Zerto Continuous Data Protection Aims Directly at Veeam, Commvault

Want all of the value of continuous data protection but at a price for backup from Zerto? Zerto Data Protection (ZDP), announced Thursday, aims to do just that, according to the vendor.

Dissing competitors Veaam, Commvault and others, Andy Fernandez, product marketing manager at Zerto, says Zerto Data Protection puts the company on the same playing field.

Zerto’s Andy Fernandez

“To me, what’s most important about ZDP is that it’s priced for backup,” he said. “So, when [customers] evaluate Zerto for their entire environment, they’re seeing ZDP as competitive and affordable as Veaam, Commvault, Veritas, Rubrik and more.”

Zerto Data Protection removes the barrier of paying for backup and disaster recovery, when customers just need backup for important – but not mission-critical – applications and virtual workloads. The new offer-packaging changes make the product cost effective and competitive, Zerto said. Those requirements are key for Zerto to displace its existing backup and disaster recovery solution.

More on Zerto Data Protection

Zerto Data Protection delivers 50% TCO savings by reducing hardware needs, enabling recovery of data without downtime or data loss. Pricing targets backup use cases.

The solution delivers continuous backup and long-term retention.

• Local continuous backup for day-to-day backup restores. Local journaling technology allows users to recover without the data loss, downtime or production impact that are inherent to traditional backup solutions, ensuring business continuity and availability.
• Long-term retention on premises or in the public cloud. This is required for compliance and regulatory demands where data need to be stored for months and years. ZDP incrementally copies from the journal into cost-effective storage on premises or in the public cloud with Microsoft Azure and AWS, for cost optimization and the elimination of problematic backup windows.

Zerto Enterprise Cloud Edition is still available for higher-level, mission-critical applications. For businesses that need both, licenses can be run in parallel.

Fernandez wants to be clear about the new Zerto Data Protection.

“It’s not a lesser edition. ZDP isn’t an essentials or basic edition. It’s a premium backup product,” he said.

Zerto 8.5

Also introduced Thursday is the Zerto 8.5 platform. There’s plenty that’s new in Zerto 8.5; for starters, backup to Microsoft Azure and AWS. Additional features include instant file and folder restore, backup administrator role, long-term retention compression and audit trail logging.

The key highlight of the upgrade is backup to Azure and AWS as a long-term retention repository.

“Whether you have a purpose-built backup appliance, such as HPE StoreOnce, or anything you paid for and want to use as cheap secondary storage or you want to move to the cloud to get the reliability of the pay-as-you-go model for data you simply have to store for years, we’ve added that capability,” said Fernandez.

Here what’s in Zerto 8.5:

• Backup directly to Microsoft Azure and AWS.
• Instant file and folder restore to production.
• VMware on public cloud disaster recovery and data protection for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine and the Oracle VMware Solution.
• Platform automation and life cycle management.
• Zerto Data Protection offering enabling the use of Zerto for lower tier application backup.
• Zerto PowerShell Cmdlets Module.

“We also have the intention in the next release or sometime soon to include Google Cloud as an additional long-term repository,” said Fernandez.

Partner Proposition

Zerto partners will be able to revisit customers and help displace backup.

For no cost, Fernandez says Zerto will give service providers local backup and long-term retention, which is essentially, backup and data protection.

“So partners can see the value in end-user environments, increase profitability and consolidate to one solution for all mission-critical applications. That way, you don’t have to include the cost of an additional legacy backup. This means you don’t have to continue buying more hardware to support more customers that you’re already protecting with Zerto,” he said.