Zerto Software Lands in New Zealand.
Here’s what you need to know.

 

Whether an organisation is a small or midsize business (SMB) or a global enterprise, they all share a common trait – a dependence on data and technology spread across various platforms to ensure business continuity, growth, and innovation in an always-on and fast-evolving world.

To keep up with this pace creates a continuous need for data protection solutions and digital assets.

The average ransom payment almost doubled from $812,380 in 2022 to $1,542,333 in 2023. The total cost of ransomware in 2031 will be $265 billion^[1].

Now that we have dollar figures attached to the consequence of ransomware, it’s likely you are triggered to look much deeper at how to prevent this for you and your customers.

The good news? As a value-added distributor and with 30 years representing the HPE brand and its solutions, Dicker Data resellers have access to the HPE team and their expertise to equip them with the latest solutions like Zerto.

Gerald David, CTO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise NZ said, “Ransomware is becoming more frequent and costly. As customer data disperses across on-premises and cloud environments, protecting it is more challenging than ever. To address this, Dicker Data is offering partners and resellers Zerto, a scalable, software-only solution ideal for ransomware resilience, disaster recovery, and multi-cloud mobility. Zerto ensures continuous availability across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.”

What is Zerto?

New to the New Zealand market, Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specialises in ransomware resilience, disaster recovery, backup, and multi-cloud mobility software for virtualised infrastructures and cloud environments. Zerto's solutions are designed to protect, recover and move data and applications seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

The solution is renowned for its continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities and delivers rapid recovery and robust data resilience, helping resellers and their customers maintain business with rapid disaster recovery, ransomware resilience, and multi-cloud mobility strategies.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Key Highlights

• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): real-time replication without production impact, scheduling, snapshots, or agents. Easy software-only deployment with minimal footprint, compatible with a customer’s existing hardware and storage.
• Journal-based recovery technology: near-instant recovery times (RPOs in seconds, RTOs in minutes) with a detailed journal containing thousands of checkpoints – allowing for consistent recovery from an entire site or datacentre to individual applications VMs, and files. The journal can store up to 30 days of changes, which accounts for 90% of regular recovery needs.
• Application-centric protection: write-order accuracy across entire multi-VM or Kubernetes app stacks, across different hosts/nodes or storage, simplifying recovery without staggered backup windows.
• Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Agility: scale-out architecture, cloud-focused design, and native services utilisation to futureproof IT strategies and provide seamless workload mobility between on-premises and cloud environments, including multi-cloud replication and scalable disaster recovery within Azure or AWS regions.
• Simplicity at Scale: integrated orchestration and automation and continuous availability, to keep applications running 24-7 against any disruption or threats. Offering enterprise grade capability, it scaled for production environments from 10 to 10,000 VMs.
• Software-Only Solution: hardware, hypervisor, and cloud agnostic, ensuring adaptability without physical appliances.
• Orchestration, automation, and analytics: built-in orchestration and automation features, seamless integration with existing tech stacks, and extensibility through REST APIs for unlimited customisation.

Understanding Zerto doesn’t compete with Backup and Restore

When it comes to data protection strategies, it’s crucial to understand the distinct roles various solutions play. Zerto, a leader in Continuous Data Protection (CDP), is often compared to traditional backup products (e.g. Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas). While Zerto can rapidly recover data just as these traditional backup solutions do, the real differentiation lies in its Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).

Here's what you need to know:

	Traditional Solutions	Zerto
RPO and RTO	During an incident, traditional solutions offer greater than 15 minutes of downtime and ‘Data Loss’. This would take more than 15 minutes, or often significantly longer to restore the data from tape or other backup media.	Zerto CDP significantly reduces RPOs and RTOs in just minutes or even milliseconds. The rapid recovery time is a game-changer in scenarios involving disaster recovery, cyberattacks, or malware incidents.
Data Loss and Restore Time	The potential for data loss and the time required to make the data usable again are generally higher with traditional backups. These solutions are primarily designed for routine data protection and long-term archival, using media like tapes which are not optimised for quick restores.	Zerto stores data on live volumes, rather than tapes. This means the data is immediately accessible and can be restored much faster, provided the underlying infrastructure supports it. However, this also means the “mileage will vary” from client to client, depending on their specific setups.

 

Putting this in context, Zerto actually compliments traditional solutions

Crucial to understand that Disaster Recovery (DR), Cyber Recovery (CR), and Malware Recovery (MR) with Zerto do not replace the need for traditional backup, which covers 96%-100% of servers in most organisations. Only a small percentage (1%-4%) of servers that require near-instant RPOs and RTOs qualify for a Zerto CDP solution. Therefore, CDP Zerto complements rather than competes with traditional backup solutions.

Dicker Data partners are encouraged to help customers allocate separate cybersecurity budgets for applications and workloads that need the advanced capabilities of Zerto CDP. This distinction helps avoid confusion and highlights how both solutions can work together to enhance overall data protection strategies.

Why Zerto for Dicker Data partners and your customers?

Zerto delivers the fastest RPOs and RTOs in the industry at any scale – whether you and your customers are an SMB or enterprise it's a comprehensive IT resilience platform that offers numerous advantages for businesses.

Dicker Data HPE team can support partners with seamless integration to modernise customers infrastructure, by removing complexity to support disparate infrastructures and capitalise on the One Solution for Data Protection and Cloud Mobility technology that Zerto delivers.

So why Zerto?

• Minimizes Downtime: With industry leading RPOs and RTOs, businesses can recover from disruptions almost instantaneously, ensuring continuity.
• Protect Against Data Loss: the CDP feature ensures that data is always safe, reducing the risk of significant data loss during unforeseen events.
• Simplified Management: The platform’s automation capabilities mean you spend less time managing your disaster recovery processes and more time focusing on your core business activities.
• Fast recovery times: ransomware threats can be detected and recovered in minutes to seconds before an attack.
• Future-Proof Your IT Environment: The support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments ensures that disaster recovery strategy remain effective as you and your customer’s IT infrastructure evolves.
• Improves operational efficiency: Automation, orchestration, and consumer-level simplicity can simplify IT operations.
• Zerto’s cost-effective pricing model: Ensures even small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can afford top-tier protection.
• Scalability: As businesses grow, Zerto can scale with them, without the need for significant infrastructure changes. For larger enterprises, advanced features like advanced orchestration, automation, and analytics, are available to streamline operations and enhance data protection strategies.

Gerald David, said, "While cyberattacks can't always be prevented, threats can be mitigated. Dicker Data’s HPE team is supporting our reseller community to take a proactive stance, as opposed to a reactive approach. Zerto helps defend IT from the effects of ransomware, ensuring IT professionals are in control of data and end-users aren’t vulnerable to hackers demands. With real-time detection, continuous data protection, rapid recovery, and ease of use, Zerto is an invaluable asset for businesses of all sizes.”

HPE and Dicker Data have the resources and expertise to work with resellers and their end users to equip them with Zerto. For enquires, Freach out to our HPE Dicker Data team or email hpe@dickerdata.co.nz.

 

[1] https://www.cobalt.io/blog/cybersecurity-statistics-2024#:~:text=In%202023%2C%2066%25%20of%20organizations,%245%20billion%20(SC%20Media)