HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We do many data-related activities for various government ministries in India. We use Zerto to back up and recover data in many training and capacity-building activities.

We implemented Zerto to address challenges with data centralization in our complex platform environment. Previously, pulling data from a central source was impossible due to the need to feed it into an internal location before deployment. This limitation hindered customization and integration efforts. Additionally, integrating our primary data source, previously used with IBM, into the new platform proved difficult due to compatibility issues. Zerto's capabilities were seen as a potential solution to these problems.

The remarkable benefits of Zerto have yet to manifest fully. The software operates efficiently without significant bugs or issues, and Zerto's customer support has been responsive. While real-time reporting is a standout feature compared to other trial products, its impact on our ongoing projects remains to be determined. A full assessment of Zerto's potential will require an additional six months.

Zerto has significantly improved our Recovery Time Objective, particularly regarding project timelines. The expedited turnaround during critical project phases has been instrumental in streamlining our processes. By accelerating these stages, we've reduced the need for additional developer resources and eliminated time-consuming tasks associated with establishing essential parameters and metrics. As a result, projects that previously took six months can now be completed in as little as four. This accelerated timeline has enhanced profitability and optimized resource allocation, allowing us to maximize project revenue.

Zerto has significantly reduced our disaster recovery testing efforts. By consolidating software and streamlining processes, we've dramatically decreased the required manpower. Multiple teams efficiently utilize a single platform, eliminating the need for disparate services and reducing costs. This centralized approach has markedly decreased the time and resources invested in disaster recovery testing and pre-testing activities.

Zerto's greatest strength is its speed. We never encountered lag or interruptions, even when working remotely from home or other locations with potentially limited internet bandwidth. The software's streaming performance was exceptional, without buffering or connectivity issues. This was a primary factor in our decision, as Zerto emphasized its ability to operate effectively on lower bandwidth connections during the initial demo. Deploying the software in any remote location is straightforward and hassle-free.

The primary concern expressed by all server users is the lack of robust integration features. While Zerto offers some integration capabilities, the smooth and efficient data flow between portals remains a significant challenge. The support and technical teams know this issue and actively seek user feedback, but progress has been slow. The current process, involving multiple platforms and a database management system bottleneck, is time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, while reporting and dashboard features exist, real-time reporting and mobile functionality require improvement. The user interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly. Customization, a critical requirement for government clients, is another concern. Implementing requested changes is often time-consuming and expensive, hindering adaptability. Addressing these integration, reporting, user experience, and customization issues is essential for improving customer satisfaction and retention.

Currently, Zerto only offers an annual subscription, but it would be beneficial to provide quarterly and semi-annual subscriptions to help retain clients.

I have been using Zerto for one year.

I have not encountered any performance issues, such as lagging or crashing. The system operates efficiently and reliably under various conditions, even with significantly lower bandwidth. Zerto has consistently demonstrated stability and high speed, ensuring uninterrupted application performance.

Approximately 50 to 60 individuals within our ecosystem utilize Zerto directly or indirectly. Given its operational efficiency, which I estimate to be between 95 percent, I confidently assert its scalability. While we haven't encountered a scenario within our ecosystem that necessitates testing its scalability limits, its exceptional performance thus far strongly suggests its capacity to handle increased demands.

Zerto uses a ticketing system and offers support through a help desk accessible via chat or phone. A dedicated technical team is assigned to address customer issues, which are typically resolved within 24 hours. We have not experienced any significant delays in issue resolution.

Positive

We find the Zerto pricing fits our budget.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Maintenance is required quarterly. The Zerto technical and business teams collaborate with us on the backend to remove all the repeated queries that make the system sluggish. This service is charged additionally.

I strongly recommend that anyone considering purchasing Zerto begin with the 30-day trial, which can be extended to 60 days. This ample timeframe allows a thorough evaluation of all features and functionalities. Understanding Zerto's customization and integration capabilities to align with specific business needs is crucial. Had I followed this approach and shared my feedback earlier, the outcome might have been different. Therefore, it's essential to fully explore the trial version before committing to an annual subscription. Close collaboration with the Zerto technical team is vital to ensure successful implementation. While sales teams often present an optimistic view, real-world experiences from existing users provide the most valuable insights. I encourage potential customers to connect with other Zerto users through industry networks to gather honest feedback before purchasing.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and cloud migration.

We are an MSP, so we have Zerto deployed on multiple public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises.

We implemented Zerto because its continuous data protection significantly reduces data loss and downtime costs. In the event of a production issue, we can quickly recover using the user-friendly Check Point feature. Zerto also offers flexible support for storage models, primary and disaster recovery, and hypervisors.

Zerto's user-friendly interface simplifies data protection tasks. It allows users to create virtual protection groups easily, configure failover and recovery processes, and manage licenses.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication can replicate our primary data center services related to PR, which is essential. But somehow, we are facing some pros and cons on this. If we face any challenge like a ransomware attack on our PR site, with the synchronous mode, it is also replicated on DR. That can affect us. So, if we use an asynchronous model, our data will not be replicated continuously from the PR site to the DR site. There is a specific time bracket where the data has been replicated after a particular time frame. So, there are different types of business cases and business requirements. However, we are comfortable with the near-synchronous model.

Zerto helps us set up any disaster recovery site on a cloud-based model and establish an on-premises-to-cloud migration plan. The continuous data protection feature protects our infrastructure services from ransomware and other bugs.

Our virtual protection groups safeguard virtual machines across various models, including hypervisors and virtualized environments. When configured to route to our disaster recovery site after synchronization between sites A and B, VPGs achieve our desired Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective, meeting our Service Level Agreement. Flexible protection models range from 250MB to 350MB, with varying time slots to facilitate data recovery between the PR and DR sites.

Zerto provides two functionalities: live migration and test failover. Live migration allows a seamless transition of our primary machine to the disaster recovery site within ten minutes.

Zerto has reduced our RTO from 30 seconds to three to nine seconds and has helped reduce downtime.

Zerto has helped save time in a data recovery situation and helped reduce our DR testing.

It has improved our IT resiliency strategy by 90 percent.

The ability to perform disaster recovery in the cloud is helpful because it can reduce our DR footprint and time.

Continuous protection is Zerto's most valuable aspect.

Zerto can improve by offering bare metal recovery for our physical infrastructure.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable, and if we need to scale down the line, we know it can handle it.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We previously used VMware's Site Recovery Manager. We switched to Zerto because it is easier to use and requires less set-up time.

The initial deployment of Zerto is straightforward. We must set up a VM server and install the VR agents, followed by the PR site.

The deployment times vary depending on the business model, but for someone with full knowledge of Zerto, it can be completed within 30 to 90 minutes.

The implementation was completed in-house.

I would rate Zerto ten out of ten, but I would like it to offer bare metal recovery as well.

No maintenance is required for Zerto.

We use the solution to protect our general workloads, migrating VMs to the cloud and protecting VMs in the cloud. Our primary use case is to protect and provide DR.

Zerto has enabled us to mature our DR stance quite a bit in how we protect functions.

The near-synchronous replication works pretty well. Going from RPOs of an hour to five seconds is pretty interesting.

Zerto enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center.

Having disaster recovery in the cloud is very important for our organization as we're currently moving our production workloads to the cloud.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Our RPOs are getting lower.

The speed of recovery in Zerto is much faster than with SRM.

The on-prem to Azure, migration, and protection aspects are good. Zerto is one of the few tools that work pretty good and at moving between regions or clouds.

The near-synchronous replication is good. 

Automated protection of workloads from one site to another could be improved. For example, with SRM, you can create a VM, and it automatically protects it based on mappings and other factors. Zerto does not do this.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It can throw us for a loop at times and it can be challenging to figure out.

We are pretty large-scale. It's been one of the challenges, as it seems pretty simple for smaller scales, but as you get larger, it gets more challenging, which is where the automation piece and lack of that comes in.

Level one and level two are excellent. The development team is a challenge sometimes because they work four days a week. Sometimes, when we have to have a Dev escalation or a severe issue, it takes quite a long time to get a response.

We use SRM and Commvault. Zerto is better than both of them. Commvault is not great at Orchestration DR, and SRM locks you into VMware.

We were early adopters, so the deployment has been challenging, but it's definitely getting more mature and better as we go. 

We bought it from a reseller but we used Zerto services to get it going.

It has reasonable pricing comparable to VMware and others.

Overall, I rate Zerto an eight out of ten because it makes testing easy and provides flexibility between on-premises and various clouds.

Our primary use case is to continuously replicate our VMs to our DR site. Having the ability to recover them at almost any point in time, mostly back thirty days, is the main purpose of Zerto. 

We didn't previously have a continuous replication tool and now we have the ability to recover to any number of points in time. That's really beneficial to us. It cuts down our recovery time. 

The most valuable feature is how quickly it powers down the original source VMs and the speed at which it powers up the new VMs. The amount of time it takes to put up the operating system is valuable. The speed is what I like the best. 

The near-synchronous replication is awesome. When you get hit by a cyberattack, you never know where the clean VM resides, and at what point in time it actually exists. Having the ability to find the point in time when we are clean is a good thing.

We are going from a physical data center to a physical data center at the moment.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It increased our ability to restore at a point in time. We didn't have it before, and now we have it.

Compared to other tools, Zerto is a lot faster. There are tools with your primary block storage backup, but they're just not as fast.

I'm having a problem with CentOS 7 and with VMs with multiple network adapters. Zerto recognizes those multiple network adapters on CentOS 7 vm but it will not give me the option to specify a failover IP, for that particular VM. Something's not working right, but Zerto is going to follow up. 

Zerto has been in production for three months. 

It seems stable so far. 

The scalability seems pretty easy. 

Customer service is really good. Technical technical support is lacking. At least from who I've been talking to. Maybe my case has not gotten bumped up to the higher level technicians. Customer support is great, and they're really responsive but their technical knowledge is just not quite there.

Zerto's documentation is outdated. I'm finding it hard to find documents related to my questions. Their documentation is bad.

Neutral

The initial setup was very easy. We needed a little help with the initial configuration, but it was pretty straightforward. 

We worked with Eagle Technologies for the deployment. We loved them.

I wasn't involved in negotiating any pricing. It evidently worked into our budget.

We also looked at Cohesity and Rubrik. I don't know that there's anything like Zerto. We went with Zerto because our third-party vendor recommended it. We also did a proof of concept two years ago. We liked what we saw with Zerto so we went with it. 

Everybody taunts their one pane of glass but Zerto is simple to use. I really like the GUI, the interface is not too busy. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. We don't have a test network setup. I know with Zerto, you can simulate a recovery. 

Zerto would be a perfect ten if the documentation was easier and if level 1 support would be more knowledgeable.

We store a lot of raw data for reporting and use Zerto to protect that data.

Before implementing Zerto, we lacked a data protection and recovery solution, resulting in a significant data loss incident of approximately 70 percent during a past event.

Zerto is easy to use.

The near-synchronous replication offers a critical advantage for our customers' multi-platform environments by providing continuous data protection with minimal delay.

The main benefit of Zerto is that it doesn't affect the performance of the cloud platform while protecting the data. We realized the benefits of Zerto within the first three months.

Zerto's implementation has significantly improved our recovery time objective, allowing us to get our systems back online much quicker.

Zerto has significantly improved our disaster recovery capabilities, reducing downtime from days to just two hours.

With Zerto in place, our disaster recovery time has been reduced to a maximum of two days, whereas previously we lacked a recovery solution altogether.

Our disaster recovery testing with Zerto exceeded expectations. We aimed to restore all data within five days, but using Zerto's capabilities, we achieved a full recovery in just two days.

Zerto saved our staff three days of work, freeing them for other tasks.

Zerto's continuous data protection, journal-based recovery, automation, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support, and non-disruptive testing have significantly improved our IT resilience strategy. These features not only enhance data protection and improve our Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective but also provide the flexibility and scalability needed for a robust IT environment.

It facilitates a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, eliminating the need for a dedicated physical data center to ensure business continuity in the event of an outage.

Zerto was our disaster recovery solution of choice because it offers a cloud-based implementation, which perfectly aligned with our organization's prioritization of cloud-based disaster recovery.

It stands out for its user-friendly approach to data protection and recovery, allowing for quick and efficient backups and restores.

Zerto's pricing structure could be more competitive to better suit the needs of a wider range of businesses.

The setup process could be simpler. A more streamlined installation would improve the user experience.

Zerto's long-term data storage capabilities, specifically how long data can be retained and managed, could benefit from further development.

I have been using Zerto for ten months.

We sometimes face challenges that require multiple hours of downtime but it is rare. I would rate the stability eight out of ten.

Zerto is expensive.

The technical support is quick to respond.

Positive

Integrating the initial deployment into our infrastructure proved to be a complex undertaking.

To ensure a smooth implementation, we prioritized planning and engagement, starting with management and then incorporating other stakeholders. We piloted the project with the operations team for a month before a full organizational rollout.

The deployment took around one week and involved six people.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto provides a return on investment through the peace of mind we get knowing that all of our data is protected.

Zerto is expensive.

After considering both Commvault and Carbonite, we ultimately decided Zerto was the best fit for our data protection needs.

Zerto emerged as our choice for data protection because its feature set directly addressed the specific needs of our organization.

I would rate Zerto eight out of ten.

Maintaining Zerto is manageable as we have a dedicated team of three people responsible for its upkeep.

Our organization consists of 40 analysts in one site.

Zerto provides robust data protection and excels in disaster recovery for businesses, but its cost may be steeper compared to other solutions.

We primarily use the solution for data replication. We have it in Oracle. It helps with disaster recovery. We have a primary and secondary server and the data can move between the two thanks to Zerto.

Right now, I'm having issues with delays when archiving. We're facing issues with RPU and getting 20 or 30-minute delays. That's a bandwidth issue.

We do rely on the replication capabilities. When our one system went down, we were able to immediately replicate. 

It's a reliable solution - if we have great bandwidth. It offers near-synchronous replication. This is very important. We're a fintech company relying on Zerto for disaster recovery. We tend to only use the replication features.

We use the solution for immutable data copies. The 3-2-1 rule is very reliable. 

We can use Zerto to help protect our VMs.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. We have virtual protection groups and haven't had any issues. Our production server does need to be replicated in real-time, and everything else can be replicated whenever we like. 

It only takes five to ten minutes to switch over or failover.  During data migrations, our users can continue to collaborate just fine. It's fine and fast. 

The RTO is good. If a machine is storing more than two to three terabytes, it takes longer than ten minutes, but any time the storage is less than that, it takes ten minutes or less.

Our downtime is minimal.

We've saved a lot of time in a data recovery situation. 

We do switchovers from time to time to test DR. We do switchovers every three months. It only takes half an hour. It saves us about one hour at least. We can allocate the time we save to any other activity or task. 

It's reduced the number of staff needed for DR by three or four people.

The solution did replace some legacy solutions. It replaced small backup solutions. It's helped us save on the costs needed to manage them. We've saved around two resources so far. I'm not sure how much those tools cost. However, we needed four infrastructure and two or three database people looking after those. Now, we don't need to.

We don't have great bandwidth. When we don't have good bandwidth, it doesn't work so well. 

We're not fully satisfied with the support team.

The first time, it's difficult to migrate data. However, after that, it becomes easier. 

They need to give more options, such as more archiving options. 

The company has been using the solution for around one year. I've used it for three months.

The solution is stable, from what I have seen.

We have around 100 direct Zerto users. We have around 30,000 to 35,000 end-users. We have 10 production servers, Linux machines, five development servers, and five Unity servers. 

It is very scalable. We can scale up to 200 machines and have maybe around 80 right now. I'm not sure if we will scale more in the future. 

Support has dropped off. When I joined the organizations, they were very active. 

Positive

We also use Oracle. I used it in my previous company. In this company, we use HP, and it works well with Zerto.

Zerto is very easy to use, and the GUI is very comfortable. We can configure, replicate, and sync right from the GUI.

We have Zerto on an HP machine. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

Maintenance is necessary, and we have two people handling maintenance tasks. 

The solution is worth the cost. Having disaster recovery is necessary. If we ever suffer from a hardware failure, we can easily replicate in one click. 

The solution is a bit expensive. 

We did not evaluate other options. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

The solution was primarily used for disaster recovery for clients. If there was a major issue in the data center, it allowed the client to move to the second data center. It was also used for migration to virtual machines.

My customer recently (a few years ago), had a major issue in one of the data centers. It was a virus attack that destroyed the servers and virtual machines. We could not recover those servers or virtual machines. After that, we decided to remove the corrupted data center and get everything recovered using Zerto. We were able to do that with the agreed-upon RTO and RPO for the customer. 

The replication between data centers is great. It allowed us to ensure all data was replicated from one side to another.

The near-synchronous replication is great to have. It works better than other solutions. 

It's very user-friendly and straightforward. There are no bugs in the software.

The disaster recovery features are the best I've found. 

This product allows us to do disaster recovery in the cloud rather than the physical data centers. We have multiple customers who are on a hybrid cloud. Some are on a private cloud and some are on a public cloud and Zerto allows us to provide the functionality whereby we can cover both as well as across physical data centers. We use Zerto for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

It was nice to use with AWS. Everything was in place on AWS and the functionality is well documented. We've done a POC on it. We have not yet had a chance to do a real disaster recovery just yet.

Zerto has helped us protect VMs in the customer environment. The overall effect on the RPOs is good. We can do it at a maximum within 15 minutes, however, often we can do it within five minutes, or even one minute. 

The speed of recovery is very quick compared to other tools.

It's easy to migrate data with Zerto. It's simple. Even non-technical users can see what information is needed in order to enable the replication from one site to another.

Users can still collaborate during the migration process in Azure. It depends on how much data you are including from your data center. The bandwidth connectivity between two data centers is very high.

The RTO is pretty good. We typically give our customers a heads up it will be eight hours, however, it's often less.

It's helped us reduce downtime. For example, when I was using another solution, we wanted to restore a VM. It took more than eight hours to restore ten virtual machines. In contrast, Zerto only takes 45 minutes. 

We had a corruption at one point on 20 to 25 VMs, that were critical from the customer's point of view. They had already spent so much time trying to troubleshoot. We decided to use Zerto to restore the machines and give them the latest backup. We were able to give them everything in less than one minute.

For the customer to recover using a different solution, it would take much longer. Zerto takes far less time. For example, compared to VMware SRM, it takes almost double the time compared to Zerto. 

We've been able to reduce DR testing. When we used to give RPO and RTO time to our customers, two hours for RPO and eight hours for RTO, once we started using Zerto, we reduced RPO to 15 minutes.

It's reduced the staff time involved in a data recovery situation. When we initially set up Zerto, it immediately starts replicating and does incremental replication as well. Therefore, at any given point in time, the latest data is already available on the recovery side. We just have to trigger it and everything will be restored as per our configuration. We likely save three to four hours of work during the disaster recovery period. And, in the disaster recovery phase, every minute is crucial. 

It's also reduced staff involvement. It's not complex and very straightforward. Since tasks are reduced, we do not need so much staff. 

Previously, it was not compatible with the public clouds. However, now that it is, it's helped a lot. One of the most challenging aspects in migrating items from private to public.

We'd like to be able to migrate data without its operating system or any other functionality and without having to go through a virtual machine or server. 

I've used the solution since 2015. I stopped using it around 2022.

The solution is absolutely stable. We have customers that have used it since 2016 without any concerns. 

The product can scale. 

We haven't had to engage with technical support. 

I'm familiar with VMware SRM.

Not a lot of people in the market are aware of Zerto. They need to market it better.

However, Zerto is pretty simple and straightforward, compared to other options on the market.

Replacing the legacy solution has helped customers remove compatibility issues and reduce costs. 

The deployment of the product is straightforward. We have, for example, more than 100 VMware ESX-site servers and there are two agents in terms of virtual machines that get deployed on all of them.

To deploy the solution, it only takes 30 minutes. You only need one or two resources to manage the implementation. The maintenance is minimal. Once it's set up, it's fine. 

Our customers have witnessed an ROI. 

The product is cost-competitive and less than other options. I do not have too much data on the exact costs, however. However, we are definitely saving costs when we compare Zerto to VMware. 

My understanding is we have a partnership with Zerto. It provided free training to our employees and we have done multiple certifications. 

We did not use it for immutable data copies.

We don't use it for blocking unknown threats and attacks. We don't use it for security purposes. We have other security protection services for our customers, including firewalls and antivirus. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery.

I'd advise potential users to pay attention during the initial setup and watch what you are replicating from one side to another. After the setup, you will not have to put a lot of time in - as long as you pay attention during the initial phase. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use Zerto to back up our VMs to our disaster recovery site.

Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate.

The fast recovery speed is Zerto's most valuable feature. It gives us peace of mind to know that the VMs are replicated and are there if we ever have a disaster. We recently upgraded our license to include the cloud because we are considering migrating from our hosted data center to cloud-based DR. Zerto's near-synchronous replication has been excellent. We haven't had any issues during our testing. It has worked flawlessly, and we're very pleased.

It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script.

We have used Zerto for five years.

We haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't done a lot of scaling. We initially purchased a number of licenses, and we've kinda stayed about that number for the whole time. We're currently protecting 175 VMs, which is a small fraction of our total environment.

I rate Zerto customer service eight out of 10. It's been good. I haven't had to open any tickets with support, but we worked with our sales engineer to configure things, and it went well.

Positive

We've used backup providers before to do replication, but we've never had a solution that offered immediate recovery. We evaluated VMware SRM and some other backup providers, but none were quite on Zerto's level. The recovery speed doesn't compare to Zerto. Zerto is easy to use aside from the scripting aspect of things, but the other solutions aren't aren't any better in that regard. 

The setup is straightforward. We deploy an appliance, and it's up very quickly. The initial installation is done in a day, but it takes time to configure things exactly the way you want them, get the VMs protected, write scripts, etc. 

It's hard to quantify the return, but we can do what we set out to. We're able to recover critical services in a DR site. We haven't had to use it, but we know it's there, and we've done testing that shows it works. Hopefully, we don't have to use it, but it's a good insurance policy. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.