Baron Funds to support trading ops with Zerto

Wall Street Letter

—Jeanene Timberlake

The recent implementation by Baron Funds of the Virtual Replication offering from Zerto is a move by the mutual fund manager to support its extensive trading and back office systems, according to Henry Mayorga, manager of network technology for Baron Funds.

The firm implemented the functionality in less than a week with 10 licenses to support six critical systems within the firm in a move to shore up its disaster recovery and business continuity. Baron Funds has more than $17.5 billion in assets under management.

Mayorga said the decision to use Zerto for a portion of its virtual servers came after several years of using other software packages that took “significant amounts” of time to bring systems back up. “We failed on a test at the end of the quarter and knew that we were not going to be able to solve the problem because we needed to have those machines in an almost ready state,” he said.

With Zerto, he noted that the replication of the covered systems happen outside the storage level at the hypervisor level, which results in less time to bring up the systems in a disaster recovery mode. Jennifer Gill, vice president of marketing at Zerto, said the recovery time objective, or how fast you want the data to be available, is five to 10 minutes, and the recovery point objective, meaning how much data you are willing to lose, is six seconds.

Mayorga said the trading and back office systems being protected by Zerto now are some of the most complex to bring back up to because they have multiple components. He said the firm expects to expand its use of Zerto over time as additional systems are identified as critical for a disaster recovery scenario. He said further considerations by Baron Funds will be given toward expanding the service to machines other than servers.