Zerto, an industry leader in cloud data management and protection, has announced the general availability of Zerto 9, significantly advancing its capabilities in the fight against ransomware.
Offering powerful new immutability and automation features, Zerto 9 also provides enhanced cloud data management and protection capabilities for end users and managed service providers, new backup capabilities including support for additional cloud platforms, and cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management.
Ransomware attacks continue to grow in severity and volume, bringing increasing costs and growing financial, legal, and even political ramifications. Organizations must invest in technology that allows them to recover and resume operations quickly following a ransomware attack, not just protect against it. Based on a foundation of 12 years of expertise with continuous data protection (CDP), Zerto enables organizations to move on from a ransomware attack with minimal data loss and downtime by allowing users to rewind and recover data with granularity from any point in time—and do so within seconds of a disruptive event.
Zerto 9 enables immutability settings for long-term data retention to be easily managed from within the Zerto user interface. As a result, users can set how long backups can remain unaltered, safeguarding them to the cloud to prevent malicious deletion or modification of data, including ransomware. In this release, immutability support is available for Amazon S3.
Zerto 9 adds new automated VM protection to ensure complete, flexible data protection across each environment even when new VMs are added. Using native vSphere tags, servers can now be instantly added to Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) without any manual configuration to quickly protect workloads with new or existing protection groups and apply existing SLA rules, including pre-validation and alerts.
New instant restore has been added so that Zerto users can restore VMs straight into production easily and quickly without having to worry about failing over to a DR site first or running out of resources on overtaxed backup appliances. Preserving journal checkpoints allows users to revert to other points in time quickly for the same VM if the selected restore point does not meet requirements. This has been coupled with restore of files or directories by downloading them or by restoring them directly into its original location from any long-term retention (LTR) repository such as public cloud.
New Capabilities for End Users and Managed Service Providers
Zerto 9 continues to advance its backup and disaster recovery capabilities to include new support for additional cloud platforms and new cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management for both end users and managed service providers.
For instance, long-term retention repositories can now be stored on S3-compatible on-premises or cloud storage such as Cloudian. In addition, users can also tier LTR data to Amazon S3-IA and S3 Glacier as well as Azure Blob Cool and Archive storage classes by defining retention policies within Zerto 9. Native cloud APIs to tier backups are leveraged to eliminate compute costs associated with tiering data in public cloud.
Backup is now managed within its own separate context within the Zerto user interface. A new type of virtual protection group (VPG) called local continuous backup VPG enables easy configuration and management of CDP-based backups and long-term retention of VMs. This new VPG provides users with the ability to segregate less critical VMs which require only backup and restore from the critical VMs that need full Zerto disaster recovery features.
Users can find training on the advanced Zerto 9 capabilities in several updated hands-on labs, including recovering from ransomware in a safe lab environment. New and updated Zerto 9 labs can be found in myZerto or by getting started at zerto.com/labs.
Read the full announcement here.
