Backup and DR — Partner Solutions — Google Cloud Platform — Part 1

Backup and disaster recovery are vital components in your business continuity plan & Google Cloud is committed to providing suitable solutions that meet your business needs through partner and first-party solutions.

A broad ecosystem of ISV and system integration (SI) partners provide backup and disaster recovery offerings on, and/or integrated with, Google Cloud. This provides Google Cloud customers with freedom of choice and facilitates frictionless use of preferred third-party products and services.

In this blog series, I would cover about third party products and services(Zerto, Veeam, VMWare SRM) that could be leveraged for backup and disaster recovery use cases on Google cloud platform. This blog in particular would cover about Zerto, One Solution for Cloud Data Management and Protection.

What is Zerto?

Zerto provides disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized and cloud environments. Their flagship product, Zerto Virtual Replication, is a hypervisor-based replication and disaster recovery solution for virtualized infrastructure and applications. It allows organizations to replicate and recover their data and applications in the event of a disaster or data loss.

Primary Components of the Zerto

1. Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM)

The Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) is a Windows service, running on a dedicated Windows VM, that manages everything needed for the replication between the protection and recovery sites, except for the actual replication of data. The ZVM interacts with the hypervisor management user interface, such as vCenter Server or Microsoft SCVMM, to get the inventory of VMs, disks, networks, hosts, etc. It also monitors changes in the hypervisor environment and responds accordingly. For example, a VMware vMotion operation or Microsoft Live Migration of a protected VM from one host to another is seen by the ZVM, and the Zerto user interface is automatically updated accordingly.

2. Virtual Replication Appliance (VRA)

A VRA is a virtual purpose-built Linux appliance installed on each hypervisor host where VMs are to be protected from or to, delivering a true scale-out architecture that grows and shrinks with your environment. The VRA manages the replication of data to and from protected VMs to its local and/or remote target where it stores the data in the journal. This same scale-out appliance handles copying data from the journal to a long-term retention repository.

3. Virtual Protection Group (VPG)

Zerto protection, mobility, and backup are all configured through the creation of virtual protection groups (VPGs). To understand the features of VPGs fully, it is worth covering the traditional approach to protection, where each VM workload is protected individually at different points in time. Today, there are very few scenarios where an application is run on a single VM. Instead, most applications have multiple VM dependencies. Using the traditional method of protecting VMs individually results in significant challenges to recovering your complete application quickly. You might be able to recover individual VMs quickly, but they will all be recovered to different points in time, and it becomes challenging to get them all consistent, so the application is in a usable state. This ends up extending your recovery time objective (RTO). Zerto’s unique VPGs differ by allowing you to protect one or more VMs together in a consistent fashion, ensuring every point in time that is inserted into the Zerto journal is from the same point in time for all VMs within the VPG. This allows consistent recovery of an entire application, and all its VM dependencies, to a consistent point in time.

4. Journal

In addition to VPGs, 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 virtual machine is copied by Zerto. These writes are replicated locally and/or remotely and written to a journal managed by a VRA. Each protected virtual machine has its own journal. In addition to the writes, every few seconds all journals within the VPG are updated with a checkpoint time stamp. 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 virtual machine is attacked by a virus or ransomware, to a point in time before the attack.

Zerto Solution Overview & Highlights

Zerto delivers cloud data management and protection with a simple, scalable solution built for virtualized and container-based environments running on-premises or in the cloud.

1. Disaster Recovery

Zerto’s platform is the gold standard in disaster recovery, drastically mitigating your data loss and downtime no matter whether the disruption is a natural disaster, hardware failure, or anything else that comes your way. Zerto’s continuous data protection unlocks the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs to enable recovery of whole clusters, multi-VM applications, or simply a single server. Whether recovering to a secondary site, the public cloud, or a managed service provider, Zerto gives you the confidence to protect, manage, and recover all your critical digital assets.

2. Continuous Backup

Local continuous backup with Zerto takes the old backup paradigm and flips it on its head: instead of copies made every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto makes always-on backups on an ongoing basis every 5–15 seconds. By using CDP instead of snapshots, Zerto backup doesn’t impact production and lets you forget about the infamous nightly or micromanaging backup windows. Zerto’s continuous backup delivers instant recovery of files, folders, or VMs that are merely seconds behind the real thing — an easy way to totally thwart ransomware or undo accidental deletions.

3. Long-Term Retention

Zerto makes it dead simple to meet your regulatory or legal requirements: send data to the cloud or the purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for retention spanning months or years. These long-term copies can be taken from local backups or DR replicas, are done on a schedule of your choice, and can be stored wherever makes most sense for your business. Powerful indexing & search makes finding and restoring files as easy as 1–2–3 no matter what your 3–2–1 strategy looks like. In it for the long haul? Use cost-effective cloud tiering to move LTR copies from hot to cold to deep freeze storage for data you want to keep but only infrequently access.

4. Data Mobility and Migrations

Whether for datacenter consolidations, mergers & acquisitions, or an on-ramp to the cloud, Zerto helps our customers move their data and applications with none of the pain typically associated with migrations. Dramatically speed up your migration project with Zerto’s fully orchestrated platform, even if migrating to a different hypervisor or to/from the public cloud. Need to move back later? Zerto’s tech-agnostic approach gives you flexibility to move back whenever needed without being locked into a specific platform or cloud.

5. Test and Development

Zerto’s continuous replication means you can always get a copy of production systems that’s only seconds behind. Customers use Zerto to quickly deploy test/dev servers that are nearly identical to production, then let Zerto efficiently clean up once the servers are no longer needed. Easily validate patches or test new code in isolated environments that won’t interfere with production. It’s a win-win for everyone when continuous data protection meets continuous integration and deployment.

6. Security and Compliance

The unmatched granularity Zerto provides means ransomware or other malware doesn’t have to stop your business — let alone force you into paying a ransom. Use Zerto to quickly rewind to a point in time just prior to the infection and restore your unencrypted files and VMs. That granularity of seconds also enables on-demand sandboxes that are ideal for post-incident forensics, analysis, or proactive scanning. Even pen-testing is made simpler when production replicas can be hammered with no impact to the live systems.

Combine the Protection of Zerto with the Power of Google Cloud

Zerto’s award-winning VMware-based replication and journaling technology lets you seamlessly migrate workloads and perform disaster recovery on Google Cloud VMware Engine without refactoring your applications.

How Zerto for Google VMware Engine Works

Zerto’s software-only solution ensures enterprise-class protection of your environment no matter the size with components that include:

1. Zerto scale-out replication appliance, with built-in WAN optimization, encryption, and Quality of Service, replicates every change generated in real time to the target journal and is responsible for copying data to the long-term retention repository.
2. The journal contains all changes that occurred to any protected entity and allows you to use that data to restore to any point in time with seconds of granularity.
3. The management server integrates with any hypervisor management platform and has an intuitive interface that orchestrates user-initiated operations with simplicity.
4. A long-term retention repository allows you to store data for years on cost-effective disk, cloud, or object storage.
5. In public clouds, an all-in-one cloud appliance combines management and replication components. It integrates natively, using cost-efficient storage offerings, APIs, and cloud scaling features.

Zerto supports these use cases for Google Cloud VMware Engine:

1. Migration to GCVE: Migrate specific applications or entire datacenters to the cloud with seamless orchestration and no risk of losing data.
2. DR to GCVE: Build or shift disaster recovery capabilities to the cloud, lower costs, and remove operational burdens.
3. Region-to-region DR within GCVE: Replicate workloads running in Google Cloud VMware Engine to another GCVE site for intra-cloud DR.