Over the last few years we have implemented countless infrastructure solutions to provide disaster recovery. We've used words like RPO, RTO, consistency, storage replication and snapshots, but until recently we rarely used the word 'Simple'.

Today we're excited to announce our partnership with Zerto a solution that simplifies Disaster Recovery for the Virtualised Data Centre.

Disasters that affect IT operations aren't ever simple matters, but providing a robust infrastructure to protect and support your information and apps should be. Lets say you want to protect your company ERP. You want be able to protect the application and database servers, replicate them to another site, regularly test recovery, and provide a mechanism to fail back when things are restored.

Ask this of your current disaster recovery solution, you might find the functionality is there. Then ask how complicated it is. How many technologies have to work together? Are you using separate products to replicate data and to manage recovery and testing? Is there another product to manage data consistency? How long does a recovery take? The harder the solution is the less you want to test it, and the less you test, the greater the risk of an outage.

Zerto is the first hypervisor-based, virtual-aware, data replication solution designed for tier-one applications deployed on virtual infrastructure. It replaces the need for multiple technologies and tools. Eliminating the need for traditional array-based replication and disaster recovery solutions that are not built to deal with virtualised IT environments. One software tool to replicate the data, protect the virtual machines (no matter what LUN they're in), regulary test, and easily failback.

The Australian adoption for virtualised data centres has been high. You've virtualised most if not all of your server fleet and benefited from reduced server costs and a faster response when called on by the business. However, as server numbers have depleted in the data centre, storage has exploded. The savings you predicted have been eroded by the high-cost of storage, and the duplication of data to identical arrays is putting even more pressure on your budget.

Zerto is storage-agnostic. No matter what vendor, what tier, or type or protocol, if your vSphere envrionment is connected to the storage, you are able to protect the virtual machines. In fact the virtual machines are the lowest unit for replication. You can choose to replicate a single VM, or multiple VMs together in a protection group, all on the same schedule, regardless of the LUN or storage device they are stored in. You can also replicate to the cloud (just ask us how).

We're always looking for innovative solutions that can reduce costs, simplify management and make the best use of the resources you have available. If you haven't got confidence in your current solution, drop us a call for a chat about Zerto or check out this video - Zerto in 90 Seconds.