Zerto

Zerto (recently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise) fundamentally redefined the Disaster Recovery (DR) and backup landscape by pioneering the concept of software-only, hypervisor-based Continuous Data Protection (CDP). While traditional backup solutions take "snapshots" of data every few hours or once a day (leaving organizations vulnerable to losing hours of critical data if a crash occurs between snapshots), Zerto operates entirely differently. It continuously intercepts every single write operation at the hypervisor level and asynchronously replicates it to a secondary site or the cloud in real-time. This continuous replication architecture provides Zerto with its defining advantage: incredibly aggressive Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) measured in seconds, and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) measured in minutes. If a massive database server crashes or is hit by ransomware, an organization utilizing Zerto does not lose the entire day's work. They can literally "rewind" the virtual machine to the exact second before the failure or infection occurred, ensuring virtually zero data loss for mission-critical applications. This level of granularity is impossible with traditional, snapshot-based backup tools. Zerto excels in its ability to orchestrate complex disaster recovery failovers. Administrators can group hundreds of interdependent virtual machines (e.g., a web server, an application server, and a database server that make up a single e-commerce application) into a "Virtual Protection Group." With a single click, Zerto can automatically failover this entire group to a secondary data center or public cloud, handling all the complex network re-IPing and boot ordering automatically. This removes the massive human error and delay traditionally associated with disaster recovery testing and execution, making Zerto indispensable for "always-on" enterprise applications.