As you probably know, I am involved in the WhatMatrix initiative for a while now. WhatMatrix is an on-line platform that compares different IT solutions in the industry. Comparisons of SDS/HCI, cloud management platforms, virtualization and backup for virtual environments are all provided by the platform. One of the comparisons I’ve been working on is the disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments. By the end of this week an update on this comparison will be published. In this article I will provide a sneak preview on this update. The update is available now, access it here.

DR solutions updated to the latest version

The products in the comparison are now updated to the latest version. You will find VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1.1. in the comparison, which supports the latest version of VMware vSphere. Also Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 5.0 will now be included in the comparison. ZVR 5.0 includes some new features, such as:

Azure support;

One to many replications (Zerto is currently the only vendor supporting this topology);

Extended journaling capabilities;

Introduction of the Zerto app.

More details on ZVR 5.0 are here.

New: Disaster Recovery as a Service

For the first time we have a DRaaS solution in the DR for virtual infrastructures comparison. I’ve added both Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Additional solutions will be added in the future.

ASR includes support for both Microsoft and VMware environments, while vCloud Air DR is a business continuity solution only for VMware vSphere environments. Note that Zerto’s ZVR solution is used by many local DRaaS providers.

Next steps

As always there are some additions/changes coming up in the future. With the introduction of Windows Server 2016 this is certainly a platform we want to add. We’re also working to add Veeam’s backup & replication solution and get it off the draft status.

Another enhancement will be to add detailed information on the cloud options Zerto is providing. Zerto does integrate with Amazon Web Services and Azure, this is mentioned in the comparison, but a deep dive on the exact functionality is currently not there. To be added in the next version.

Publication