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Krista Macomber, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group, pointed out that other vendors such as Commvault have been splitting off dedicated software packages to handle backup and DR use cases separately. She said the reasoning behind this is sound — all applications require protection, but not all protection is equal. Some mission-critical applications require the highest tier of data protection and availability, but it would be expensive to put everything on that tier. The same vendor offering different products for different SLAs can make it easier for customers to determine if they’re using the right data protection tool for their applications.
“Different approaches are required to meet protection requirements without breaking the bank. I think it’s a smart move,” Macomber said.
Van Doorn said ZDP is poised to disrupt the world of backup with CDP technology, but Macomber said that could be a tall order. Traditional snapshot-based backup is entrenched, and most customers are cautious about switching backup vendors. Macomber said he expects ZDP’s initial customers to be current Zerto customers who want to lower the recovery points for their operational backup or consolidate their data protection vendors. Outside of that, Macomber said Zerto’s products are a good fit for organizations experiencing trouble hitting their recovery time or recovery point objectives.
Macomber said the Zerto 8.5 updates are incremental but important. The backup-related upgrades are clearly part of the vendor’s push into that use case, but the cloud support shows a growing trend of data protection and cloud becoming joined at the hip. Data protection operations are growing larger, as organizations need to protect more of their environments. Cloud offers better scalability, remote accessibility and greater simplicity in both deployment and management compared with handling data protection on premises.
“Cloud is increasingly a part of the data protection conversation for many customers,” Macomber said.
