

Some of the key features are detailed below:

A unique Elastic Journal that combines the granular journal technology with long-term repositories, providing a continuous stream of recovery points with intelligent index and search – for recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time.

Being able to recovery from any point in time and not just from the last backup? I would love to be able to do that.  Think about being able to be that granular to recover what is needed.

Data protection workflows that automate recovery from numerous points in time, across multiple VMs, ensuring application consistency across short- and long-term data retention

Being able to automate recovery, across multiple VMs?  I don’t know of a backup/recovery product that let’s you do this today.

Built-in support for Purpose Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) such as Exagrid, with new on-premises support for NFS and SMB targets

Retention policy settings for daily, weekly, monthly and annual cycles to copy the recovery data to cost-efficient LTR repositories

Support for PBBA is a nice new feature.  Also, being able to have retention policies to send older recovery data to long term repositories automatically is ideal.

Scale-out architecture designed to further accelerate the application recovery process for Microsoft Azure

Automatic encryption at rest upon the recovery of EC2 instances when protecting workloads on Amazon EC2

Support for Azure and Amazon EC2 just make sense as they are two of the most popular cloud platforms today.

Robust resource planning and ‘what-if’ scenario modeling within Zerto Analytics which continuously monitors and analyses compute, storage and network resources across on-premises environments and public, private and hybrid clouds

Who doesn’t want to be able to be proactive with their infrastructure?  Being able to have ‘what-if’ scenarios to stay on top of your compute, storage and network resources is something that I feel everyone should want.

My final thoughts:  As more and more infrastructure is located in the cloud and uptime is important, having a product that allows you to pick a point it time for recovery quickly is important.  Being cost effective is always important so being able to utilize long term repositories for older recovery data just makes sense.  Finally, being able to stay on top of your compute, storage and network resources with Zerto Analytics is tops on my list.

Check out the following video for some great info on why DR and Backups are Better Together!

Find out more about Zerto 7.0 by clicking here!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. Zerto compensated me for my time but any opinions given are my own.

I have been given the opportunity to blog about a new product from Unitrends.  The new product is called VM Backup Essentials, or vBE for short.  Certain bloggers were provided a blogger release which I am going to post below.  I will add my comments under each section as I downloaded the product into my lab to install and test out the features of this product.

vBE (short for VM Backup Essentials), converges enterprise-grade backup software, ransomware
detection, and cloud continuity into a powerful, easy-to-use, all-in-one platform priced 30% less than
comparable products. An “All-in-One Solution” vBE provides a disruptive approach to backup – with complete vertical integration (including the cloud), fast time to value and an all-in-one solution provided by a single vendor with industry-leading customer service. vBE includes all the software and features you would find in an enterprise-level data protection and recovery solution.
vBE includes operating system, security, backup software, WAN acceleration, replication, cloud integration, and archiving.

With an easy to use interface lost file recovery is one of the most common tasks performed by IT on an
emergency basis and can chew up many hours of your time. vBE ensures easy file recovery. It takes less than five minutes to recover a lost file with vBE, from login to full restoration. The UI is easy and intuitive enough that any member of IT can recover a lost file without having to consult a manual or receive special training.
Easily set all aspects of protection using an advanced, intelligent feature called SLA policy automation.
vBE’s SLA Policy automation intelligently sets your backup schedule based on your RTO and RPO goals.
Built-in one-glance, one-click dashboards and reports keep you fully up-to-date on the health and status
of your backup and continuity strategy.

The UI is fairly easy to navigate.  I was able to easily add my lab vCenter instance so I could select any of the VMs for backup.  I chose to backup one of my Windows VMs once so I could test file recovery as mentioned in the section above.  After the backup was complete, I deleted the downloaded files in my Downloads folder.  I selected the server from the Recover tab and clicked the Recover Files option.  This will mount the backup for use in the File Level Recovery tab.  This will mount them as a CIFS share that you can visit to download the files back to the server they were deleted from.  You can also use iSCSI to mount the backup into the server if preferred for file level recovery.  It would be nice to choose the files in the mounted job and tell it to restore back to the same server so you can do it from one interface

vBE comes with Deep Cloud Integration. The cloud is an ideal way to ensure geographic resilience,
especially those without a secondary location that need to protect copies of their data. vBE easily
manages protection for your VMware workloads in hyperscale clouds such as Google or AWS. However anyone that has worked with hyperscale clouds knows it can be complex and very expensive. vBE has its own purpose-built continuity cloud designed for long-term retention and DRaaS, as well as great integration with AWS and Google. Offloading cloud backup and recovery to experts gives you 100% confidence you will recovery when you need to and let’s you focus on those tasks only you can do – work with your business partners to improve company performance.

As I have no cloud options to test, all I can verify are the options in the UI.  Under the Configure tab, you can add Cloud based storage as a target for backup and recovery.  Currently the options ads Google Cloud Storage, Amazon (S3) and Rackspace Cloud Files.

Licensing to rival all other vendors!
vBE is licensed for $105 per socket and covers VMware virtual machines only. Base prices include one
year of 24x7x365 support with an annual renewal available.
Support terms of 3 or 5 years can be chosen at the time of initial purchase or support plan renewal.

My only comment on this claim is that this pricing is much cheaper than what I have seen out there for comparable products.  I do not use these products on a daily basis anymore but I remember the pricing from one vendor I used to use was in the $700 to $1,000 price range per socket.  If the performance of this Unitrends product matches up to the other backup vendors then this pricing will be a game changer, in my opinion.

Points of note:

• Total Protection – No limits on the number of virtual machines that can be protected on a host
• No License Tiering – No tiering of licenses based on the number of cores in the CPU socket.
• Only License what you need! – Only occupied sockets require a license, but ALL occupied
  sockets of the host must be licensed to protect its virtual machines.
• Infinite retention! – Retention is directly proportional to the amount of storage that can be
  provided by the customer for backup. The license has no limits on retention.
• Replication to the Cloud – Site-to-site replication is not supported at this time. vBE does support
  replication to the cloud – both hyperscale clouds such as AWS, Google and Rackspace as well as
  clouds purpose-built for DRaaS services.
• Advanced Ransomware Protection – New ransomware variants are emerging every day and
  your ransomware protection needs to evolve to keep up.30-Day FREE TRIAL!

A 30-day free trial is available from https://www.unitrends.com/products/vm-backup-essentials
Simply download, deploy, and quickly start backing up all VMware workloads as it includes everything
required for data and application protection and advanced features.

As my lab is small I am not able to fully test every feature of this product but my overall impression is very positive. Being able to test it out for 30 days for free is a great way to see if it will work for protecting your VMs.