Jayme Williams is senior systems engineer for the Americas division of Dutch $1.2 billion multinational specialty fabric maker TenCate (KTC.AS). Based in Atlanta, Williams was responsible for moving the IT operations of his division from an older data center to a new high-tech data center. This process, known as replication, involves moving the data, software platforms, and workloads from one location to another. The solutions Williams looked at involved a shutdown of operations for several days to a week, and often included months of advance planning with expensive consultants. It's a common problem. Despite all the talk in the tech world about mobility of data, it's common to ship hard drives around using a parcel shipper, because it simply takes too much time and money to ship terabytes of data over public or private networks.
Then Williams was introduced to Zerto. "An advisor recommended it," Williams recalls. "At first I didn't comprehend what they were talking about. Then we did a webex with Zerto. It took about an hour for them to walk us through how it worked. Then we did an install. It takes about 15 minutes to install and then the app is ready to rock and roll. It's as easy as installing Office."
During the webex, the Zerto folks ran a test, involving the replication of a TenCate application running on VMware virtual machines in the primary location. First they copied the application to a backup location. Then, they "failed" the primary location (forced it to go down) and the secondary location automatically stepped in and began operating in its place. It took a matter of seconds. "My boss watched, and he turned to me and said two words: `order it.'" Since then Williams has deployed Zerto in all the data centers used by the various divisions of his business as a disaster recovery (DR) solution, and used it to transfer an ERP application with 300 gigabytes of data from a California data center to Atlanta. "That took us 15 minutes. The other option we looked at, they quoted three to five days."
In the world of disaster recovery and business continuity, it's not uncommon to spend months planning the architecture of the solution, and paying expensive consultants for hours of work, for plans, documentation, and tests. Willaims comments on Zerto with a touch of amazement: "There was no professional services engagement, and we'd already tested it once in that webex, for free. We just deployed it."
"Up till Zerto, people have been taking solutions built for a physical environment and using duct tape and shoehorns to make them work in a virtual environment," explains Zerto Global Product Marketing Director Jennifer Gill. "With Zerto, we started with a solution built for the hypervisor and the cloud, so now we have real mobility."
Zerto's unique approach to disaster recovery, backup, and replication has not only turned it into a fast-growing startup; it's also delivering one of the first important applications of the true hybrid cloud. It's an application that is likely to grab the attention of many more large enterprises, especially now that Zerto has added compatibility with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AMZN). Based in Israel and Boston, Zerto was founded by Ziv Kedem, an Israeli tech entrepreneur who sold his previous backup company Kashya to storage giant EMC (NYSE:EMC) in 2006 for $150 million.
Other disaster recovery solutions have relied largely on technology that functioned by taking regular "snapshots" of the IT infrastructure in the primary data center and saving them to disk storage at the secondary data center. The rise of virtualization has made this approach less effective, because with virtualized servers and virtualized applications, workloads can move unpredictably between physical servers and it can be hard to transfer workloads to a secondary data center based on snapshots that may be out of date. Zerto solves the problem by not using snapshots at all. Instead it is constantly replicating direct from primary site virtual machines to secondary site virtual machines. "Zerto is just in the hypervisor, it doesn't care about the storage, so if you change your storage, Zerto doesn't care, that hypervisor is still protected," Gill explains.
Williams witnessed the problems with traditional disaster recovery solutions when shopping for TenCate's solution. Before buying Zerto, he looked at the DR solution from VMware (VMW), which is actually a set of software solutions often referred to as Site Recovery Manager or SRM. "We looked at SRM but it was expensive and took away a lot of the benefits of having virtualization in the first place because it restricts your ability to move data around and still know where it is," Williams says.
At this year's VMworld conference, there was a lot of talk about "hybrid cloud." A true hybrid cloud is a situation in which one application runs simultaneously in both a public cloud and an enterprise's on-premise data center. Most applications run best in one or the other, but not both. (The premise of companies marketing "hybrid cloud" like VMware and Hewlett Packard that hybrid cloud is the future is based on the expectation that hybrid applications will come, we just don't yet know what they will be.) Disaster recovery is one application that makes complete sense in a hybrid architecture, for the simple reason that the secondary backup site is likely only to be used a very few times each year, and then for only a short period of time. So putting that secondary site in the public cloud brings enormous economies—why have a complete secondary site sitting idle 364 days of the year when you can put it in the public cloud and only pay for the time and resources you actually use?
Zerto is already enabling the hybrid cloud for cloud providers. Bluelock is a cloud service provider whose main business is offering disaster recovery as a service. Bluelock Chief Technology Officer Pat O'Day explains: "Our customers are typically companies who have discovered they have a piece of technology that is mission-critical to their business. It cannot go down. They have one data center but no second data center. We become their second data center." Bluelock has two data centers, one at headquarters in Indianapolis and another in Las Vegas. Its DR technology is Zerto. "You need something that moves the data as soon as it's created. Zerto's job is to copy data in real time. It literally intercepts the data in RAM (memory) and sends it over. If there is a catastrophic failure, Zerto can usually restore operations in less than a minute, if not less than 30 seconds."
O'Day says Bluelock's business is growing strongly. "Our customers are hospitals, pharmaceuticals, banks, manufacturers, and universities. Our pipeline is extremely healthy with a lot of DR projects." He adds that for some customers, the DR project leads to other public cloud projects, when they see that their applications may run faster on Bluelock's infrastructure.
In May, Zerto announced v4 of its software, which includes compatibility with Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization and Amazon Web Services. This is a major extension of Zerto's capabilities, which should benefit Microsoft Azure, AWS, and other public cloud providers too. TenCate's Williams was eager to try it out, since TenCate's CIO is in favor of shifting work to AWS. "Zerto asked if I wanted to participate in the proof of concept and I said `absolutely'! We are now replicating 8 terabytes into an AWS virtual private cloud."
Zerto won't have the virtualization-friendly DR market all to itself for much longer. "We haven't got much pushback on price because Zerto is first to market and there's been nobody to compare them to," says O'Day. "That should change towards the end of this year when competitors will release new products." Likely competitors include startup Veeam and Microsoft.
Last month, Zerto announced that its revenue in the first half of 2015 was up 110% on the year-earlier level. Zerto won't disclose actual figures but revenue seems likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year. Says Gill: "We have more than 1,000 customers and we are going after the Tier 1s," by which she means large potential cloud providers like AWS. Zerto already has a 200-strong network of cloud service providers offering its solution. CEO Kedem has said that their goal is an IPO in 2016 or 2017. Bluelock's O'Day says that after three years of working with the Zerto solution, he couldn't be happier with it.
"They are absolutely who they say they are, and their product does exactly what they say it does. There is little or no hype with Zerto. And that's very refreshing."
