Zerto 7 and the promise of the Elastic Journal

ivision is a Zerto 7 Early Adopter

ivision is excited to announce our participation in the Zerto 7 Early Adopter Program. As a part of this program, our team will get the chance to thoroughly test the new features of Zerto 7 and get a head start on identifying how these features can impact our clients. We also have a direct line of feedback to the Zerto team and we can assist in identifying defects and gaps in the release.

New Features Unify Disaster Recovery with Backup

Since its introduction at ZertoCon 2018, we’ve been excited to share Zerto 7 with our clients because of the convergence of disaster recovery and backup it offers. This convergence is enabled by several new features in Zerto 7. The two features which really stand out are the Elastic Journal and Intelligent Indexing and Search.

The Elastic Journal

Zerto is widely known for continuous journal-based data protection technology which offers low Recovery Point Objectives for virtual workloads. In the current release of Zerto 6.5, these journals are limited to 30 days of point-in-time checkpoints. While this is more than adequate for most recovery events, such as rolling back from a malware attack, longer-term retention requirements cannot be met with the current version of Zerto. Enter Zerto 7 and the elastic journal. This feature allows recovery options to 7 years and beyond for your critical data.  Long term retention is supported on a variety of secondary targets, including NFS, SMB, S3, Azure, and AWS.

Intelligent Indexing and Search

The other big feature that Zerto 7 offers is intelligent indexing and search capabilities. While the elastic journal retains both short- and long-term recovery checkpoints, this feature allows administrators to search for and recover the data they need whether it is located on-premise or in the cloud. Streamlining the data recovery process has obvious benefits for every organization.

Benefits of Recovery Option Consolidation

As you can see, Zerto 7 offers powerful new features that have traditionally only been available in backup products. The value of this consolidation is clear. If a single product can offer both short and long-term recovery options for workloads and data, a significant decrease in management requirements and cost is realized.

With support for incremental, synthetic, and full copies, Zerto 7 has the potential to truly transform how we manage data protection and recovery operations. As with any new release that offers a significant step forward, we expect that there will be some challenges along the way. We also don’t expect this first release of this feature set to be a “silver bullet” for all our clients. We are, however, focused on the potential value that this holds and will be continuing to provide our feedback to help Zerto deliver on the promise of this new release. We are looking forward to our continued testing of Zerto 7, which is expected to be released by mid-April and supported in our Fusion Recovery and Protect offerings by early summer.

Until then, check out our existing Disaster Recovery and Backup solutions. We’d love to architect a solution that helps your organization ensure business resilience.