City of Cape Coral in Florida Opts for Zerto

Zerto, Inc. announced the City of Cape Coral, FL has improved municipal efficiency by supporting major business applications using Zerto’s BC/DR software, Zerto Virtual Replication.

The city’s IT department has achieved its data center virtualization goal to reduce OPEX and environmental impact, while exceeding its audit requirements to protect key enterprise resource planning (ERP) and HR applications. With Zerto Virtual Replication, the City of Cape Coral’s IT department has also met their RPO and RTO for enterprise applications such as JD Edwards and Kronos. Additionally, they can replicate applications off-site to a secondary data center, and reduce testing and development time to support migration to their production environment.

The City of Cape Coral began virtualizing its IT environment in 2005 to conserve space and lower administrative costs in its data center. It also established a goal of virtualizing 95% of its primary business applications. After multiple audits of potential solutions, the City of Cape Coral couldn’t find a suitable solution that was efficient, and delivered within budget all while eliminating downtime by decreasing RPO and RTO. After extensive evaluation based on a recommendation from Zerto reseller partner, Alturna Tech, the City of Cape Coral chose Zerto Virtual Replication. They found it allowed them to achieve their data center goals while using their own custom hardware to increase their ROI.

Zerto Virtual Replication provides the city with a solution that meets RPO and RTO goals for each audit report. Software-based technology uses asynchronous replication at the hypervisor level to capture the data before it is even written to the storage layer in order to be the closest to zero RPO as possible.

The software also lowers the City of Cape Coral’s RTO in several ways
that reduce the recovery time of their servers, including:

• Putting the servers in affinity groupings that logically go together, either by tiers or by service or application support. Zerto calls these Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs).
• Integrating the orchestration and replication tools for administrative efficiency.
• Thoroughly and routinely performing failover tests to allow Cape Coral to more effectively manage all aspects of their failover operation and ensure success in the event of a disaster.
  

Fidel Deforte, ICT manager, City of Cape Coral, said: “Zerto is continuously providing new, industry-leading innovations such as Zerto Virtual Replication that answered the critical needs of our municipal IT environment, while meeting our specific criteria on every level. With Zerto Virtual Replication, we were able to provide instant data management solutions with minimal issues and overhead, while eliminating downtime. The fact that Zerto can be installed in any infrastructure anywhere and work flawlessly, while providing a smooth transition failover to and failback, assured us that our partnership with Zerto will be a successful one for years to come.“

Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto, said: “Municipal IT departments nationwide are increasingly realizing the critical importance of maintaining and improving operational efficiency by better supporting major business applications and protecting their infrastructure from failed DR efforts. Any downtime to a city’s virtualized infrastructure would likely shut the city down, which is unacceptable. We’re pleased to be able to provide Cape Coral with comprehensive, around-the-clock protection of their critical business applications across multiple IT infrastructures. With ZVR, Cape Coral’s IT department is better equipped to meet their critical operational requirements, while reducing variable capital costs.“