The Check Box vs the Asterisk

One of the most powerful tools in the marketing arsenal is the check box.

• Does your solution do this? Absolutely, there’s the check box right there!
• Compare our solution to our competitors? See that, we have way more check boxes. They’ve got like ten, we have dozens and we add more checkboxes all the time! We have a whole team that check boxes all day long!

Sadly, our friend the Asterisk, is often missing in the data sheets and solution overviews but he’s a big player in the manuals!

• Not intended for production use or on systems that are powered on.
• Here is our list of thirty seven caveats related to the specific hardware, software, patches, configuration and phase of the moon that must be in place.
• Theoretically we do this, but we’ve never done it before. You’ll be our first client to try it and we’re so excited!

One place where the checkbox asterisk dichotomy frequently shows up, is when we are talking about Backup and DR to the cloud. Many of our clients are anxious to use cloud as part of their backup and DR strategy and there is no shortage of solutions with the checkboxes to support their ability to do so. Everyone wants in on the action!

At Prescriptive, we are interested in the checkboxes but we pay careful attention to the asterisks. More than that, we don’t just take what we are told and run with it, we ask the hard questions and put the solution through it’s paces.

One of the solutions we like quite a bit is Zerto. Zerto recently released version 6 of their virtual replication solution and it has several new capabilities and enhancements.

MultiCloud Capabilities

• Inter-cloud workload mobility and protection between Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud and more
• Intra-cloud replication between Azure regions
• Replication of workloads to and failback from AWS. This was already available on Azure

In addition to enhancements to their cloud replication and failover capabilities Zerto continues to make strides in the area of Data Protection. They support a broader set of file systems, improved performance and allow you to store up to one year of data.

Ian Evans, one of our Senior Architects, recently created a series of videos illustrating how to setup Zerto with failover to Azure. The series provides details about the components involved and shows the solution in action. We hope you find it informative and over the next couple of months we will be posting similar videos with some of our other favorite solutions.

Here is a link to the first video in the series.