Skip to content
11:11 Systems
Rethink Connected
11:11 Systems11:11 Systems
  • Why 11:11
    • Submenu
      • Column 1
        • Cloud Console
          Cloud Console
          Compliance
          Compliance

      • Column 2
        • Global Regions
          Cloud Regions
          Catalyst
          Planning and Assessment

      • WHY CHOOSE 11:11
      • Overview
      • Leadership
      • News & Media
      •  
      • Careers
      • Technology Partners
      • Customer Stories
  • Products & Services
    • Products & Services
      • CLOUD
      • Cloud Overview
      • Public Cloud
      • Private Cloud
      • Object Storage
      • Cloud Labs
      • Colocation/Bare-Metal
      • BACKUP
      • Backup Overview
      • Veeam Backup
      • Microsoft 365 Backup
      • Managed Backup for Cohesity
      • DISASTER RECOVERY
      • DRaaS Overview
      • DRaaS for Veeam
      • DRaaS for Zerto
      • DRaaS for Azure
      • Autopilot
      • SECURITY
      • Security Overview
      • Continuous Risk Scanning
      • Managed SIEM
      • Managed EDR
      • Managed Firewall
      • CONNECTIVITY
      • Connectivity Overview
      • SD-WAN
      • Multi-Cloud Connect
      • Managed IP
  • Solutions
    • Solutions Submenu
      • INDUSTRY
      • Education
      • Financial
      • Government
      • Healthcare
  • Partners
    • Partners Submenu
      • Overview
      • Become a Partner
      • Partner Portals
  • Resources
    • Resources Submenu
      • Events
      • Webinars
      • News & Media
      • White Papers
      • Podcast
      • Data Sheets
      • Customer Stories
      • Innovation Blog
  • Support
    • Support Submenu
      • Contact Support
      • Product Documentation
      • API Documentation
Search:
  • Console Login
  • Contact
Header Right Menu
Free Trial
  • Why 11:11
    • Cloud Console
    • Compliance
    • Cloud Regions
    • Planning and Assessment
    • WHY CHOOSE 11:11
    • Overview
    • Leadership
    • News & Media
    • Careers
    • Technology Partners
    • Customer Stories
    • Blog
  • Products & Services
    • CLOUD
    • Cloud Overview
    • Public Cloud
    • Private Cloud
    • Object Storage
    • Cloud Labs
    • Colocation/Bare-Metal
    • BACKUP
    • Backup Overview
    • Veeam Backup
    • Microsoft 365 Backup
    • Managed Backup for Cohesity
    • DISASTER RECOVERY
    • DRaaS Overview
    • DRaaS for Veeam
    • DRaaS for Zerto
    • DRaaS for Azure
    • Autopilot
    • SECURITY
    • Security Overview
    • Continuous Risk Scanning
    • Managed SIEM
    • Managed EDR
    • Managed Firewall
    • CLOUD CONNECTIVITY
    • Connectivity Overview
    • SD-WAN
    • Multi Cloud Connect
    • Managed IP
  • Solutions
    • INDUSTRY
    • Education
    • Financial
    • Government
    • Healthcare
    • Column 2
  • Partners
    • Overview
    • Become a Partner
    • Partner Portals
  • Resources
    • Events
    • Webinars
    • News & Media
    • Whitepapers
    • Podcast
    • Datasheets
    • Customer Stories
    • Innovation Blog
  • Support
    • Contact Support
    • Success Center
    • API Documentation
  • Contact
  • Console Login
  • Free Trial
Tags: Disaster Recovery
Author: Mike Mosley
Date: January 17, 2017

Zerto Cloud Disaster Recovery – An Intro

cloud_easy_buttonEditor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.

Disaster Recovery (DR) has become a vital aspect of both a company’s IT and overall business strategy with the primary objective being to recover from an outage or disaster as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing downtime. Combining Zerto replication software with the 11:11 Cloud offers a reliable and secure way to recover your production site in a cloud-based environment as quickly and easily as possible. Zerto provides an interface that is easily accessible and allows you to be in complete control of your DR strategy. As a service provider and recovery site, 11:11 Systems offers full support and assistance to ensure you are confident, comfortable, and protected in the case of a disaster. Let’s take a look at the basics, and in upcoming blogs, I’ll be going into more detail on other areas.

The Basics of Zerto Replication

In order to replicate with Zerto, Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) are required. These servers are deployed on the customer’s production end. The ZVM is the brains of the Zerto functionality, and this can be installed on a Windows 2008 R2 server or higher. From the ZVM, you will connect to your vCenter and have the ability to install VRA servers and create Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). After you install Zerto, the VRAs are pushed out by the ZVM server. A VRA will need to be deployed on all hosts in the production environment that have a server you want to protect. These VRA servers will act as the proxy for replication; they read the iSCSI connection from the VM to the host and replicate all changes to the 11:11 Cloud. The VRAs do require an IP and need to be on a network that can communicate with the ZVM server.

Once the ZVM and VRA servers have been installed and configured, the last step is to create VPGs. VPGs are groupings of VMs that replicate and failover together. For example, you might group your Domain Controllers in one VPG and then group Web Servers in another VPG. During an outage where you need to failover, you may decide to failover the Domain Controller VPG to ensure the domain is online first then failover the Web Servers VPG shortly after.

Replication occurs from your production site to 11:11 over a Replication VPN Tunnel. 11:11 will assist with creating this VPN, along with ensuring any issues over time are resolved. In your 11:11 environment, you have two firewalls: one is dedicated to the replication VPN and the other is for your failover environment. These DR firewalls give you full control of your environment during test and live failover situations. They also allow you to fully test your recovery environment using a Zerto Test Failover while maintaining replication during the testing period.

zerto_replication

Understanding RPO and RTO Requirements

Zerto replicates data in real time from your production environment to 11:11. This means that changes made on one of your production servers are automatically replicated to the recovery site, enabling a low Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RPO refers to the amount of time or data that your business can tolerate being lost during a DR Scenario. For instance, pretend your production center was to go fully offline due to a tornado or hurricane. If you were able to recover to a point in time from five minutes prior to the outage, two hours before, or even a day before, would your business still be able to operate? What would be the customer impact and potential business losses? The goal should be to minimize downtime as much as possible for your critical systems. With the real-time replication in Zerto, you should expect minimal RPO times averaging around 15 to 20 seconds. Other considerations can determine the RPO in Zerto, such as bandwidth and data change. More on that later.

Another aspect to look into when researching a DR service is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RTO is the time that can be allowed for the actual recovery of your production environment to ensure business continuity. Where your RPO might be to always have the ability to recover to at least five minutes ago, RTO is being able to recover to that point within 30 minutes or an hour. A failover in Zerto can be initiated in just a few clicks, which allows you to quickly failover the servers needed to restore business functionality. Once the failover starts, your servers will be automatically imported and powered on at the 11:11 Cloud recovery site. There is no need to revert from snapshots or wait on any extra processes for recovery – just a simple import and power on. With the 11:11 Cloud Console, you are able to initiate a failover, even in the event that all of your production servers, including your Zerto infrastructure, are offline. There are other factors that go into this, such as the number of servers and boot delays if required.

Bandwidth and Data Change Considerations

Zerto’s real-time replication and RPO does come with some challenges for companies with lower bandwidth and/or high amounts of data change. Because changes are happening in real time, certain large processes or causes for high data change can cause network saturation. Large SQL queries or a backup of an application may cause a high amount of data changes on your servers. If there is more change happening at a point in time than the bandwidth is able to handle, you may see some saturation in the network. This causes the RPOs to grow for your VPGs. This may also happen if you are trying to protect a lot of data but have limited bandwidth availability. For instance, if you have 30 VMs that total 10TB but only a 50Mb connection, you may see issues. Even if there isn’t one big, global workload that generates a lot of change, the bandwidth you have available may not be able to handle the daily rate of change on all servers. You must also consider that the bandwidth consumed by Zerto might affect the available bandwidth to your actual production network. If the network your production servers or end-users are connected to is the same network being used for replication, you might see contention in the bandwidth usage, again impacting the performance of replication.

These bandwidth and data change issues are addressed by 11:11 Systems during the DR solution design process – along with defining the required RTOs and RPOs for different VPGs. In my next blog, I’ll be exploring best practices for Zerto installation and configuration – stay tuned.

Categories: DRaaS, ZertoBy Mike MosleyJanuary 17, 2017
Tags: Disaster Recovery

Author: Mike Mosley

Mike Mosely is a cloud engineer at 11:11 and has worked at the company for over 3 years. He holds a number of VMware certifications including VCP5 as well as the Veeam VMCE certification. Mike works closely with customers to build cloud solutions that fit their requirements.

Post navigation

PreviousPrevious post:DRaaS with Veeam – Creating a Replica JobNextNext post:ISO Compliance in the Cloud – Why Should you Care?

Related Posts

Preparing for 2023 with 11:11 Systems: IT Trends in Security, Cloud, and More
February 1, 2023
11:11 Systems Wins 2022 Backup and Disaster Recovery Award from Cloud Computing Magazine
January 25, 2023
How businesses can respond to IT disruptions during the holiday season
How businesses can respond to IT disruptions during the holiday season
January 4, 2023
The CloudBytes Podcast: Season 3 is Here!
December 2, 2022
Celebrating Get To Know Your Customers Day
October 20, 2022
Experts: Prepare for Busy 2022 Hurricane Season
July 1, 2022
PRODUCTS & SERVICES
  • Cloud
  • Backup
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Managed Security
  • Connectivity Solutions
  • Compliance
COMPANY
  • Why 11:11
  • Customer Stories
  • Careers
  • Leadership
  • Technology Partners
  • News & Media
  • Contact Support
CLOUD REGIONS
  • North America
  • EMEA
  • APAC
CONNECT
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Youtube

© 2023 11:11 Systems Inc., All Rights Reserved | Privacy Notice

Go to Top
PRIVACY POLICY AND COOKIE CONSENT
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}
PRIVACY POLICY AND COOKIE CONSENT
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information that allows us to process data such as browsing behavior. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions. By clicking Accept, closing this message, or continuing to browse, you consent to these technologies and accept our Privacy Notice.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}