Highly Resilient Hybrid Cloud with Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform

IBM Hybrid Cloud for the enterprise has gained traction with the market and industry analysts as they continue to build a compelling offering. Additionally, application requirements and just the sheer amount of data is growing at rates where building out traditional data centers does not make sense. More and more customers are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy to increase diversification of vendors, assets and provide the flexibility that organizations need to respond to changing business requirements. IBM’s announcement with VMware for the VMware Cloud Foundation^TM on IBM Cloud has the market, analysts and customers excited about IBM’s Hybrid Cloud strategy.

Today’s organizations are eager to embrace the hybrid cloud, but are often held back from migration to the cloud as they require highest level of resiliency in all failure modes.  Zerto delivers Resilience for Evolving IT^TM ensuring that applications and data are available to end-users and customers so that organizations can focus on their business.

IBM Cloud with Zerto provides the capability to create secure and flexible VMware environments on top of IBM’s public cloud that is fully protected across IBM Cloud data centers that are connected via IBM interlink high speed connectivity.

Customers can now safely deploy critical business applications on the IBM Cloud expecting minutes of RTO (recovery time objectives) and seconds of RPO (Recovery Point Objective) from any failures including data corruption.

Existing customers can:

• Simple Migrations to IBM Cloud – Orchestrate the migration of VMware workloads to the public cloud with minimal risk with a predictable, consistent process.
• Built-in BC/DR – Integrated solution stack for BC/DR between cloud sites with an RPO of seconds and RTO of minutes with no snapshots required.
• Recover from Data Corruption – Improve resilience by overcoming accidental, or intentional corruption such as ransomware attacks.
• Automated Recovery – Automatically recover to any point in time, and test without impacting production.
• Non-Disruptive Testing – With no impact to production, customers can test their DR solution at any time, giving end-users confidence their cloud environment will perform as business needs require.
• Application Consistency – Recover complex applications running across multiple virtual machines and servers to any point in time in minutes with service levels and recovery reporting to respond to audits.
• Rapid Recovery – Ability to recover to any point in time within seconds of data loss with minimum data loss. Take advantage of existing VMware skills, assets, and processes (scripts, VMware).

Figure 1: High-level architectural components

How can I configure BC/DR for the IBM Cloud?

In the very short-term, Zerto’s Virtual Replication will be implemented through a push-button automated process when BC/DR option is ordered. The IBM Cloud sites will be pared, and then Zerto’s Virtual Replication is configured in the GUI.

However, if you can’t wait and want to use Zerto’s Virtual Replication today, you can purchase the product from Zerto and use it in the IBM Cloud.

Can I pick my BC/DR data center, is there a limitation on distance?

There is no distance limitation. You can pick your failover site from a list of IBM Cloud sites that are available to you.

How do I get my Cloud Site connected to my BC/DR site?

IBM Cloud Direct Link is used to create a point to point connection to your production cloud site.