Cloud Fabric technology to solve challenges of workload portability

Zerto has announced its strategy to create a new infrastructure layer called “Cloud Fabric” which allows organisations to seamlessly move and protect virtualized workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds across leading hypervisors and cloud providers.

Through hypervisor-based replication technology, Zerto enables the replication, orchestration, reporting and monitoring of BC/DR and migration operations across multiple sites for cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises. In delivering recovery, mobility and data protection solutions to more than 450 enterprises, including many Fortune 1000 companies, Zerto identified the key functionality required for production workloads to utilize any cloud:
· A powerful transport layer for data and applications – one that is cross-hypervisor and hardware agnostic
· Orchestration of the mobility of complex applications
· Encapsulation of all of the dependencies that are part of an application such as boot order, IP configuration and more
· Production-level tools for the highest service levels of data mobility and protection – so that mobility of workloads is easy to manage and report on
Specific Zerto Cloud Fabric components will be released throughout this year.

“We are announcing this strategy early as a marker for service providers and enterprises that are looking to utilize a hybrid cloud paradigm for their production workloads but are struggling with the challenges of multiple, flexible production environments,” said Gil Levonai, VP Marketing and Products at Zerto. “The notion of a Cloud Fabric is a concept that will evolve over time, but certainly includes ability to protect and mobilize production workloads between VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenStack and in a later stage between any cloud or hypervisor. This is vital for both providers and customers to avoid lock-in and to retain their ability to choose any IT environment that fits their business needs.”

Zerto currently helps more than 100 managed cloud service providers (CSP) including Terremark, Bluelock, Colt and Kelway to replicate workloads across VMware-based clouds. “We are at the mid-stage of a development cycle that will add the ability to protect and mobilize workloads deployed on Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon public cloud,” said Oded Kedem, CTO and co-founder of Zerto.

Levonai also contends that a healthy IT industry should have multiple vendors offering Cloud Fabric components. “Recent announcements such as the Cisco InterCloud initiative, which Zerto has joined as a technology partner, promoting interoperability between clouds irrespective of underlying hypervisor or cloud technology, highlight a similar mind-set within the networking space,” maintains Levonai.

“There is a clear trend in the industry towards expanding the role of disaster recovery products to application mobility, increasing flexibility and agility within the IT infrastructure. The hybrid cloud is not possible without the ability to mobilize production applications so they can seamlessly take advantage of resources across clouds, hypervisors and infrastructures,” said John Morency, research vice president at Gartner. “The concept of a cloud fabric is a mechanism for promoting the underlying and often underachieved flexibility of virtualization. It enables the seamless migration of workloads so they can leverage any cloud – public and/or private - quickly and easily without application reconfiguration. It is the true enabler of the hybrid cloud.”

“Zerto's technology makes it easy for our customers to mobilize their workloads to access resources in our enterprise cloud,” said Gary Moore, Marketing Director at Colt. “This helps us to offer the right service to our customers. With Zerto Virtual Replication, customers enjoy a range of features which barely disturb their existing production environments, but which give them sophisticated business continuity options into Colt’s local cloud locations.”