Continuous Backup and Recovery - Inside the Guide Addressing Traditional Backup and Exploring Continuous Backup and Planning Your Journey: ...

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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 Zerto
THE 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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                                                                                   ii
PUBLISHER’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

                                                             iv
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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
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            Discusses items of strategic interest to
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                                                        v
ICONS USED IN THIS BOOK

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                                                       vi
INTRODUCTION

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.

                                                                        8
CHAPTER 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.

                                                                      9
Since 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                                     10
In 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                                     11
environment 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                                         12
Recovery 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                                                                13
2 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                                             14
Snapshots
     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                                            15
Dispelling 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
                                                                                     17
Synchronous 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                                                 20
App.           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                                                 21
Zerto 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                                         22
Analytics
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Consideration: 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                                                        33
Consideration: 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                                                       34
Consideration: 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                                                     35
If 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                                     37
Relief 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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