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Continuous Backup
and Recovery
Lawrence Miller
Inside the Guide
• Addressing Traditional Backup and
Recovery Challenges
• Exploring Continuous Backup and
Recovery with the Zerto Platform
• Planning Your Journey:
From A to ZertoTHE GORILLA GUIDE TO... ®
Continuous Backup
and Recovery
Express Edition
By Lawrence Miller
Copyright © 2021 by ActualTech Media
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used
in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States
of America.
ACT UA LT E C H M E D I A
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www.actualtechmedia.com
iiPUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS E D ITO R I A L D I R E CTO R Keith Ward D I R E CTO R O F C O NT E NT D E L I V E RY Wendy Hernandez C R E AT I V E D I R E CTO R Olivia Thomson S E N I O R D I R E CTO R O F C O NT E NT Katie Mohr PA RT N E R A N D V P O F C O NT E NT James Green WITH SPECIAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ZERTO Andy Fernandez, Senior Product Marketing Manager Debra Gonzalez, Senior Content Marketing Manager Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Director, Technical Marketing Caroline Seymour, VP Product Marketing ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lawrence Miller, CISSP, has worked in information security and technology management for more than 25 years. He received his MBA in Supply Chain Management from Indiana University and has earned numerous technical and professional certifications throughout his career. He is currently working as an IT security solutions consultant. He’s previously worked as the vice president of IT for a major Verizon reseller, director of IT and e-commerce for a retail mer- chandising company, and IT operations manager for a top 100 U.S. law firm. He served as a Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy and is the author of more than 200 books on various topics including information security, cloud, unified commu- nications and collaboration, storage, 5G, and the Internet of Things.
ENTERING THE JUNGLE
Introduction: The Future of Data Protection 8
Chapter 1: Traditional Backup and Recovery Challenges 9
The Usual Suspects 9
The Not So Usual Suspects 12
Chapter 2: Exploring Continuous Backup and Recovery
with the Zerto Platform 17
Looking Under the Hood 18
Putting the Zerto Platform to Work for You 23
Chapter 3: Planning Your Journey: From A to Zerto 32
Deployment Checklist 32
Benefits and Business Outcomes 36
Relief Is Available 38
ivCALLOUTS USED IN THIS BOOK
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express them through a series of grunts
in the Bright Idea section.
Takes you into the deep, dark depths of a
particular topic.
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business leaders.
vICONS USED IN THIS BOOK
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viINTRODUCTION
The Future of Data
Protection
Welcome to The Gorilla Guide To…® Continuous Backup and Recovery,
Express Edition! Today’s highly competitive business environment is
largely defined by business agility and time to market. DevOps teams
release multiple updates daily through continuous integration and
continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. In an era when business
continuity has taken on renewed importance in the wake of the global
pandemic and relentless cybersecurity threats, including ransomware
attacks, doesn’t it seem a bit ironic—even perilous—that backups of
our critical systems, applications, and data are still largely done the
same way they’ve been done for the past three and a half decades? In
many cases, backups are only performed nightly or perhaps period-
ically with incremental snapshots occurring throughout the day. But
business leaders still seem somewhat unprepared for the risk of an
outage or data loss that could cost the business millions of dollars.
Whether you’re an IT director, network/cloud architect, security
professional, site reliability engineer, or systems administrator, this
guide will help you recognize the perils of traditional backup solutions
and introduce you to the future of data protection: continuous backup
and recovery. Let’s get started by taking a look at some traditional
backup and recovery challenges.
8CHAPTER 1
Traditional Backup and
Recovery Challenges
Data is among the most valuable assets for modern businesses and
data availability is foundational to data-driven organizations. Data
availability requirements are driving shorter service-level agreements
(SLAs), including Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery
Time Objectives (RTOs), with little to no tolerance for data loss or
downtime: Today’s organizations simply cannot afford to lose their
data and run 24/7. Backup and recovery technology has long been
an essential component of IT infrastructure. But as the IT landscape
and business requirements continue to rapidly evolve, traditional
backup and recovery solutions haven’t kept pace. They’re too com-
plex, require intensive resources, and are increasingly unable to
support IT modernization and digital transformation initiatives. In
this chapter, we’ll look at the challenges of traditional backup and re-
covery and introduce a better approach to data resilience: continuous
data protection.
The Usual Suspects
The basic process for backing up systems and data—along with the
technology used to perform those backups—hasn’t changed much
over the past 35 years: During off-peak hours you dutifully take a copy
of any data that has changed in your production environments since
the last backup window and store it in another, secondary location.
9Since you’ve probably been doing backups for as long as you can
remember, you are no doubt familiar with many of the challenges
associated with traditional backups. Let’s take a look at some of the
most common culprits.
Complex and Expensive Backup
Infrastructure
While the basic process hasn’t changed, there is certainly nothing
“basic” about the backup solutions that traditional backup vendors
offer. From backup networks, tape libraries, and tiered storage arrays
to multiple backup/recovery targets, different backup/recovery soft-
ware for different business use cases, and much more, backup and
recovery technology has become a perplexing—and costly—hodge-
podge of solutions designed to support an archaic process that doesn’t
meet modern business service-level agreements (SLAs). Moreover,
the very nature of traditional backup solutions puts a strain on pro-
duction environments, often leading to downtime, whether planned
or unplanned. This downtime is costly and means operations and
business, along with your critical data, is at risk.
Multiple Tools Needed to Get the Backups
You Require
Most traditional backup and recovery vendors don’t offer a “Swiss
army knife” solution to address different backup and recovery sce-
narios. Instead, different software and hardware tools are needed for
all of these scenarios:
• Disaster recovery
• System-level backup/restore
• File-level backup/restore for systems and data on-premises and
in cloud environments
• Long-term retention and archiving.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 10In addition to increasing cost and complexity, adding multiple tools—
which may not be interoperable, let alone integrated—may require
additional specialized skills to operate, potentially causing exponen-
tial increases in management overhead.
Long Backup and Recovery Windows
Backup systems often negatively impact production performance,
so backup jobs are limited to off-hours windows. As the number of
systems and size of data in an environment increases, so too does
the length of the backup window. Additionally, when you have an
application deployed across multiple virtual machines (VMs), the
various VMs that make up that application are being copied at differ-
ent checkpoints. To perform a consistent recovery, you then have to
find the common denominator (that is, checkpoint or point-in-time)
across all the VMs. This takes a lot of time and is a big reason for
lengthy RTOs, as well as data loss in daily backups.
Many traditional backup vendors have introduced distributed systems
to handle the amount of data being transferred, for example, by using
backup proxies and media agents to mitigate negative performance
impacts and to keep backup windows as short as possible. As the IT
Many businesses now operate more or less con-
tinuously. For example, businesses may extend normal
working hours, schedule rotating shifts, or use a “follow
the sun” strategy using resources across time zones and
continents. Maintenance windows—which are increasingly
necessary to update systems, install critical security
updates, and service hardware—also compete with backup
windows for off‑hours downtime. All of this means the
backup window is becoming shorter, even as the number
of systems and amount of data that needs to be backed up
is increasing.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 11environment gets larger, more of these components must be added
and configured—and often scaled up as well, typically requiring
costly, high-performance physical servers. Managing and sizing the
backup infrastructure becomes complex and requires dedicated spe-
cialists within the IT team. All of these components, complexities, and
hidden costs translate into a high total cost of ownership (TCO).
Lack of Confidence and Speed in
Recovery Processes
Complexity doesn’t necessarily breed confidence. Despite growing
investments in backup systems, many businesses have relatively low
confidence in their ability to recover their critical systems and data
accurately and quickly when they need it most. Frequently testing
your restore capabilities (failover, failback, and move operations) can
help build confidence, but this hasn’t changed the reality that most
organizations retain multiple copies of their backups for far longer
than the business requires, simply because they can’t be certain that
they have a single reliable backup from which to recover.
The Not So Usual Suspects
Perhaps less obvious than the common culprits, there are many other
traditional backup and recovery challenges lurking in the shadows
and vexing organizations today. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Many ransomware variants directly target enterprise
backups, which further erodes confidence in an organiza-
tion’s ability to recover critical systems and data.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 12Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the last point in
time to which systems, applications, and data can be
recovered. RPO indicates the amount of data that will be
lost, measured in elapsed time.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time that it takes to
recover systems, applications, and data (that is, how long
will it take to resume normal business operations after an
outage or interruption).
Substandard RPOs and RTOs
According to a recent study by IDC 1, the average cost of downtime was
found to be $10,000 per hour per application workload. Yet despite
this costly impact, RPOs and RTOs for critical business systems and
data are still defined in hours and days. When your business execu-
tives sign off on a 4-day RPO and RTO for a critical business system
with multiple application workloads, do they really understand that
they’re saying they’ll accept a loss of millions of dollars?
Backup Technology Hasn’t Kept Pace with
the Speed of Innovation
With so much innovation in technology everywhere we look—from
smartphones and smart cars to virtualization, cloud computing,
blockchain, and more—it’s a wonder that backup technology hasn’t
kept pace. The shift from tape- to disk-based backups was a huge
step forward, but it was more about the cost of disk becoming more
competitive than about technological innovation.
1
“Continuous Data Protection: A New Era of Backup and Recovery” October 2020 Source: IDC
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 132 hours !
43 minutes
9+ hours Corruption
5:43 PM
BACKUP Snapshot Snapshot Snapshot Snapshot Snapshot
Figure 1: RPO example comparing snapshots and daily backups
Incremental snapshots and array-based replication approaches to
backup are certainly an improvement over periodic daily backups
but have limitations of their own. For example, snapshots provide
better granularity and RPOs than daily backups, but simply provide
more frequent periodic backups, and can still result in several hours
of data loss. In Figure 1, for example, if data corruption or encryption
occurred at 5:43 p.m. and snapshots are taken every 3 hours, 2 hours
and 43 minutes of data loss would occur. Although this is certainly
better than having to restore from the previous daily backup and
losing 9+ hours of data, it doesn’t meet the requirements of today’s
fast-paced and rapidly changing businesses. This approach also
compounds the problem of inconsistent recovery for multi-VM ap-
plications, discussed earlier in this chapter, due to different snapshot
checkpoints for the various VMs that comprise the applications.
The Future Is Continuous Backup
and Recovery
It’s time to move from recovery to availability and from restore to
resume. The future is journal-based continuous backup and recovery.
Continuous data protection (CDP) is a protection mechanism
that allows organizations to continuously capture and track data
modifications using software-based replication, automatically
saving every version of the data that the user creates locally or at a
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 14Snapshots
12:30 PM 5:26 PM
Snapshot Outage
Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
5:26 PM
12:30 PM
Outage
CDP
5:25 PM
Checkpoint
Figure 2: Comparing snapshot and CDP recovery points
target repository. Writes are saved to a journal file along with the
corresponding file changes. By utilizing Change Block Tracking (CBT),
CDP enables users and administrators to restore data to any point in
time with remarkable granularity, as illustrated in Figure 2.
CDP offers RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes, drastically reducing
data loss and downtime with no burden to a production environment.
The benefits of a CDP approach to backup and recovery include:
• Eliminates the need for backup windows, snapshots, and
“babysitting” backup and recovery jobs
• Reduces storage costs and TCO
• Ensures multi-VM application consistency
• Enables granular recovery with journal-based backup
• Eliminates the need for backup and recovery point solutions
• Reduces IT complexity and dependence on skilled resources dedi-
cated to backup, freeing them to work on more strategic priorities
• Maximizes choice and flexibility with a simple, single cloud-
enabled scalable platform.
In Chapter 2, you’ll learn about Zerto’s approach to continuous back-
up and recovery.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 15Dispelling the Hype Around Hyperconverged Backup Hyperconverged backup is one of today’s biggest trends in backup technology, but does it live up to the hype? Hyperconverged backup consolidates compute resources, storage, and backup software into a purpose-built hardware appliance that enables scale-out architecture. Combining all of these resources and features into a single solution—and adding an easy-to-use interface to manage and schedule backups—solves many of the complexities involved in running more tra- ditional build-your-own backup solutions. However, the hyperconverged backup model doesn’t address the need for more granular recovery capabilities. It successfully reduces complex- ity in the backup architecture but uses the same technology to protect the data: periodically copying data from the production systems to a secondary storage target. To meet modern business requirements for data resilience, a paradigm shift is needed: from periodic backups to continu- ous backups. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 16
CHAPTER 2
Exploring Continuous
Backup and Recovery with
the Zerto Platform
The Zerto platform (Figure 3) converges backup, disaster recovery,
and data mobility across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud envi-
ronments. The platform is built on a foundation of CDP, with built-in
orchestration and automation that provides simplicity, enterprise
scale, and agile data protection to eliminate point solutions and save
time, resources, and costs. In this chapter, you’ll discover how the
Zerto platform delivers data resilience for modern businesses and
improves TCO.
The Zerto Platform
Cloud Data Management and Protection
Orchestration | Automation | Analytics
Disaster Continuous Long-Term Data Mobility Test & Security &
Recovery Backup Retention & Migrations Development Compliance
Continuous Data Protection
Figure 3: The Zerto platform architecture
17Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication There are two types of replication com- monly used in storage arrays: synchro- nous and asynchronous. Synchronous replication ensures all data is written to the source and target storage simultane- ously, waiting for acknowledgment from both arrays before completing the operation. Asynchronous replication uses storage snapshots to take a point-in-time copy of the data that has changed since the last snapshot and sends it to the recovery site. Looking Under the Hood Zerto delivers top-tier continuous data protection for all applications and workloads across backup and disaster recovery in a unified data protection platform. CDP is no longer relegated to only mission- critical virtual machines (VMs) and customers no longer have to micromanage legacy point solutions that don’t provide fast, granular recoveries. By making the move to continuous protection, customers can meet the demands of 24/7 business—no matter the protection challenge. And unlike other CDP platforms, the Zerto platform delivers built-in, out-of-the-box CDP with no additional integration required (that is, it’s not an add-on feature). Continuous Data Protection (CDP) CDP technology is made possible with Zerto’s near-synchronous replication using CBT, which provides the best of both synchronous and asynchronous replication approaches. Zerto sits at the hypervisor level and as a software-only solution, it works totally independent from the underlying hardware and infrastructure, including storage. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 18
Because it works across hypervisors, clouds, and platforms, you have the choice to use what’s right for your business and the Zerto platform easily integrates with your existing IT investments (no need to “rip and replace”). Zerto works seamlessly in the background without impacting production, allowing you to remain completely hands-off: No more fiddling with backup windows (eliminating “off hours” or “weekend” work) or tweaking schedules and no more managing snapshot chains or wrangling a mess of agents. You simply set it up and replicate. CDP is always-on protection. Journaling Part of what makes CDP with Zerto so powerful is its unique journal- ing capabilities. The journal tracks every single change made in your application or on your server, and then logs these as checkpoints ev- ery 5 seconds—even when you have hundreds or thousands of servers. Zerto’s CDP stores all replicated data in the journal. The journal stores all changes for a user-defined period, up to 30 days, and allows you to recover to any point in time within the journal, ensuring your RPO is always as low as possible. Every write to a protected VM is copied by Zerto. These writes are replicated locally and/or remotely and written to a journal managed by a virtual replication appliance (VRA). Each protected VM has its own journal. In addition to the writes, every few seconds all journals are updated with a checkpoint timestamp. Checkpoints are used to ensure write-order-fidelity and crash-consistency. Recovery can be performed to the last checkpoint or a user-selected checkpoint. This enables recovering files, VMs, applications, or entire sites, either to the previous crash-consistent point-in-time or, for example, when the VM data is encrypted by ran- somware, to a point-in-time before the attack. Whenever needed, you can simply rewind to a previous checkpoint and easily recover from that exact point in time. For example, if a ransomware attack hits at 10 a.m., it’s very easy to rollback one minute to 9:59 a.m., completely mitigating the infection. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 19
SECONDS YEARS
Journal with recovery points Long-term retention
seconds apart repository
Figure 4: Zerto journaling provides recovery points just seconds apart while
long-term retention enables recovery for years
Long-Term Retention Repositories
For retention beyond 30 days, Zerto supports long-term retention
(LTR) repositories of many shapes and sizes, whether on simple
Network File System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB) shares,
to a dedicated deduplicated appliance, or to cost-effective storage in
clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or any
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)-compatible repository. This LTR
feature extends protection of the journal beyond 30 days, allowing
you to retain your data for the long haul, whether that’s for 3, 5, or
7 years, or however long you need. Figure 4 illustrates the journaling
and long-term repository capabilities of the Zerto platform.
It’s worth noting that no matter whether you’re pulling
from short-term retention—maybe going back just a
couple of hours or recovering something that’s a couple of
years old—that recovery can be of an entire virtualized site,
an entire application, or just a few VMs or individual files.
Application Consistency
To solve the challenge of recovering complex enterprise applications,
you need to protect your VMs as a cohesive, logical entity. In this
way, you avoid the inconsistent recovery of multi-VM applications
where each VM is being restored to a different point in time. When
creating recovery points with Zerto, all the VMs will share the exact
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 20App. App. App. App. App.
Server Server Server Server Server
Web Web Web Web Web
Server Server Server Server Server
DB DB DB DB DB
Server Server Server Server Server
File File File File File
Server Server Server Server Server
2:48:00 AM 2:48:05 AM 2:48:10 AM 2:48:15 AM 2:48:20 AM
CDP
Figure 5: Multi-VM applications are restored as a single entity
same checkpoint so that when the application is recovered, every VM
that contains the application will spin up from that same cross-VM
recovery point. You could have a web server with a database on another
VM, plus a load balancer, and a logging server—all these servers can
surface as a consistent whole, in the boot order of your choice, without
any extra work on your part. This allows you to protect and recover
complex, multi-VM applications together as one unit to the exact same
point in time (see Figure 5). This saves a ton of resources when you’re
trying to reduce the amount of time dedicated to recovery.
Orchestration and Automation
Built-in orchestration and automation enable faster management of
workloads at scale with minimal touch, allowing IT resources to shift
their focus toward innovation and services that help your business
run more efficiently. The Zerto platform supports multi-cloud and
hybrid cloud strategies, including VMware, Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure,
IBM Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and hundreds of cloud
service providers. All recovery settings are configured up-front, such
as boot order and re-IP failover, well before any disaster or other
event occurs—greatly simplifying the recovery process. In fact, it’s
so simple, any member of your IT team could perform it in just three
clicks. You can also configure different settings for test failovers,
ensuring that test failovers/moves can be run at any time with zero
impact on production or protection.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 21Zerto Pricing and Licensing
Zerto’s flexible licensing enables you to
easily mix and match licenses based on
the role of a customer’s VMs and appli-
cation tiers, either combining for disaster
recovery and backup (ideally suited for
mission-critical tiers), or backup only (for
lower-tier applications where cost is the priority). Either way, customers
get all the backup and disaster recovery management, administration,
and orchestration that’s ideal with one platform.
Zerto pricing is simple with three license types:
• Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE): Zerto ECE unlocks the full power of
CDP for disaster recovery, backup, and long-term retention across
on-premises and public cloud. ECE delivers premium disaster re-
covery orchestration and recovery.
• Zerto Data Protection (ZDP): ZDP delivers local continuous backup
and long-term retention capabilities for on-premises and public
cloud, priced for backup.
• Zerto Migration: Zerto Migration is for customers looking to
seamlessly migrate applications and workloads to the cloud or
on-premises, delivering workload mobility for cloud migration,
infrastructure modernization, and data center refreshes.
Learn more about Zerto’s flexible licensing options online.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 22Analytics Zerto Analytics, included in the Zerto platform, provides one single, comprehensive view of your entire multi-site, multi-cloud environ- ment. Built-in intelligent dashboards and reports provide real-time and historical analysis of the health and protection status of your applications and data. Metrics such as average RPO, network per- formance, and storage consumption help you spot trends, identify anomalies, and troubleshoot issues. The powerful resource planning capability monitors and analyzes compute, storage, and network resources across on-premises environments and public, private, and hybrid clouds to give you confidence in your resource requirement needs. “What-if” scenario modeling delivers accurate planning of future storage, compute, and network resources. Zerto Analytics helps you make better-informed decisions and with intelligent, predictive infrastructure planning you can achieve an efficient, IT-resilient mode of operation. Putting the Zerto Platform to Work for You Now that you understand how the Zerto platform delivers data re- silience by leveraging CDP technology and orchestration, let’s take a look at several common recovery scenarios and use cases, as well as some real-world customer success stories. Ransomware Attacks The frequency and sophistication of ransomware attacks continue to increase at an alarming pace. According to the November 2020 McAfee Labs Threat Report, there were approximately 2.5 million new ransomware attacks in the first half of 2020 alone. Secure and reliable backups remain an organization’s best option for both recovering CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 23
Customer Success Story: TenCate Recovers from Ransomware with Zerto— Before and After TenCate, a multinational textiles company based in the Netherlands, experienced two ransomware attacks—each with very different outcomes. In the first attack, which occurred prior to implementing Zerto, all of the file servers in one of TenCate’s manufacturing facilities was hit with CryptoLocker. The company’s only recovery method was to restore to backup disks using a lengthy, multi-step data restore process. As a result, TenCate experienced 12 hours of data loss and spent weeks rebuilding file directories and attempting to recover applications. After implementing Zerto, directories on a file server in another TenCate manufacturing facility were hit by a more advanced form of CryptoLocker. However, with Zerto the outcome was markedly different—TenCate ex- perienced only 10 seconds of data loss and was able to fully recover in less than 10 minutes. their data and avoiding hefty ransoms. Zerto’s granular recovery ex- perience enables rapid recovery from cyberattacks, including ransom- ware, and has visibility and scanning capabilities so you can remain proactive and alert. File Deletion/Database Corruptions Accidental file deletions and database corruptions are the “oops” of data centers and cause real headaches for IT teams. A problem caused in a matter of seconds—an overzealous finger on the delete button CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 24
Customer Success Story: University of Colorado Boulder HDS Protects Critical SQL and POS Systems with Zerto The Housing & Dining Services (HDS) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is an innovative and transformative organization that creates dynamic residential living and learning com- munities using socially just and sustainable practices. HDS was unable to deliver the level of service required with its existing storage resource management (SRM) and array-based replication solution. They selected Zerto to protect their critical SQL database and point-of-sale (POS) systems. Zerto was installed in less than an hour and delivered the aggressive SLAs that the university required, including RPOs reduced from 30 minutes to 10 seconds and RTO from 5 hours to less than 5 minutes for 10 servers. or a back-end database error—can take hours or days to recover. Zerto enables IT teams to rapidly recover from these heart-stopping moments to get businesses, and business users’ heart rates, back to normal quickly. Converging Backup and Disaster Recovery Zerto delivers industry-leading recovery time for all recovery scenarios—including natural disasters, hardware failures, outages, and more—unlocking the fastest RPOs and RTOs with CDP to easily recover entire sites within seconds in any infrastructure. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 25
Customer Success Story: Leading Chemical Corporation Finds Chemistry Between Azure and Zerto A global specialty chemicals and perfor- mance materials company determined that moving some disaster recovery operations to the cloud would be more efficient than using its second physical data center. The organiza- tion was already working with Microsoft Office 365 and chose Azure for the cloud as a natural fit. The company studied the market and chose the Zerto platform to replicate its on-premises production data to the Azure cloud. Now the organization’s IT team uses Zerto to protect 150 VMs with appli- cations that include SQL, standalone apps, Oracle, JD Edwards, and more. The team also uses Zerto to conduct an annual disaster recovery test to make sure everything works in Azure in the case of a disruption. Since implementing Zerto, the company has enjoyed its ease of use, com- bined orchestration, and failover features. It has improved efficiencies on several fronts: It reduced the disaster recovery testing process from days down to hours, and by replicating data to the cloud rather than a coloca- tion site, the company has saved an estimated $1 million in costs over a five-year period. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 26
Customer Success Story: Large Telecommunications Company Reduces Testing from Hours to 15 Minutes Giving the Flexibility to Test Whenever Needed A leading telecommunications company has hundreds of test copies of their data which are needed in order to test various updates and features in its infrastructure but can overload production. The clone/unwind pro- cess is cumbersome and resource intensive, slows down innovation, and typically takes 24 to 36 hours using snapshots. With Zerto, the company is able to quickly spin up copies in its recovery site, complete testing, and then delete the copies. Zerto has reduced test- ing from hours to 15 minutes, giving the telecom company the flexibility to test whenever needed. In addition, Zerto is used to migrate and minimize outages between ap- plications as they move from one lab to another. The telecom company’s VMs can be from 2TB to 12TB in size. Before Zerto, if the company needed to restore one of these VMs, it took several days and there may have been only one weekly backup so it was potentially losing six days of data. With Zerto, the company’s maximum data loss is down to five minutes. Using Protection Data for Test/Dev With Zerto, DevOps, Infrastructure and Operations (I&O), and security teams can easily spin up isolated sandbox environments that only dif- fer from their production counterparts by minutes to leverage for test and development, patch management, upgrade validation, or security scans—all without slowing down production. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 27
Customer Success Story: Grey County Government Reimagines Recovery and Backup with Microsoft Azure and Zerto Grey County serves more than 96,000 residents in Ontario, Canada, with a wide range of critical municipal services. It needed to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable data backup and fast recovery capabilities. The county opted for a hybrid architecture, augmenting its on-premises servers with Microsoft Azure. It also rolled out Zerto’s disaster recovery service for continuous data protection and the ability to work seamlessly with Azure. The Grey County IT team reimagined its backup and recovery processes, streamlining the previous maintenance requirement from a full-time team of 13 to just a single person. While the team gets the reporting it needs, whether to satisfy compliance or check on performance in real time, the county optimizes its budget—adding up to peace of mind for everyone. Hardware Failure and Outages It’s inevitable: If it has moving parts, it will eventually fail. Despite designing and building IT infrastructure with robust and redundant, high-quality components, hardware failures and outages still happen. To protect your business from unplanned downtime due to hardware failures and outages, Zerto delivers continuous backup and recovery that enables RPOs measured in seconds and RTOs in minutes. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 28
Customer Success Story: Global Online Education Provider Embraces the Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure and Zerto A global provider of online education, training, and certification provides contin- uous learning facilities to professionals working in a range of industries around the world. This customer’s backup modernization journey began during a storage refresh and disaster recovery project. The company had been rapidly making acquisitions resulting in multiple consolidations of applications, platforms, and infrastructures. Because of this accelerated growth, its existing data centers were nearing full capacity and the company needed a solution. It needed to complete the migrations between disparate infrastructures, minimize the business impact of disasters and downtime, and enable a hybrid cloud strategy to increase capacity and reduce costs. After installing Zerto in its vSphere environment and linking it to the company’s Azure account in just 30 minutes, the customer experienced the benefits immediately. With no downtime and no changes required to its production VMs, the company achieved 20-second RPOs and 5-minute RTOs. The 3-year total TCO for the Azure and Zerto solution is estimated at $773,000—representing a savings of more than $2 million compared with its legacy backup infrastructure. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 29
Customer Success Story: Zerto Delivers Healthy Disaster Recovery Strategy for Canton-Potsdam Hospital Canton-Potsdam Hospital (CPH) is a certified 94-bed not-for-profit commu- nity healthcare facility that provides emergency medicine, acute care, hospitalist medicine, critical care, and outpatient health services in var- ious locations across New York. With patient care as its biggest priority, downtime isn’t acceptable. CPH needed a disaster recovery strategy that would minimize downtime and ensure it met all healthcare compliance and regulatory requirements. CPH needed to implement a disaster recovery solution quickly due to a potential storage failure. It also needed assurance that MEDITECH, its electronic health records (EHR) system, would be protected and easily recoverable. Finally, the facility needed the ability to test on-demand to meet compliance requirements. Instead of the months it would have taken to replace its storage array, the facility implemented Zerto in just hours. Zerto reduced its RPOs by over 99% and RTOs by 75%, allowing for on-demand testing in 15 minutes to meet compliance requirements. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 30
Backup Modernization While organizations are often on the leading edge when it comes to modernizing their production IT infrastructure, backup systems and infrastructure often lag. As a result, many organizations are left struggling with the challenges of traditional backup technologies and processes that are decades old (as discussed in Chapter 1). Even if these organizations have upgraded their backup infrastructure to a shiny new box in recent years, the technology it’s built upon is still likely decades old. The Zerto platform provides an opportunity for organizations to modernize their backup infrastructure, ensuring their backup systems and infrastructure, disaster recovery, and data resilience capabilities keep pace with their digital transformation initiatives. Compliance Recovery Needs Businesses in every industry must comply with increasingly complex regulatory mandates that often require data to be stored for months and years. In addition to meeting storage mandates, that data must be quickly recovered (for example, when a data subject requests a copy of their personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR]), and completely erased (for example, when a data subject exercises their “right to be forgotten” under GDPR). With Zerto, data is copied from the journal into cost-effective storage on-premises or in the public cloud and can be identified and restored (or deleted) at a granular level in minutes to support GDPR and other regulatory requirements. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 31
CHAPTER 3
Planning Your Journey:
From A to Zerto
In this chapter, we’ll help you get started as you plan your journey to
continuous backup and recovery with Zerto. We’ve included a deploy-
ment checklist to help you plan your steps and avoid common pitfalls.
You’ll also learn about the benefits of the Zerto platform to help you
make your business case.
Deployment Checklist
Continuous availability, moving to the cloud, migrating applications
and data—these are complex challenges that many businesses will
struggle to overcome. The checklist on the following page provides
an organized way for you to take an objective look at your backup and
data protection strategy and see where there are gaps. Review this
checklist with your technical and management teams to ensure that
you can protect data during planned disruptive events, effectively
react to unplanned events, and accelerate data-oriented business
initiatives.
32Consideration: Continuous Availability
Sub-
Description
Consideration
In organizations undergoing or that have undergone a digital
transformation, downtime and loss of data are simply
unacceptable. Moreover, even performance degradation is a
Outages and form of outage.
Disruptions Can you provide an RTO that’s measured in minutes instead of
hours, if required?
Do you have push-button failover capability so that you can
restore service while you fix a problem?
The question is not whether ransomware will infect your
organization, but when. Are you prepared?
Do you have a short (minutes or seconds) RPO so that your
Ransomware workforce won’t lose all the work they’ve done since yester-
Recovery day?
Can you recover an unaffected copy of only the infected sub-
set of your data, as opposed to recovering an entire storage
volume?
The scope is changing, not only for what must be protected but
also for how long it should be protected.
Be more explicit to the 3-2-1 rule for your backups.
Backup Best Is it simple for you to test failovers and restores and confirm
Practices the integrity of your data?
Can you fine tune your retention policies from seconds to
years and guarantee compliance with regulations that apply to
your industry?
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 33Consideration: Workload Mobility
Sub-
Description
Consideration
Technology is always changing, and performing upgrades and
refreshes is a never-ending chore. But it can become much less
daunting with the proper tools in place.
Infrastructure Can you move virtual machines – seamlessly and without
Modernization interruption of service – from old hardware to new?
From one infrastructure architecture to another?
From one hypervisor type to another?
From on-premises to the cloud?
As businesses change and grow, the IT infrastructure needs to
change with it. If your company were to change significantly due
to a merger or acquisition, or if your business makes a significant
pivot that requires a substantially different infrastructure, are
you prepared to make the change?
Can you easily test your migration/consolidation to confirm
functionality by performing failover and failback operations
Migrations and without disruption?
Consolidations Do you have the flexibility to choose which hypervisor, which
cloud, and which management tools you use because you
have sufficient workload mobility to relocate anywhere?
As you swing over application stacks to a new home, will
the boot dependencies be automatically considered, and will
the network interfaces have correct new IP addressing, or
will the reconfiguration at the destination be a highly man-
ual effort?
Since agility and speed are everything to modern business,
the ability to produce high quality code (as free of defects as
possible) and to deploy to production frequently is paramount to
success into the future.
Can your development team work with a fresh copy of masked
Testing and production data at any time they want?
DevOps
Is automated testing and user testing streamlined so that
defects are caught before they impact production?
Is your development team able to push frequent but small
updates to production, decreasing the mean time to resolution
for failed deployments?
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 34Consideration: Multi-Cloud Agility
Sub-
Description
Consideration
It’s hard to move applications from a traditional, on-premises
environment into a public cloud. But being able to do so can
unlock huge opportunities for your business.
Do you have the capability to migrate applications with a high
Cloud rate of change to the cloud without major downtime?
Integration
Are you confident in your ability to deconstruct and move
applications with complex interdependencies without break-
ing them?
Can you move your backup to cost effective cloud storage?
Leveraging multiple clouds at once sounds great. But in practice,
managing multi-cloud environments can be troublesome due to
issues like VM format differences.
If you so choose, do you have the ability to replicate between
Hybrid and
multiple clouds without having to refactor applications and
Multi-Cloud
manually convert and re-IP virtual machines?
Are you locked into a particular cloud provider or are you free
to leave whenever you please (because you have the tools to
do so easily)?
One of the biggest downsides to a multi-cloud infrastructure
model is that it introduces complexity. It takes a special umbrella
management tool to take a look at all of your clouds and make
sense out of what you’re doing globally.
Can you monitor across clouds to make sense of what’s going
Analytics on across your organization, rather than just within a single
Across Clouds cloud provider?
Can you provide reporting across clouds to ensure you’re
meeting compliance and SLA metrics universally?
Can you plan for your backup cloud resource infrastructure
requirements?
Consideration: Operational Efficiency
Sub-
Description
Consideration
It’s imperative that a fast-paced IT organization has a streamlined
toolset. Using a different point solution for every problem makes
Tooling administration cumbersome and decreases visibility.
Do you have a single platform for backup, replication, automa-
tion, and migration?
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 35If there are boxes that you were unable to check, perhaps it’s time
to reevaluate your data protection strategy. Read Zerto’s “Future
of Backup: From Periodic to Continuous” white paper to learn more
about how to prepare for planned and unplanned disruptions, as well
as guidance on hybrid and multi-cloud IT.
Benefits and Business Outcomes
Zerto enables backup, disaster recovery, and workload mobility
on-premises, as well as to, from, and between clouds, for true
infrastructure flexibility and data resilience. The benefits of
protecting your business with the Zerto platform include:
• Always-on replication: Zerto utilizes change-block tracking to
constantly replicate data as it is written to storage. Because con-
tinuous data protection (CDP) is always on, it offers RPOs of sec-
onds and RTOs of minutes compared to lengthy backup recovery
times in traditional backup solutions.
• No performance impact: With Zerto, the journal is only used until
you commit to the point in time selected, without the perfor-
mance impact of many snapshots. By comparison, storing mul-
tiple snapshots on replica VMs incurs a significant performance
penalty on production environments when attempting to power
on replica VMs.
• Journal-based any point-in-time recovery: Journal-based
recovery keeps a constant log of all the changes users make to
applications and data. Because the changes are continuously
written to the datastore, Zerto delivers any point-in-time
recoverability to within a specified time frame with an easy,
intuitive way of quickly selecting a checkpoint and rolling
back in time.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 36• Scale-out architecture: The journal can be placed on any data-
store with maximum size limits and warnings—preventing the
datastore from filling, which would otherwise break replication.
By comparison, using snapshots on replicated VMs gives no way
of controlling the total space used for snapshots, making them
not scalable in terms of SLAs and efficiency.
• Storage savings: Zerto uses no extra space in the source storage
because no snapshots are created. Only 7% to 10% of the target
storage is used, which frees up significant amounts of space and
results in dramatic savings. By comparison, snapshot technol-
ogies require significant overhead on the storage arrays, often
requiring 20% to 30% at both the source and target.
• Ransomware recovery down to seconds: Zerto delivers a contin-
uous stream of recovery checkpoints available to use for recovery.
In the event of ransomware or other malicious attacks, data can
be recovered to just seconds before the corruption took place,
minimizing impact on the business and the brand.
• Lower TCO and resource savings: The Zerto platform’s soft-
ware-only, scale-out architecture allows you to easily install,
manage, and scale regardless of your infrastructure with a simple
license model that enables you to only pay-for-what-you-need
and grow with your business.
• IT infrastructure modernization and reduced investments: The
Zerto platform is built on a foundation of continuous data protec-
tion and converges backup, disaster recovery, and data mobility
across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. It
is a complete, yet simple cloud data management and protection
solution, that integrates easily with existing IT infrastructure
investments while eliminating the need for costly point solutions
and specialized IT resource skills.
CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 37Relief Is Available Thank you for reading The Gorilla Guide To…® Continuous Backup and Recovery, Express Edition. Although you’ve no doubt experienced headaches with your current backup solution, you now know there is relief available: continuous backup and recovery with Zerto. To learn more about the Zerto platform or schedule an interactive demo today to see Zerto in action. CONTINUOUS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 38
ABOUT ZERTO
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation through a single,
scalable platform for cloud data management and protection. Built for
enterprise scale, Zerto’s simple, software-only platform uses contin-
uous data protection to converge backup, disaster recovery, and data
mobility and eliminates the risks and complexity of modernization
and cloud adoption. Zerto enables an always-on customer experience
by simplifying the protection, recovery, and mobility of applications
and data across private, public, and hybrid clouds. Zerto is trusted by
over 9,500 customers globally and is powering offerings for Microsoft
Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and more than
450 managed service providers.
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