Maritz needed a short RPO and flexible cloud provider options for its recovery process. Zerto replication protects applications to and from clouds and between multiple clouds.
When Maritz set up its disaster recovery system, the sales and marketing services company's goal was to achieve a seven- to 10-second recovery point objective.
After buying into the Zerto Virtual Replication for AWS, Maritz found that the flexible cloud data protection service could reduce recovery time with a seven- to 10-second RPO.
The St. Louis-based company designs and operates employee reward programs, sales channel incentive programs and customer loyalty programs. Maritz needed a disaster recovery and data protection product for data located in about 10 field offices that had a total of 120 physical host servers and 1,600 virtual machines. It also has more than 70 servers running in AWS. The goal was seamless migration of complete workloads to AWS with minimal configuration changes. The company has about 4,000 employees.
Maritz also needed a cloud service to give its application teams the flexibility to use several different cloud providers.
"AWS works well, but we may get other application teams that may want to recover from other clouds, as we continue to roll this out across the company," said Andy Wolfe, the technical architect at Maritz. "Zerto gives us the flexibility to recover from anywhere."
Zerto Virtual Replication is a hardware-agnostic, hypervisor-based replication tool that uses continuous replication and automates failover and failback in VMware environments. Unlike traditional array-based replication, which requires homogeneous storage systems, Zerto Virtual Replication allows for replication to any storage system, as well as hybrid and public clouds.
Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 has the ability to perform intercloud and intracloud data movement using AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud environments.
Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 has the ability to perform intercloud and intracloud data movement using AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud environments. Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 expands the bidirectional replication capability to protect applications and data to and from clouds and between multiple clouds.
Wolfe said he installed a Zerto Virtual Replication manager in the data center that is connected to the vSphere environment. The virtual manager talks to the Zerto AWS cloud appliance. Each virtual replication sits on a host and pushes out the changes in data to the cloud appliance on the AWS S3 object storage site.
"[The replication software] is doing a combination of full sync and the changes," Wolfe said. "It captures the writes from the virtual machines and replicates it to the cloud. We use it for business-critical applications and [the software] displays how many seconds for replication. Zerto has seven- to 10-seconds RPO."
Wolfe said Maritz still uses legacy data protection systems in some cases, which include disk-to-disk replication and tape backups, but that Zerto is part of the company's long-term recovery strategy.
"We had three disaster recovery tests [on Zerto] and there haven't been any glitches," Wolfe said.
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