Zerto is one of those vendors that I have been aware of for a while and has been in our “need to get to that and evaluate” pile for a while now. It was put into that pile for two reasons:
However, as we all know in this game, marketing sometimes gets ahead of itself and the devil is in the detail. White papers and clouds on a whiteboard connected with lines are great, but until we at DG see and experience the vendors widget performing the function it claims it can do in the way they claim it can do it – well it’s just all that isn’t it, claims.
At the end of October 2018, I got to the evaluation pile and decided to put Zerto through its paces to assess the Zerto marketing claims. Engaging with Lou Sassani, ANZ Zerto Systems Engineer, was painless as I explained to him how we work and within four hours of requesting, I had my demo licenses and access to the Zerto portal.
As mentioned, at DG we will assess each vendor’s claims we work with and expect our customers to do the same with us. To back up our claims, we have built and run our own Hybrid Cloud that is architected to the same framework we would deploy for a customer.
So, the Zerto evaluation –
After flipping through the portal documentation, I discovered that you needed to deploy Zerto instances into each cloud you want to replicate data across. Makes sense so let’s do that.
Am I saying you can deploy a hybrid cloud architecture in three hours? No, as this was already architected, designed, deployed and fully operational.
Is the point here the speed that I managed to deploy Zerto, not entirely (although it is impressive) as it was only 1 VM.
But it is testimony to the ease and intuitiveness of the Zerto product with a seamless user interface, combined with a properly architected, deployed and managed Hybrid Cloud Framework that has allowed someone with very little keyboard time these days (i.e. Me as current CTO) to get Zerto up, configured and running with a machine “DR” across a hybrid cloud within three hours. Don’t forget I have never seen or used the product before!
While I did do some fast reading from the portal working my way through this, it felt the like the process pretty much drove itself and with all that I have to say Zerto has passed most of the claims test for me.
I look forward to working with Zerto more as part of the DG Hybrid Cloud framework.
– Matthew Agoni, Chief Technology Officer
Melbourne based Diversus Group (DG) Chief Technology Officer Matthew Agoni has 20 years’ experience in the ICT industry. Matthew was the first employee at DG at its inception in October 2006 and leads the solution architect(s) and consulting teams. With his team DG have crafted a hybrid cloud framework that help customers with their transition from traditional ICT models to next generation technologies. Follow Matthew on LinkedIn.