Zerto In-Cloud for AWS - Part Two - Zerto
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Zerto In-Cloud for AWS – Part Two

October 4, 2022
Cloud & Data Management
Disaster Recovery
Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

In part one, we described the challenges that Zerto In-Cloud for AWS meets, why Zerto In-Cloud for AWS, and provided a glimpse into its management components. This post will dive into how Zerto works and will provide a breakdown of what the disaster recovery process looks like between AWS regions.

How it Works

The Zerto In-Cloud solution is a disaster recovery orchestrator designed to leverage the power and capabilities of AWS itself. With Amazon EBS Snapshots and native AWS replication capabilities, Zerto In-Cloud for AWS moves data from one region to another. The solution takes advantage of built-in high availability that automatically replicates EBS snapshots between zones within the same region. Zerto simply facilitates the protection, tracking, and recoverability of that data to greatly reduce recover time objectives (RTO) in AWS.

While all the native tools are there for anyone to take advantage of, what makes this solution unique is that Zerto takes the guesswork out of having to manage those snapshot chains, replication, instance configurations, networking, and identifying what instances make up which applications. This simplifies what otherwise would be a very labor-intensive and manually driven effort for administrators, especially when considering how to maintain anything developed in-house at scale.

Ongoing Replication

Once you’ve created a Virtual Protection Group (VPG) and have set your desired recovery time objective (RPO), 15 minutes, for example:

  1. Every 15 minutes, Zerto will send the command to create EBS snapshots of the disks backing the VMs in the VPG.
  2. Once the snapshot has been created, a snapshot copy command will be initiated, and the snapshots will be replicated to the target region/zone for recovery.
  3. Once received in the recovery region, Zerto In-Cloud inserts a checkpoint to the journal for that point in time.
  4. This process repeats as the VPG is running. As the history of the journal grows, the oldest checkpoints get deleted, and this process continues.

Failover Live Workflow

If there is a failure of either the availability zone, region, or systems in the protected region, a disaster is declared.

Zerto begins the live failover operation, which provides production subnets and IP addressing in the target recovery region and availability zones with the following steps:

  1. Initiate the live failover from the Zerto In-Cloud Manager
  2. Create the EC2 instances for the affected VPGs, and power those instances off
  3. Attach the replicated disks then power the instances back on
    • Validate the configuration; if elastic IP addresses are required for remote access, they will need to be created and assigned now

Summary

Adopting the public cloud has its challenges when it comes to disaster recovery and application mobility. The service design of the public cloud constrains architected applications to a specific region. While high availability of the hardware and design of the application can be implemented, patching together disaster recovery solutions in the public cloud is costly, ineffective, and difficult to monitor, manage, and orchestrate. Zerto In-Cloud for AWS helps solve these problems with disaster recovery protecting EC2 workloads because it provides the orchestration needed for the native protection capabilities built into the AWS platform. Managed through a simple interface, Zerto In-Cloud for AWS gives users the ability to test failovers, perform live failovers, and recover thousands of EC2 instances across regions, zones, and accounts.​ It uses Amazon EBS Snapshots and native AWS replication capabilities to move that data from one region to another. If protecting between zones, the solution takes advantage of built-in high availability that automatically replicates EBS snapshots between zones within the same region. Zerto simply facilitates the protection, tracking, and recoverability of that data to greatly reduce RTO in AWS.

Interested in learning more about Zerto In-Cloud for AWS? Read the datasheet.

 

Update: Zerto In-Cloud for AWS is now available in the AWS Marketplace. Read the datasheet to understand the benefits of going through the AWS Marketplace, and click here to subscribe to Zerto In-Cloud.

Anthony Dutra

Anthony Dutra is a Technical Marketing Manager (TME) at Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Company who specializes in solution architecture, designing microservices in the public cloud, and developing web3 (blockchain) applications. For the past decade, Anthony has leveraged his Master’s in IT Management to become a trusted technical partner with organizations seeking to modernize their data center or migrate to the cloud.