In this article I’m going to talk about Zerto, a data protection company specialising in virtualized and cloud infrastructures who I recently saw as part of Storage Field Day #2. They’ve presented twice before at Tech Field Days (as part of their launch in June 2011 and Feb 2012) so I was interested to see what new developments (if any) were in store for us. In their own words;

Zerto provides large enterprises with data replication solutions designed specifically for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud. Zerto Virtual Replication is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications, replacing traditional array-based BC/DR solutions that were not built to deal with the virtual paradigm.

When I first heard the above description I couldn’t help but think of VMware’s SRM product which has been available since June 2008. Zerto’s carefully worded statement is correct in that SRM relies on storage array replication for maximum functionality but I still think it’s slightly disingeneous. To be fair VMware are equally disingeneous when they claim “the only truly hypervisor level replication engine available today” for their vSphere Replication technology – marketing will be marketing! 🙂 Later in this article I’ll clarify the differences between these products but let’s start by looking at what Zerto offers.

Zerto offer a product called Zerto Virtual Replication which integrates with vCenter to replicate your VMware VMs to one or more sites in a simple and easy to use manner. Since July 30th 2012 when v2.0 was released it supports replication to various clouds along with advanced features such as multisite replication and vCloud Director compatibility. Zerto are on an aggressive release schedule given that the initial release (which won ‘Best of Show’ at VMworld 2011) was only a year earlier but in a fast moving market that’s a good thing. For an entertaining 90 second introduction which explains what if offers better than I could check out the video below from the companies website;

Just as server virtualization opened up possibilities by abstracting the guest OS from the underlying hardware so data replication can benefit from moving ‘up the stack’ away from the storage array hardware and into the hypervisor. The extra layer of abstraction lifts certain constraints related to the storage layer;

• Array agnostic – you can replicate between dissimilar storage arrays (for example Netapp at one end and EMC at the other). For both cloud and DR scenarios this could be a ‘make or break’ distinction compared to traditional array replication which requires similar systems at both ends. In fact you can replicate to local storage if you want – if you’re one of the growing believers in the NoSAN movement that could be useful…
• Storage layout agnostic – because you choose which VMs to replicate rather than which volume/LUN on the array you’re less constrained when designing or maintaining your storage layout. When replicating you can also change between thin and thick provisioning, or from SAN to NAS, or from one datastore layout to another. A typical use case might be to replicate from thick at the source to thin provisioning at the DR location for example. There is a definite trend towards VM-aware storage and ditching LUN constraints – you see it with VMware’s vVols, storage arrays like Tintri and storage hypervisors like Virsto so having the same liberating concept for DR makes a lot of sense.

Zerto goes further than just being ‘storage agnostic’ as it allows further flexibility;

• Replicate VMs from vCD to vSphere (or vice versa). vCD to vCD is also supported. This is impressive stuff as it understands the Organization Networks, vApp containers etc and creates whatever’s needed to replicate the VMs.
• vSphere version agnostic – for example use vSphere 4.1 at one end and vSphere 5.0 at the other. For large companies which can typically lag behind this could be the prime reason to adopt Zerto.

With any replication technology bandwidth and latency are concerns as is WAN utilisation. Zerto uses virtual appliances on the source and destination hosts (combined with some VMware API calls, not a driver as this article states) and therefore isn’t dependent on changed block tracking (CBT), is storage protocol agnostic (ie you can use FC, iSCSI or NFS for your datastores) and offers compression and optimisation to boot. Zerto provide a profiling tool to ‘benchmark’ the rate of change per VM before you enable replication, thus alllowing you to predict your replication bandwidth requirements. Storage I/O control (SIOC) is not supported today although Zerto are implementing their own functionality to allow you to limit replication bandwidth. Today it’s done on a ‘per site’ basis although there’s no scheduling facility so you can’t set different limits during the day or at weekends.

VMware’s vSphere is the only hypervisor supported today although we were told the roadmap includes others (but no date was given). With Hyper-V v3 getting a good reception I’d expect to see support for it sooner than later and that could open up some interesting options.

Zerto’s Virtual Replication vs VMware’s SRM

Let’s revisit that claim that Zerto is the “industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications“. With the advent of vSphere 5.1 VMware now have two solutions which could be compared to Zerto – vSphere Replication and SRM. The former is bundled free with vSphere but is not comparable – it’s quite limited (no orchestration, testing, reporting or enterprise-class DR functions) and only really intended for data protection not full DR. SRM on the other hand is very much competition for Zerto although for comparable functionality you require array level replication.

When I mentioned SRM to the Zerto guys they were quick to say it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison which to a point is true – with Zerto you specify individual or groups of VMs to replicate whereas with SRM you’re still stuck specifying volumes or LUNs at array level. Both products have their respective strengths but there’s a large overlap in functionality and many people will want to compare them. SRM is very well known and has the advantage of VMware’s backing and promotion – having a single ‘throat to choke’ is an attractive proposition for many. I’m not going to list the differences because others have already done all the hard work;

Zerto compared to vSphere Replication – the official Zerto blog

Zerto compared to Site Recovery Manager – a great comparison by Marcel Van den Berg (also includes VirtualSharp’s Reliable DR)

Looking through the comparisons with SRM there are quite a few areas where Zerto has an advantage although to put it in context check out the pricing comparison at the end of this article;
NOTE: Since the above comparison was written SRM v5.1 has added http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/cialis/ support for vSphere Essentials Plus but everything else remains accurate

• RTO in the low seconds rather than 15 mins
• Compression of replication traffic
• No resync required after host failures
• Consistency groups
• Cloning of the DR VMs for testing
• Point in time recovery (up to a max of 5 days)
• The ability to flag a VMDK as a pagefile disk. In this instance it will be replicated once (and then stopped) so that during recovery a disk is mounted but no replication bandwidth is required. SRM can’t do this and it’s very annoying!
• vApps supported (and automatically updated when the vApp changes)
• vCloud Director compatibility

If you already have storage array replication then you’ll probably want to evaluate Zerto and SRM.
If you don’t have (or want the cost of) array replication or want the flexibility of specifying everthing in the hypervisor then Zerto is likely to be the best solution.

DR to the Cloud (DRaaS)

Of particular interest to some customers and a huge win for Zerto is the ability to recover to the cloud. Building on the flexibility to replicate to any storage array and to abstract the underlying storage layout allows you to replicate to any provider who’s signed up to Zerto’s solution. Multisite and multitenancy functionality was introduced in v2.0 and today there are over 30 cloud providers signed up including some of the big guys like Terremark, Colt, and Bluelock. Zerto have tackled the challenges of a single appliance (providers obviously wouldn’t want to run one per customer) providing secure multi-tenant replication with resource management included.

vCloud Director compatibility is another feather in Zerto’s cap, especially when you consider that VMware’s own ‘vCloud Suite’ lags behind (SRM only has limited support for vCD). One has to assume that this will be a short term advantage as VMware have promised tighter integration between their products.

Pricing

Often this is what it comes down to – you can have the best solution in the market but if you’re charging the most then that’s what people expect. Zerto are targeting the enterprise so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re also priced at the top end of the market. The table below shows pricing for SRM (both Standard and Enterprise edition) and Zerto;

As you can see Zerto costs a significant premium over SRM. When making that comparison you may need to factor in the cost of storage array replication as SRM using vSphere Replication is severely limited. These are all list prices so get your negotiating hat on! We were told that Zerto were seeing good adoption from all sizes of customer from 15VMs through to service providers.

Final thoughts

I’ve not used SRM in production since the early v1.0 days and I’ve not used Zerto in production either so my thoughts are based purely on what I’ve read and been shown. I was very impressed with Zerto’s solution which certainly looks very polished and obviously trumps SRM in a few areas – hence why I took the time to investigate and write up my findings in this blogpost. From a simple and quick appliance based installation (which was shown in a live demo to us) through to the GUI and even the pricing model Zerto’s aim is to keep things simple and it looks as if they’ve succeeded (despite quite a bit of complexity under the hood). If you’re in the market for a DR solution take time to review the comparison with SRM above and see which fits your requirements and budget. Given how comprehensive the feature set is I wouldn’t be surprised to see this come out on top over SRM for many customers despite VMware’s backing for SRM and the cost differential.

Multi-hypervisor management could be a ‘killer feature’ for Zerto. It would distinguish the product for the forseeable future (I’d be surprised to see this in VMware’s roadmap anytime soon despite their more hypervisor friendly stance) and needs to happen before VMware bake comparable functionality into the SRM product. Looking at they way VMware are increasingly bundling software to leverage the base vSphere product there’s a risk that SRM features work their way down the stack and into lower priced SKU’s – good for customers but a challenge for Zerto. There’s definitely intriguing possibilities though – how about replicating from VMware to Hyper-V for example? As the use of cloud infrastructure increases the ability to run across heteregenous infrastructures will become key and Zerto have a good start in this space with their DRaaS offering. If you don’t want to wait and you’re interested in multi-hypervisor management (and conversion) today check out Hotlink (thanks to my fellow SFD#2 delegates for that tip).

I see a slight challenge in Zerto targeting the enterprise specifically. Typically these larger companies will already have storage array replication and are more likely to have a mixture of virtual and physical and therefore will still need array functionality for physical applications. This erodes the value proposition for Zerto. Furthermore if you have separate storage and virtualisation teams then moving replication away from the storage array could break accepted processes not to mention put noses out of joint! Replication at the storage array is a well accepted and mature technology whereas virtualisation solutions still have to prove themselves in some quarters. In contrast VMware’s SRM may be seen to offer the best of both worlds by offering the choice of both hypervisor and/or array replication – albeit with a significantly less powerful replication engine (if using vSphere Replication) and with the aforementioned constaints around replicating LUNs rather than VMs. Zerto also have the usual challenges around convincing enterprises that as a ‘startup’ they’re able to provide the expected level of support – for an eloquent answer to this read ‘Small is beautiful’ by Sudheesh Nair on the Nutanix blog (who face the same challenges).

Disclosure: the Storage Field Day #2 event is sponsored by the companies we visit, including flight and hotel, but we are in no way obligated to write (either positively or negatively) about the sponsors.

Further Reading

Steve Foskett and Gabrie Van Zanten discuss Zerto (from VMworld 2012)

Good introduction to Zerto v1.0 (Marcel Van Den Berg)

Zerto and vSphere Host replication – what’s the difference?

Zerto vs SRM (and VirtualSharp’s ReliableDR)

Step away from the array – fun Zerto blog in true Dr Seuss style

vBrownbag Zerto demo from VMworld Barcelona 2012

Zerto replication and disaster recovery the easy way

Take two Zerto and call me in the morning (Chris Wahl from a previous TFD)

Musings of Rodos – Zerto (Rodney Haywood from a previous TFD)

451 group’s report on Zerto (March 2012)

Storage field day #2 coverage

Twitter contacts

@zertocorp – the official Zerto twitter account

Shannon Snowdon – Senior Technical Marketing Architect

@zertojjones – another Zerto employee