Cloud Fabric looks to solve workload portability challenge

There can be problems with Disaster Recovery management in the cloud – and indeed with on-premise systems – even if DR capabilities are in place. It is not always possible to provide a like-for-like infrastructure on which to run the recovered system, which means that recovery may not be possible, or at least delayed until a suitable infrastructure is provided.

It is to solve problems like that that Israeli DR specialist, Zerto, has come up with a strategy to create a new infrastructure layer called `Cloud Fabric’.

This allows organisations to seamlessly move and protect virtualised 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 and enterprises. In delivering recovery, mobility and data protection solutions Zerto has come to identify the key functionality required for production workloads so they can utilise any cloud.

These include the need for a powerful, cross-hypervisor and hardware agnostic transport layer for data and applications, the ability to orchestrate the mobility of complex applications, encapsulate all of the dependencies that are part of an application such as boot order, IP configuration and more, and 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 utilise 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 the ability to protect and mobilise 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 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 mobilise 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,” he added.

According to Gartner research vice president, John Morency, 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. He suggests that the hybrid cloud is not possible without the ability to mobilise production applications so they can seamlessly take advantage of resources across clouds, hypervisors and infrastructures.

“The concept of a cloud fabric is a mechanism for promoting the underlying and often underachieved flexibility of virtualisation. 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,” he said.