In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk from VMware Explore, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Caroline Seymour, VP of Product Marketing at Zerto, to introduce us to the company and how they are helping organizations with data replication and back-up. Seymour goes on to discuss its acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and the integration of its disaster recovery technology into HPE GreenLake.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Zerto was founded in 2009 where it first introduced hypervisor-based replication, which transformed how disaster recovery was done. Seymour discusses how the company brought their unique continuous data protection capability teamed with their replication journal to market and this has since been their main focus.
• Zerto focuses on replicating every check that changes continuously over periods of approximately five seconds, while other solutions only allow for periodic backup. Seymour discusses how the latter means you only get a low level of granular recovery and can lead to data loss and a longer recovery time.
• Zerto sponsored a survey with IDC that found that 79% of the 500 respondents had initiated a disaster recovery event in the past year and that 69% of those said it was due to a ransomware or malware event. Seymour explains that disaster recovery is becoming a priority for larger organizations.
• Seymour discusses how Zerto is enhancing their solutions and focusing on ransomware resilience to tackle this, adding in immutability. She takes us through some of the examples of how they are building in immutability and their large campaign for ransomware recovery. She explains about Zerto’s free edition that was launched earlier this year and how it is helping.
• Back in 2009, most companies were using on premises but now we are working in hybrid environments. Zerto added AWS as a DR target back in 2015 and since then, more companies are using cloud as a DR target. Seymour discusses how Zerto is helping organizations migrate to the cloud and have cloud as a DR target or backup target.
• In September last year, HPE acquired Zerto and one of the key factors of the acquisition was the integration of disaster recovery technology into the edge to cloud platform, HPE GreenLake. She tells us that it will be GA later this year and how it will help facilitate the edge to cloud and assist with orchestration of disaster recovery within the Data Services Cloud Console and platform.
• The data protection market is crowded with players like Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik, which have all come from the backup world. Seymour explains that Zerto comes from a different angle and she feels that that is the company’s strength. She believes that breaking into Kubernetes is the next evolution and that since Zerto has already brought their technology to the Kubernetes world, this puts them ahead of their competition.

Connect with Caroline Seymour (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Learn more about Zerto (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.