This piece will discuss a couple of storage solutions aimed at data center applications, one from Zerto and the other from Reduxio. It also includes results from an IDC IT Resilience Readiness survey.
Zerto, offering disaster recovery and backup services, made some announcements at their 2019 ZertoCON conference, including a subscription licensing option for customers to purchase the Zerto IT Resilience Platform. The company’s roadmap includes integration with the VMware VAIO framework, enhancing their support of HPE StoreOnce and developments with Microsoft Azure.
Phil Goodwin, Research Director at IDC, previewed the results of this year’s “State of IT Resilience Readiness” survey during his keynote at ZertoCON. The survey included 500 respondents at companies with greater than 1000 employees and found that:
* Data protection modernization is the top IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months. Specifically, 38% will deploy new backup/recovery solutions within the next year
* Cloud-based data protection solutions ranked as a second priority for respondents over the next 12 months. 19% already plan to deploy DRaaS within the next year. For 91.3% of respondents using public cloud for data protection, the use of public cloud has had no impact, or has reduced their data protection budget overall.
* 82.3% of respondents indicate data protection and disaster recovery are an important part of their IT and/or digital transformation initiatives
* 93.4% of respondents are likely to pursue convergence of backup and DR tools as a way to eliminate redundancy
I also had a conversation with a Zerto customer, UW Health’s Brandon Matt. They had merged several prior operations, going from 5 data centers to one primary and one secondary data center (in Des Moines, IA). They also 4 or 5 different backup utilities that they were using. Brandon said that they went to a hyperconverged infrastructure with many VMs to handle various functions. They went to Zerto and found that they had a very good experience with VM backups and disaster recovery. In particular they found that moving radiological image sets (which tend to be rather large, 5-10 TB in size) to their central data center was much faster using Zerto software than with VMware. The subscription model they use with Zerto is one quarter the cost of their previous solutions.
Ruduxio gave me a briefing on their upcoming container storage technology. The Magellan platform for Kubernetes pairs high-performance software defined container-native storage and data management in order to build a single data cloud for their applications across all of a customer’s infrastructure.
Magellan is a microservices-based container native storage platform. The company says that the product offers instant access to data, is scalable and elastic and offers global dedupe and compression. This product will be generally available in Fall 2019 and customer evaluations are now underway.
As more data is aggregated into data centers IT resilience, including backup and disaster recovery, become more important. In addition, providing storage for container applications helps to implement microservices run from these containers.
