Zerto unveils 2019 Plans at ZertoCON Conference

Ziv Kedem, Zerto CEO and co-founder, announced that customers can acquire Zerto either as a perpetual license or, now, as a subscription according to their business preferences. Purchasing software as OPEX instead of CAPEX can free up budget for projects that directly impact the business’ bottom line. In addition, for some organisations, OPEX purchases often follow a simpler approval path, as they are used to scale on an as-needed basis and offer the ability to have more flexibility with demand forecasting. Zerto now offers both pricing models so companies can make IT investment decisions based on features, efficiency and agility, rather than cost alone.

Rob Strechay, Zerto’s SVP of Product, announced in his keynote that Zerto has completed the initial certification of its vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) for VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. He was joined on stage by Mike Adams, Sr. Director, Cloud Platform Product Marketing from VMware to share the details. Zerto’s certified VIB will be available for use with Zerto’s next major release, expected to be generally available in the second half of 2019. Zerto’s integration with VAIO will enable support for Secure Boot for VMware vSphere hosts as well as creation of Zerto replication policies within vSphere’s Storage Policy-Based Management.

Also in Rob’s keynote, Zerto previewed some of the new features and functionality that will be available with Zerto 7.5, which will be released in the second half of 2019. Key 7.5 new and enhanced capabilities will include deeper integration with long-term repositories including the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst API. The 7.5 release also focuses on scale and performance with Azure and AWS, including native integration with Azure scale sets. Zerto Analytics, used for management of data and applications protected with Zerto, will include features such as the upcoming Resource Planner to provide predictive sizing for Azure, AWS or on-premises environments.

Phil Goodwin, Research Director at IDC, previewed the results of this year’s “State of IT Resilience Readiness” survey during his keynote at ZertoCON. The survey included 500 respondents at companies with greater than 1000 employees and found that:

• Data protection modernisation is the top IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months
  • Specifically, 38% will deploy new backup/recovery solutions within the next year
• Cloud-based data protection solutions ranked as a second priority for respondents over the next 12 months
  • 19% already plan to deploy DRaaS within the next year
  • For 91.3% of respondents using public cloud for data protection, the use of public cloud has had no impact, or has reduced their data protection budget overall
• 82.3% of respondents indicate data protection and disaster recovery are an important part of their IT and/or digital transformation initiatives
• 93.4% of respondents are likely to pursue convergence of backup and DR tools as a way to eliminate redundancy

Source: IDC’s Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey, May 2019

Goodwin’s recommendations based on these results highlighted making sure that all applications are covered by a resilience plan and closing the data protection gap with reliable solutions can help to avoid unrecoverable data.