When recording a significant event where every moment matters, would you choose a video camera or a standard camera? A video camera, complete with expansive memory, makes frame-by-frame recording possible. In contrast, a standard camera only takes occasional photos and fails to capture the in-between moments that define an event in its entirety.
For business operations to be complemented by a comprehensive disaster recovery solution, competent IT leaders would prefer a solution that is akin to the video camera analogy. In essence, it is about capturing the entire spectrum of your business processes without unnecessary gaps and blind spots. However, many organizations still use snapshot-based legacy solutions, like the mentioned standard camera, that only capture one single image at a time, potentially missing ongoing events that are critical.
CDP vs Snapshots
Zerto Disaster Recovery (DR) is a leading DR solution due to its modernized approach that utilizes continuous data protection (CDP). CDP involves the capture of all changes as they occur and replicate these changes to backup storage. Remember, continuous recording is the only way that IT leaders can ensure every single data change is captured and recovered.
Yet, there was a time in which organizations accepted less in the form of snapshot protection. Snapshots are point-in-time images of data taken at periodic intervals, capturing data or the state of a system at a particular moment. The problem is that you need more than that one moment in time, and because time is money, you are leaving money on the table when settling for snapshots. Businesses cannot afford periodic recovery. It demands continuous recovery, which is what Zerto delivers.
Recovery Point Objectives
The goal of DR is to swiftly restore an organization's critical operations following an unforeseen incident, thereby limiting both data loss and downtime. This overarching aim is encapsulated in two key objectives:
- The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss an organization is willing to accept in the event of a disruption. As an example, an RPO of three hours means that in the event of a disaster, your organization can tolerate losing three hours’ worth of data.
- The recover time objective (RTO) is the duration in which business processes must be restored to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a disruptive event. For example, a company may determine they must recover and resume functions within two hours of a disaster.
Continuous data protection enhances RPO and RTO more effectively than snapshot-based methods by endlessly capturing and replicating data changes in real-time. With CDP, data loss is minimized to almost zero in the event of a disruption, as the most recent changes are already saved, significantly improving the RPO. Additionally, since the data is continuously updated and readily available, the time required to restore operations and data after a disaster is significantly reduced. Whichever way you look at it, CDP leads to faster recovery times and that includes all the pieces to your operations puzzle.
More About Zerto
A longtime partner of WEI, Zerto stands out with its true CDP solution to offer industry-leading RPO and RTO for companies that cannot tolerate business disruption. With Zerto DR, enterprises have the capability to recover anything at any point in time, within a granularity of seconds. What makes this possible is Zerto’s unique journaling technology. This approach not only ensures continuous data availability but also results in storage efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent, heavy snapshots. Key benefits of Zerto’s CDP solution include:
- No negative impact on production performance as Zerto’s CDP process operates seamlessly without affecting the production environment.
- Simplified operations without the need for complex scheduling thanks to Zerto’s continuous and automatic data protection approach.
- Minimized risk of data loss, with comprehensive and gap-free data recording.
- Reduced management overhead for storage arrays, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational complexities.
With Zerto, you gain a robust and efficient disaster recovery solution that addresses common challenges associated with traditional data protection methods.
Zerto Protects Your Applications, Too
Data alone does not do any good if you cannot act on it. It is your mission-critical applications that work with your data and create value from it, which means backing up the application environment is a must. This pertains to not just backing up files and folders, but also your virtual machine environment. This includes items such as the preconfigured boot-order of your VMs or the network and IP address configuration of their network environment. If you want to know just how resilient Zerto is when it comes to VM environments, it can handle VM counts in the five digits. That is what you call an encompassing solution.
Choosing Zerto and GreenLake Together
Choosing Zerto’s journaling technology for effective CDP stands out as a superior alternative to traditional snapshot methods. The decision to adopt this advanced approach is just the first step however, because the next critical choice is determining how best to integrate this technology into your operational environment. This is where the partnership between HPE GreenLake and Zerto becomes pivotal, offering Disaster Recovery CDP as a comprehensive service.
HPE GreenLake, renowned for delivering flexible OPEX solutions, now incorporates Zerto’s CDP, thereby streamlining the adoption process. This collaboration enables a shift away from traditional on-premises deployment or reliance on managed service providers (MSPs), offering a SaaS-based solution that fits into a diverse edge-to-cloud platform. With HPE GreenLake and Zerto, achieving RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes becomes a streamlined, efficient process, enhancing your DR capabilities within the HPE GreenLake ecosystem.
The integration with HPE GreenLake also means global accessibility to Disaster Recovery solutions via the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC). This unified console allows for the management of all mission-critical and business-critical assets in one place, offering a simplified, comprehensive view. By consolidating these functions, HPE GreenLake not only enhances operational efficiency but also optimizes expenditures. With the ease at which these as-a-service solutions can be consumed, any other way of acquiring DR may seem as archaic as, well, snapshotting your environment.
Talk to WEI to learn how HPE GreenLake and Zerto can collaboratively to ensure the relentless progression of your business activities.
