March 12, 2014 at 8:47 am
Our sysadmin is wanting to use a product for data replication and disaster recovery called Zerto. He brought me in to watch a presentation by one of their clients talking about how much they love this software, and afterward asked if I thought that using a product like this would work so well it could possibly even eliminate the need for standard SQL backups. Frankly, that idea doesn't sit well with me. The concept seems cool, but it wouldn't be the first time I've seen a product not live up to the hype in our environment.
Does anyone have experience with this product (or anything similar)? Currently we have two servers running SQL 2000 that we are working to phase out, a server running SQL 2005, one running SQL 2008, and two servers with SQL 2008 using Window cluster service. We are just beginning to set up SQL 2012 and looking at HA options since we've had issues with Windows cluster service. Everything is running inside VMware.
Thanks,
Andrew
--Andrew
March 13, 2014 at 7:03 am
Never heard of it. But my response to one these is always the same, "Cool. Awesome. Can you show me a recovery to a point in time?"
If they can do that. You're golden. If they can't, you smile, say thank you, and keep on doing what you're doing now.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
March 13, 2014 at 7:57 am
LOL. Supposedly, that is the purpose of this software. They claim you can roll any server (or group of servers) to a point in time. Clearly the client presenting the demo was very happy, but I'm still skeptical -- especially of a product that doesn't seem to be very widely adopted or tested yet.
--Andrew
March 13, 2014 at 11:40 am
I've used it, in production for almost 2 years now. In the interest of full disclosure, I also did a case study for them. What I can tell you is that the product does exactly what they advertise. It does point in time recovery (our recovery point is currently about 7 seconds for our db servers), and it is almost brainlessly simple to set up. We evaluated the product against VMWare SRM, and it proved to be a better solution from top to bottom. The failover testing is probably the best implementation I've seen.
For virtualized SQL servers, the product does a fantastic job. Replication does tend to work best through a bandwidth optimizer like Riverbed, SilverPeak, etc.
There are a few downsides - agent vm's required on each host being the main one - but overall, my experiences have been really positive. YMMV, but I'd definitely recommend doing a POC with them if you want to test it out. Compare it against SRM, and see how it works for your environment.
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