I saw a great product today, one that has been around for a while now but is getting more coverage and uptake..

Winning the Best Of Show at VMWorld 2011, Zerto is a product to integrate with vSphere environments. It provides VM-level replication and protection, with RPO compliance options.

• By moving the replication away from the storage layer, you remove a lot of the previous restrictions for data protection.
• No longer do you need to worry about which datastore a VM is on in order for it to be replicated and protected.
• You don’t have to replicate all VMs on a datastore to the same destination.
• You can leverage cloud-based providers as the target for your replication, giving you an off-site DR/BCP capability.
• Zerto includes the ability to replicate between vCloud and non-vCloud vSphere environments.
• CDP is included as part of the offering, allowing you to recover to a granular point-in-time.
• Disk writes are copied in memory at the hypervisor layer, removing the storage overhead of reading from the disk to copy changed blocks.

I should get this in the lab soon, so watch this space for more updates. With the use of the Zerto API, we should be able to integrate this as a ‘value add’ service that a client can easily order through the Cisco IAC portal.