Larik-Jan, CEO of Fundaments, spoke with Cohesity and Zerto, asking them about their recent developments and plans for 2020.
Cohesity
Cohesity is the platform we use for many of our backups. Larik-Jan asked Maikel Kelder (Senior Systems Engineer) at Cohesity about upcoming developments. Maikel: “Before the end of this year, we will release OneDrive and SharePoint for Office 365. Teams will be added in the first quarter of 2020. That gives you the complete Azure stack. This is very important for Managed Service Providers!”
Regarding further developments, Maikel says: “We are going all-in on our App Store. It’s great that we can show trends based on functionality, such as behavioral anomalies. You get an alert, for example, if someone with a standard change rate of 3% suddenly jumps to 8% or 10%. That could indicate a virus infection. We’ve added several integrations like this.” Larik-Jan adds: “This is all included on the platform, meaning we no longer need separate licenses. This is all coming to the Fundaments platform.”
Zerto
Larik-Jan also spoke with Robbert Ravenhorst and Bas Welman from Zerto. Zerto is a key partner for Fundaments regarding continuity. We use it in two ways: for datacenter outages and for migration issues. This involves migrating to, for example, the Fundaments Cloud, and increasingly to the public cloud as well.
Robbert sees this trend too: “At Zerto, we see business continuity moving from the enterprise level down to mid-market and SMB organizations. On the other hand, we see cloud mobility returning, where Zerto migrates seamlessly to the Public Cloud, mainly Azure. We see a lot of growth there, just as we do with AWS.”
Bas adds: “Migrations are always technically challenging. It works a bit differently for the public cloud. AWS, Azure, and HyperV all have different platforms. There are still driver issues there. We try to provide solutions for all these challenges as best we can.” Larik-Jan: “You are the best when it comes to RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). What developments do you see here?”
“What we notice is that the RPO discussion is becoming better understood, because RPO 0 doesn't really exist,” says Robbert. “It’s no longer about RPOs. It’s much more about when you are able to work with your applications again and when your employees can access their data. Being able to access it is nice, but when you can actually get back to work is much more important. You simply cannot be down for a day. That means your people aren't working and you can't serve your customers for a day.
Continuity is important, and you can test this with Zerto. We can show and have proven that you can be back live in minutes or hours. That is just incredibly important. In the enterprise sector, this has been the case for a long time, but especially in the mid-market and SMB sectors, this is increasingly being realized because the dependency on applications is becoming more critical.”
Bas adds: “The technology is actually responding to that. If you look at what Zerto has been working on in recent years, it’s about making the RTO faster and increasing the scale at which that happens. The previous version, the 1.0 release, achieved 8 to 10 times more performance improvement for vCloud. In the next update for Azure, we are focusing entirely on Azure’s scale-out technology. So, using scale sets, work your VMs, queues, and things like that to get much larger workloads into Azure. Where we used to handle 20 VMs, we now do 500 at a time.” An enthusiastic Larik-Jan: “That’s really cool. That gives us at Fundaments the ability to move everything anywhere.”
What else we saw on day 3
See below for more of what Larik-Jan saw and heard during day 3 of VMworld 2019.
