DRaaS to Azure with Zerto – Q&A from the webinar

On the 27th of February, Zerto's technology Evangelist, Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn joined us to present: DRaaS to Azure with Zerto. As promised, here are Gijsbert's responses to the questions we didn't have time to answer during the session.

If you weren't able to attend the webinar, you can watch the recording here: https://youtu.be/SgRtHe1mrZo

 

How does the IP addressing work in Azure, do you have to re-ip or is it a stretched vlan?

Azure does not support stretched VLANs. Zerto can re-IP the virtual machines as part of the fail-over process but it is also possible to create an subnet in Azure that uses the same IP range as you are using in your production environment (see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/virtual-networks-faq). The experts at Databarracks can definitely help you answer any more questions. [Comment from Databarracks: Yes we can – get in touch]

 

Is this a scalable solution for small businesses?

Zerto uses a scale-out architecture and scales together with the environment, this way we can support both small and large environments with ease.

 

Am I able to have my main servers hosted by one company but use Azure for DR?

In theory yes but this depends on the architecture and type of access you have to the hosted environment. The experts at Databarracks can definitely help you with that. [Comment from Databarracks: Yes, we do this for severa organisations. Hosting-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud continuity is definitely becoming more common.]

 

If syncing in near time does that make it difficult to de duplicate across machines. E.G. if I push an update to a dozen application servers to you need to upload that data dozens of times?

Zerto uses a very efficient Continuous Data Protection mechanism that uses built-in compression, to replicate all the changed blocks in real-time to Azure. When many changes need to be transmitted you will notice a spike in RPO (to let's say minutes) and as soon as the changes have been replicated the RPO will return to seconds.

*Note, this question was answered on the webinar – listen to the full answer here: https://youtu.be/SgRtHe1mrZo?t=29m16s

 

If you are DR-ing to Azure then why would you use Zerto (and associated cost) rather than using Azures native Site Recovery product?

Zerto operates on a different level and uses different technology than Azure Site Recovery. Zerto operates as a single platform offering a consistent user experience across all of our supported platforms, it does not require complex sizing exercises, allows for application consistency grouping and has zero impact on the performance of the production environment. These are just a few features which make Zerto the optimal choice for DR to Azure.

*Note, this question was also answered on the webinar – listen to the full answer here: https://youtu.be/SgRtHe1mrZo?t=27m58s