Zerto today opened its first virtual user conference, ZertoCON 2020, by unveiling its plans to extend its IT Resilience Platform™ to support next generation, cloud native applications. This news reinforces Zerto’s leadership in the data protection and disaster recovery market by providing disaster recovery, data protection, and mobility in a single, simple, scalable platform for on-premises, cloud, and now next-gen applications.
As a first step, Zerto for Kubernetes was announced for the initial release, which will be platform-agnostic and enable protecting applications across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu.
“Zerto is focusing on resilience for next-gen applications with its continuous data protection and journaling technology,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, ESG. “With Kubernetes becoming the critical technology in container orchestration for managing production applications, the availability of Zerto for Kubernetes is very timely and needed by many organizations. It will enable enterprises to efficiently protect, recover, and also move applications and their persistent data for Intelligent Data Management use cases such as accelerated development and delivery within DevOps workflows.”
Resilience for Next-Gen Applications
Building on its expertise with continuous data protection, Zerto will add new capabilities to its IT Resilience Platform to disrupt the way that backup and disaster recovery is done for next generation applications.
Zerto for Kubernetes will include several components critical for smooth operation.
- Data protection as code: Integrate both data protection and disaster recovery into the application deployment lifecycle from day one.
- Continuous replication: Always-on replication provides protection and fast recovery of persistent volumes within and between clusters, data centers, or clouds.
- Application-centric protection: Beyond protecting the persistent data, protect, move and recover complex applications as one consistent entity, including all associated Kubernetes objects and metadata.
- Low RPOs for Kubernetes: Continuous journaling for Kubernetes applications, including Persistent Volumes, StatefulSets, Deployments, Services, and ConfigMaps.
- Point-in-time restore: Granular journal provides thousands of recovery checkpoints to overcome challenges of synchronous replication while providing more point-in-times than traditional backup.
- Support ordered recovery of microservices for complex applications.
- Simplicity: Easy management with powerful kubectl plug-in and native Kubernetes tooling
- Non-disruptive recovery and testing: Instantiate a full running copy of an entire application in minutes from any point in time for testing or recovery from data corruption or ransomware without impacting production.
- Automated workflows: Workflows for failover, failover test, restore, rollback restore, and commit restore.
“At IFDS, the technology and services we provide underpin the world’s largest financial institutions. Our aim is to continually invest in award winning technology and ongoing R&D to deliver the most accurate, innovative, and reliable financial processing platform,” said Kent Pollard, senior infrastructure architect, IFDS. “As an early adopter of Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform for next-gen applications, data protection has become an integral part of the development cycle. Not only can we protect every piece of the application, but non-disruptive testing can happen throughout the process. It also has low RPO and is so easy to manage.”
Partner Support and Market Excitement
Zerto’s partners are eager to see this product enter and disrupt the market.
“Businesses are increasingly leveraging containers and Kubernetes to manage enterprise applications,” said Manvinder Singh, director, partnerships at Google Cloud. “We’re pleased that Zerto will expand its capabilities in data protection, disaster recovery, automated workflows, and more to help these enterprises deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.”
“As customers increasingly move business-critical applications to Kubernetes on Azure, Zerto’s continuous data protection technology will be valuable to safeguard stateful production-scale deployments using Azure Kubernetes Service,” said Aung Oo, head of product, Azure Disks & Files, Microsoft Corp.
“Developers need to be able to push applications into production quickly and also securely,” said Amit Sabharwal, Director, Tanzu technology and business solutions alliances, VMware. “Kubernetes is a great starting point, and VMware has expanded on its core functionality with a suite of products in the VMware Tanzu portfolio to provide a more developer friendly, enterprise-ready, and secure-by-default experience. The Zerto platform provides a simple user experience and built-in orchestration for disaster recovery for applications running on Kubernetes.”
“Red Hat OpenShift provides an industry-leading, comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, pairing the scale of Kubernetes with the simplicity of Operators and Red Hat’s overall commitment to open source innovation. We’re pleased that Zerto has made its IT Resilience Platform available for Red Hat OpenShift, providing further choice to our customers in how they secure and protect their critical operations,” said Julio Tapia, senior director, partner ecosystem, cloud platforms, Red Hat.
But most importantly, Zerto knows that offering this solution will best serve the needs of businesses, both today and into the future
“Our IT Resilience Platform has fundamentally changed the way companies protect and backup data across their organizations. With the clear shift towards containers based application development in the market, we are looking to extend our platform to offer these applications the same level of resilience we have delivered to VM based applications,” said Gil Levonai, CMO and senior vice president of product, Zerto. “Today at our first virtual ZertoCON, we are announcing our vision and plan for resilience in next generation applications. While next-gen applications are built with a lot of internal availability and resilience concepts, they still require an easy and simple way to recover from human error or malicious attacks, or to be mobilized and recovered quickly without interruption. This is where Zerto can help.”
Zerto for Kubernetes is targeted to be released next year, with an early adopter program launching later in 2020.
