HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We provide disaster recovery with Zerto in two scenarios. One is for our customers using on-premises deployments, and the other is for using the multi-tenant cloud. They're buying the cloud as a service, and we're also protecting that with it.

Zerto is primarily well-recognized as a leader in disaster recovery. It makes it easy for us to talk to our clients about the solution we provide them. Since it is Zerto-powered, we don't have to answer many questions about how it works, its reliability, or its capabilities. Thus, having name recognition, a positive company reputation, and technology benefits us.

The platform's ease of deployment and the ability to isolate failovers are key features for our customers who want to perform testing without interrupting their production environments. Those are the two primary use cases.

Our operational teams have discussed the ability to integrate multiple Zerto cloud platforms more seamlessly. For example, we have acquired 22 companies over the last seven years. Some already had it deployed, and integrating those existing deployments into our primary deployment is more challenging than it could be. We have provided our feedback to them.

Thryv has been using Zerto for about twelve years now.

As a product manager, I haven't received any feedback indicating issues with platform stability, which our engineering team would certainly inform me about.

We've had no issues with the product scalability so far, whether it's individual customers or even as an aggregated group.

The size of the environment varies. We have some small customers with only a handful of virtual machines and others with two, three, or four virtual machines.

In our previous company, we used VMware Site Recovery Manager and Veeam. However, over the last 12 to 14 years, we have primarily used Zerto.

We have our private cloud, and that's where we primarily use Zerto. We also manage some Microsoft Azure environments where we have sparingly used the service, mainly because the same functionality is not present as it is when using it in a private cloud.

Disaster recovery as a service is a significant component of our overall cloud services. So, the ROI lies in Thryv's profitability, as we offer a managed service that adds value to our customers and generates a profitable revenue stream.

The product's pricing is the one area where it is less competitive. However, we understand why it costs slightly more comparing the features and capabilities. Customers prioritizing price might choose a solution offering different RPOs and RTOs for a lower cost. We have provided feedback on whether there could be a lighter option or alternative that's more cost-effective for the customers while balancing cost and performance. It would help Zerto and us win more business.

The product is superior compared to the other vendors. 

We offer disaster recovery as a service powered by Zerto. We have multiple disaster recovery targets in the US and the UK and are expanding into Canada and Hong Kong.

I am happy that they've reconsidered the decision to stop supporting Hyper-V, especially with all the changes happening in the Broadcom world and customers looking at it as a solution. Zerto's continuous support is key.

The near-synchronous feature is a differentiator. Other platforms compete with Zerto, with Veeam being the primary one, trying to get the same capabilities. It is a key factor for clients who need low RPOs and the ability to protect their data with minimal potential data loss. It cannot eliminate the potential for data loss entirely and has a minimal impact. If the customers have a production-impacting event, their data is as close as possible to a mirror of what they had at the time of the production loss. So, it is a significant factor.

To some extent, we have implemented DR with Microsoft. It is less feature-rich and has a different implementation. We offer the service but don't offer much in the public cloud. Replicating out of the public cloud adds a whole other set of challenges. We can replicate it to a VMware-based cloud. However, no VMware tools are available if we want to replicate it outside of Microsoft Azure. It makes for a different recovery and is a bit more labor-intensive.

It has greatly impacted the RPOs. As long as our customers have enough bandwidth to transmit the changes across the network to our cloud, the RPOs generally take a minute. However, if the customer has bandwidth constraints, it can take up to five minutes.

With Zerto, recovery is much cleaner and faster. It's orchestrated better, and the testing capability within the cloud is a valuable differentiator. Unfortunately, we don't have many customers experiencing disasters, so our experience is generally around the testing component and making simulated or even full recoveries for customers seeking that. It has always performed well.

I would give it a nine for everything around capabilities and the product itself. The only drawback is the pricing. If we could get a better pricing model, especially in larger deals where we need to be more competitive for price-conscious customers, that would be beneficial.

Overall, though, I'm happy with Zerto as a partner. My reaction would have been different if the Hyper-V decision hadn't changed, as that would have caused complications for some customers. 

Zerto is our main application for curbing risks. We use it to protect our workflows on applications from threats that can come from the cloud and on-premises.

Before Zerto, our organization kept experiencing some attacks. Our data was not safe. There were frequent attacks on our data, and that is why we decided to deploy Zerto.

It helps to ensure that our organization's data is safe from any latest threats.

It ensures that our applications are protected. We have high-security firewalls that cannot be attacked or broken by ransomware attacks.

Zerto can block unknown threats and attacks. It has security measures in place to stop any threats that can harm our data.

When it comes to data capacity, Zerto provides an assessment of data replication that can be orchestrated to feed the data protection models.

We used to mostly have on-premises applications, but after the deployment of Zerto, we are able to move to the cloud and ensure that our data is secure from both sides.

When it comes to cloud recovery, Zerto ensures that data transfer from the cloud to our organization is safe. It cannot be easily attacked with malware or by cybercriminals. It is very important to us that our database is safe and the data on our cloud servers cannot be interfered with by external or anonymous users. It ensures that the data for the organization is channeled for the right purpose and through the right infrastructure.

We use Zerto to support DR on the AWS platform. The support has been very good, and I would recommend it. The performance has been good, and our data has always been safe.

I have not had any difficulties with data migration. Since we deployed Zerto, data migration has not been a challenge.

Zerto helps our organization to be in the right direction when it comes to data protection and recovery from both on-premise and cloud servers. When there is anything crucial or any challenge, their customer support team provides a timely solution, which helps with performance.

The recovery management has been efficient. We can use the tools to accommodate any form of data for future retrieval. Our data is safe.

Zerto has been excellent for our RPOs. When it comes to disaster recovery, the company makes sure that we have the right tools at the right time to ensure that we do not have any data recovery challenges across the enterprise.

Zerto has saved a lot of time. We used to take eight hours, but now, it takes us six hours to accomplish most tasks and projects based on the data flow.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. We have 20% less staff.

Zerto has also reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

Its user interface is excellent, and when it comes to data duplication, Zerto is very fast.

Their customer support team ensures that we get timely updates and provides status or data on threats to help us ensure that our applications are safe.

The cost of deploying and running this platform is also good as compared to other platforms.

Overall, Zerto is doing a very good job. We have experienced a few downtimes on networking. Most of the time, they come up with a solution immediately to sort out any challenge that may affect data flow or data migration. It does not happen frequently. We might experience it once in two months, but when we face any downtime, it does not impact the data. 

I have been using Zerto for the last six months.

It is a stable product. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

Their support is good. Their technical support team has been doing well. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We were not using a similar solution previously.

It was not complex. It was simple. The deployment was simple and clear. It took a few hours.

We had four people involved in its deployment. Overall, we have eight people who work with this solution.

We have seen positive returns on investment. We have achieved a lot, and our performance keeps on improving. We have seen an 80% ROI in the past six months.

Its price can be better, but it is not bad. Most small-scale organizations can afford it, but they can come up with more customer-friendly packages.

We did not evaluate other options. For now, we are okay with Zerto. 

Overall, its performance has been good, and I would recommend it to other organizations. It is a good solution that can help any organization to achieve projects based on data management.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and cloud migration.

The near-synchronous replication is valuable to our organization.

Zerto's immutable data copies three-two-one rule is great.

The ability to block ransomware attacks and help recover our servers is great.

Since we don't have a backup data center, Zerto's cloud disaster recovery is of the utmost importance.

The recovery point objective for our virtual machines is good. We haven't encountered any significant issues. However, there have been some delays due to the substantial volume of data being written to the SQL server.

Migrating data using Zerto is easy.

Our RTO went from three days to a few minutes after implementing Zerto.

In the event of a ransomware attack necessitating data recovery, Zerto would undoubtedly prove invaluable in expediting the process.

Zerto has helped reduce our recovery time from days to minutes.

Zerto has reduced the time our staff spends on data recovery by 25 percent.

The RPO for our SQL server has room for improvement.

On-premises to cloud migration lacks certain features, such as the ability to directly rename virtual machines. In the cloud, renaming resources often requires cumbersome workarounds like cloning and manual renaming.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

Initially, we had stability issues with the older versions but now I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

Zerto is scalable.

The level one technical support is slow to respond and we usually need to escalate our issue to get a resolution.

Neutral

We previously used Azure Site Recovery and switched to Zerto because it is more user-friendly with more features.

While the initial deployment presented some challenges and took approximately two weeks to finalize, subsequent deployments have been significantly more streamlined.

In the event of a disaster, we will certainly see a return on investment.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

Deploying Zerto in the cloud saves us costs on maintaining on-prem hardware.

We're a managed services provider that uses Zerto primarily for disaster recovery as a service. We offer Zerto as a DR option for our clients. Our customers in the Bahamas need a DR option outside of the hurricane belt, so we have workloads throughout the world to ensure our customers have somewhere to restore from. 

Currently, we run Zerto in a vCloud environment. All of the services are brought up in a vCloud environment. It saves us from having to constantly buy equipment. The vCloud environment enables us to spin up an environment as needed instead of having unnecessary hardware sitting there using resources.

We haven't had any major disasters that required us to use Zerto, but we perform two or three live failover tests with clients. Everyone seems to be pretty happy with the product and the turnaround time.

It's all about client satisfaction. They may not understand the underlying tech architecture, but they want to know how fast we can bring the environment back up. We can achieve fast restorations and restore sections if needed instead of the entire environment. It's been a great experience for us and our customers. 

The RTO/RPO times are fast. The speed is probably the biggest selling point for us. It's not live replication, where you have two sites up at the same time, but our customers like the fact that they can restore within seconds. 

It takes them nearly to the last point of connectivity, so it's seamless and easy to operate. It's easy to operate, and customers feel that they have a level of control. With some platforms, most things need to be done by the provider, but customers have a management platform in their environment. They can run tests without our direct involvement. 

Another advantage is the ease of use. You can click through instead of typing in the code. It's all already scripted down to the network adjustments within the VMs and the timed delays for servers that need to come up in sequence. Overall, it's a good package for us to use. We started using it in about 2018 and haven't looked back.

We have an issue with the management platform because we don't always upgrade to the latest version, whereas the customers tend to constantly upgrade. Sometimes, we lose connectivity because something isn't supported. 

For example, we have VMware version 7 update 3. This morning, a customer upgraded it without informing us. It's their responsibility to notify us because our environment is large, and we don't update every time a new version comes out. It's somewhat of a pain. 

In addition to data, the other thing would be the hardware versions for VMware. I finally found a proper support matrix, but we ran into a few problems in the early stages. I don't know how to address this, but maybe when the version is going to update, the client could get a prompt saying that the cloud location is not on that same version. It would be a more efficient way to tell them instead of trying to figure it out. 

It would also be nice if you could update without having to download a new installation file for Zerto Virtual Manager. Within the app, it could prompt you to install and perform the installation from within the application. Generally, it's relatively easy to use, but it gets a little complex when customers have special network requirements and need to customize how long they want the save points to be retained. We need to work with the storage team on the backend to see what makes the most sense for the client. 

I have used Zerto for about five years.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I haven't had any serious issues aside from the problem with version differences between a client's environment and ours. That is just a matter of striking a balance with the clients. An IT environment can't update too frequently because you don't want a change to break something. Unfortunately, you can't stop the customer. 

Support has been good about helping us troubleshoot those issues. It's easy to run a diagnostic tool and get the file. It's difficult to pull down a diagnostic file in some solutions because you need to do it via a command line. With this, it's just a couple of options you select. You run a diagnostic, save the file, and send it. 

Positive

I work on the cloud management side, so it was already deployed. I wasn't involved in deploying the cloud portion. However, I installed all of the virtual management for customers and set up the environment for them. That part of it was easy. It was a click-through thing. Most of the time, we'll guide the customer through the process, so they can see it as well. We show them the step-by-step process of performing the updates. 

Zerto is like a Ferrari. It's very fast but not the cheapest solution. You're paying a high price for quality and the assurance that you will have the environment up and steady. 

There are tradeoffs, too. Our clients spend money on licensing but save on equipment. The customers could either buy a bunch of equipment or pay for Zerto licenses. That's where we come in. We provide you with a cloud solution that doesn't cost all this money upfront. The prices could always be better, but we don't complain so much about it because the savings come from other places.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10. A lot of people are trying to convince us to look at VMware backups instead, but I don't see the urgency because Zerto works for us. I don't see anything on the market that can restore in seconds as opposed to minutes or hours. For us to switch, we would need something that beats Zerto. Right now, nothing beats it.

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery replication side to side. 

We were running VMware Site Recovery Manager and it ran well. It was a great solution compared to what we had before. We didn't have disaster recovery issues. We were just doing our test. It ran superbly. Zerto improved the amount of time it took to failover and address any issues. We went from failing over in about three or four hours during the test to it taking one hour. It was very fast.

It's in a single department in a single company. Luckily, we don't really have to support much of our field force. We have approximately 4,000 agents who are in eleven states, but we don't have to go out into the states. We're on in one building and it's one business unit. We manage the failovers but it's just one group management.

Approximately four users use the solution.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of management. It's very easy to manage. My team grew and a team member took over my role for Zerto support. He was able to pick the ball up and run with it. It was very easy for him to pick it up and go forward. I haven't had to do a lot of management of the product. 

Our RTO is between four to ten seconds to our site, which is about a hundred and fifty miles north of my location. We bought dedicated lines and we've been very happy with Zerto's performance. 

Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do.

The near-synchronous replication Zerto offers is exceptional. Our pipe is 10 GB and we haven't overloaded that connection. We are very satisfied with it.

During our test last year, we moved systems around for users to test with. We had some misconfigurations in the journal sizes, they just weren't big enough. There was logging left on some SQL servers. Our DR test lasted for three days. We had a dedicated group come in and test. We failed back to production and then put it in the test phase again. We did it all within thirty minutes, and it worked very quickly. We were very satisfied.

Zerto has had a major impact on our RTOs. We've been feeling the impact for a while. It's steady here. It's exceptional. SRM dwarfed as far as our targets for RTOs. 

Zerto has reduced our DR testing. It reduced the amount of time we have to test because it's so easy to failover. We've been very pleased with that. It's even given us the option of where we might be able to test more often anytime. We would like to get to a place where we test it once a month where we would allow some business units to test, and then do another business unit the next month.

It used to take us a week for the failover process and testing. The testing has been majorly reduced to where it now takes a day. It took a day to failover, to get everything lined up and running, and it never worked. We never were able to officially have a successful DR test. SRM fixed that and then Zerto took it to the next level. It improved drastically. This has freed up staff to work on other tasks. It used to be that we needed a room full of people for the test where we now need two. 

I don't feel like we're a big enough customer to warrant being called every week or every month but it would be good to get a little bit more contact with a salesperson or engineer group. Our account executive is very good. He's done a great job, but it was hard for him to tie down an engineer. It was a little bit of a strain to get somebody lined up to show us what version 10 was about. Once we got it, it was perfect. It would be nice if it could be easier to do that. 

They have VPGs and VRAs. The management of that when trying to do a VMware upgrade can get a little finicky. You have to bring nodes or hosts up and down where the VRAs are running on the hosts. Sometimes the VRAs won't come back up or they may not respond. So when you're done doing your work, it could be that you have fifteen servers that are not replicating. So you'll have to stop, delete, manually remove what you need to do, recreate the VRA, and that's easy enough but you have to go through and do that, and then resync. That's part of IT. They are a little finicky. 

Version 9.7 has been a little easier to work with, and it integrates with VMware a lot easier. It shuts down the VRAs. The VRAs are finicky about how they get shut down. 

I have been using Zerto for six years.

We've been very satisfied with the stability of it. 

It is scalable. 

Support has been pretty good and responsive. I would rate them a nine out of ten. They're good. 

Sometimes getting in touch with somebody is hard. We're not that big of a customer though. 

Positive

It's been easy for new users to pick up and it was pretty easy for multiple people to work within the UI.

I was indirectly involved with the setup. It didn't take very long, it was like doing an upgrade. 

You just build the servers and the proxy up, install the VRA, and then one by one had them sync.

Seven months ago we had to do a complete resync which took about four to five days. It was straightforward. There is a lot of documentation on Zerto's support site. My advice would be to get the documentation off their site. Open a ticket for support at the same time. 

We have seen ROI in terms of resources and time. For our overall management of the system, it doesn't require too many resources. The upgrades are not too bad. You may have to dedicate a staff member to do it for a couple of days. I didn't have a lot of experience with it and the two upgrades I did were simple.

In terms of time, it has saved us north of 30%. It cut down on a lot of manpower. There has been a reduction in our management pattern from other prior solutions.

You pay to play and it's not cheap but it's worth it. 

We know we have the capabilities to do disaster recovery in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center. We're replicating about 150 miles north of us. That's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years for us. We're making a pivot to where we know we're going to have to go that way with some of the cloud solutions.

We have not had to use it for data recovery due to ransomware. We have gone through the industrial hardening of our environment. We have been rated as very mature as far as our security stands. We have actually had some counterparts that experienced some issues and they didn't have anything in place, and it was very bad for them. Luckily, we have not had to use it in that capacity. We feel really good about its capability from the testing we've done. We know we can use it for malicious attack response.

We have tested it to help protect VMs in our environment and we have found that it will work for that. We got decent results with testing and I was very impressed.

In terms of it reducing our overall backup and disaster recovery management, it hasn't. We needed two staff members for the last two solutions we used. This year we will need three because I will also be involved with Zerto.

Zerto has replaced our DR and replication legacy solution. We're using Veeam for our backups but Zerto has replaced everything replication-wise. It saved costs to manage them by 20%.

My advice would be to do a POC for its concept and everything you get. Get it. Do it. It's a good product. I have friends that work with other companies that provide similar services and one of their engineers told me that you can't beat Zerto. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. 

Currently, we use Zerto to replicate our production visual systems at our disaster recovery site in Germany. This allows us to easily meet our RTO and RPO.

Zerto is easy to use. Zerto is the leading disaster recovery solution.

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

Zerto has helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication. Previously, we used to hire other providers for these services, but now we have everything in one system, saving us around 30 percent. For example, we used to have to keep a copy of our data on Veeam Backup, but now we can store it all in Zerto. This saved us time and money, and it has also made our IT infrastructure more reliable.

With Zerto, we are meeting our RPO better. Previously, it took us 20 minutes and now it is five seconds. 

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

In our simulations, we observed a reduction in downtime when using Zerto.

Our recovery time with Zerto is excellent in data recovery situations, such as those caused by ransomware. We can save around five hours compared to other solutions.

Zerto reduced the number of people involved in our data recovery by 30 percent.

The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation.

File management can be improved. Zimbra is the only platform that allows for file replication.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

The technical support is average. We have had some cases where we were not as comfortable with the outcomes as we were with other solutions.

Neutral

We previously used a custom solution, but we switched to Zerto to unify our systems and improve visibility.

The initial setup was simple. We were able to deploy one FPE every two weeks. One person was involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto, which saved us 30 percent of our costs and improved our disaster recovery time.

The price is reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we were confident that Zerto was the best, as indicated by the Gartner chart.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is deployed to replicate our on-premises and virtual infrastructure data between our two offices in Germany and Italy.

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

I recommend that new users take advantage of Zerto's flexible license program to buy one or two licenses and try them out before fully committing.

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's very critical for us. For example, with SQL, we used to use Always On to protect databases at the database level, to give us high availability and DR. But now, in Azure, we don't do that. If we wanted to do that, we would have to have a SQL Server on the protected site and another up and running on the DR site and those machines would always have to be up and running. To save on costs, instead of using Always On, we're now protecting the VM as a whole, thanks to Zerto.

It's also the main tool that we use for our annual DR tests for all of our production applications. Once a year, for one week only, we do a failover of those critical production applications from the primary site to the DR site and we let them run there for that week. Zerto does the failover and the DR site becomes the active site while everything replicates to the former primary site. Once the week is over, we do a failback and Zerto is the main tool that we use for that, and we repeat the whole process. We're then good for the whole year. Zerto is protecting those VMs.

Another advantage is that Zerto has decreased downtime for us. It could have been a situation where we were down for weeks because of something that Azure did on their end. Even though Zerto has a partnership with Microsoft Azure, sometimes Azure makes changes that are disruptive. There was one change that affected our ability to replicate our critical workloads and it was a rough one. For that week, Zerto found a workaround because they were not getting any progress on resolving the situation from the Azure team. Zerto applied the workaround in their code and we were good, but that was a rough situation. Zerto goes out of its way to help its customers. We've had issues but Zerto has been very responsive.

The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick. Our SLAs are 24 hours, but Zerto could do what we needed, on-prem, in seconds, and in the cloud, in minutes. Zerto is way ahead of what our SLAs are.

Sometimes we do failover tests to make sure that we will potentially have a successful failover or migration. It's very flexible and does its job very well. And one of the things I love about the product is that whenever you do a failover, it gives you the ability to either commit or roll back. Some of Zerto's competitors don't have that ability, at least in Azure. That's critical for us because after we have DR tests on a weekend, we have users sign off on their applications that everything is fine. If something isn't right, we can always roll back to how everything was right before we started the DR test. And if everything is working great, then we commit.

Since we are primarily in the cloud now, Zerto definitely needs to update its platform. When we were decommissioning one of our on-prem data centers and going to Azure, there were issues. And with Azure, it's still limited in the way we can manage our resources there. Zerto hasn't quite kept up to date with how certain elements run within Azure.

In Azure, there is something called resource groups. You cannot create a resource without a resource group. You can apply tags to resource groups and that tagging information is very critical to our company because we now have 95 percent of our production environment workloads running in the cloud. We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group.

When it fails over, it uses the name of the group that you created within Zerto. The VM is failed over with no problem in a reasonable amount of time. But the problem then becomes that the resources are part of a resource group that has no tags. It does not follow our naming commission for resource groups and then we're stuck. It's not as easy just renaming the resource groups.

These components are very critical for us but they are missing in Zerto. They're aware of it because we've had feature-request meetings with our Zerto account team. They're working on it for the next release and have mentioned that they are going to be making improvements to the product. But for now, it's lacking.

Also, a downside with Zerto is that there is a lot of management overhead when running it in the cloud. On-prem, we used to have one Zerto management appliance, but in the cloud, we have about 20 to manage to protect our VMs. Zerto has mentioned to me that, for the next release, they're building it from the ground up and it will be much better in the cloud, with more cloud focus.

Because of the experience that I had with Zerto running on-prem, where we only had one appliance in each of our data centers, I deployed one in Azure as well. Little did I know that there were limitations and that more appliances had to be deployed because of all the replication of the traffic and the number of VMs that we were trying to replicate. But Zerto stepped in and helped when it came to that.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

They're very helpful. They always want to understand your situation and, even if they're not sure, they do their best to help and fix the problem. 

For on-prem, there were always references, but for the cloud there is a bit of a knowledge gap. I would always get workarounds, fixes, or KB articles for on-prem, but the cloud implementation is where the documentation is lacking. But the team does its best. It depends on who you get. Some know Azure, or cloud, and some still lack that knowledge. But if they don't know, they get the right person on the call.

Positive

We were a VMware shop on-prem and we were migrating to the cloud from on-prem VMware to Azure, so the tool that we were using to protect VMs through DR would no longer work. We used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for years when we used to be solely on-prem. 

We started looking for a product to help and, at the time, Zerto was the one that stood out among the competitors, and it was a solid product, so we started using it. Zerto is definitely a more effective product. It is a lot quicker when bringing our VMs up on the DR side, and even when we do a fallback. And Zerto is a lot easier to use than VMware.

The initial setup was not straightforward.

And maintenance is required for upgrades when there are newer releases, especially when it comes to Azure. There are newer releases that contain fixes and improvements and we do update the version of the Zerto appliance. They are running on Windows Servers, so we also have to patch the operating system. In Azure, there are a lot of SKUs with different pricing. Depending on the utilization of a VM, we sometimes make changes to the family types to save on costs at the VM level.

I did it with our Zerto account team, which included our sales engineer. Just the two of us were involved.

Zerto saves us a lot of time. One team member alone can handle the DR test using Zerto, whereas before, when we used SRM, at least two or three people were involved from the VM perspective and from storage. VMware was integrated with our NetApp environment and that meant at least two or three team members were involved. But with Zerto, just one person uses the product for a DR test.

We looked at Azure Site Recovery. We were close to going with it. It did have the ability to do resource group selection, but there were two showstoppers at the time that prevented us from going forward with it.

When we were looking at Azure Site Recovery, it seemed that it had a better cost per VM, but Zerto was not that far off. And we were more comfortable using Zerto to protect our VMs than the other products we were testing.

My advice is that if you're in the cloud, you really should test the failover of your VMs. If tagging is not a key component, you'll be fine. But if it is, that is a huge problem. And expect a lot more management overhead when it comes to managing Zerto in the cloud.

In terms of our RPOs, Zerto is consistent. From time to time, it may run past our SLAs, but that's because there are network or VM issues. And that happens very rarely. It almost always meets our RPOs.

The ease of moving data varies on the size. A good thing about Zerto is that it does give you a little chart indicating the step that it's at in the replication process.  But even if it's a small VM, it does take some time, including setting it all up and starting the synchronization. It's not instant.

We are failing over approximately 250 systems. In many ways, this could impact 3,800 insurance agents across 11 states. 

There are two sites: the source site and the production site. Those are failing over to another data center about 150 miles north of my location.

When we went from the original DR plan that we had with Double-Take to SRM, we were able to fail over in an hour and a half. We did all the storage groups in bundles, and we are like, "Wow, this is unbelievable. This is awesome." Then, we went to Zerto, and it was like, "Oh wow, we can pick and choose how we want to do this." So, Zerto provided us with a lot of value. 

We went from testing in a week, e.g., we would say, "Alright, we are going to set aside Monday through Thursday to test all the apps which have been deemed 'need to be tested', and make sure for DR purposes that they are working correctly." We went from that to a day. We can do it whenever we want much easier than before. Instead of having to do it in a group, you could have it where there is scratch space and all the things that are needed, where all the changes and deltas are being cached. Now, we can do a small group of people anytime that we want, or whenever. 

We haven't done it all in a day. Our plan is to have it fail over where we can get it done quickly enough in that morning, e.g., if we have all the testing, testers, and developers lined up, then they can test and we can have it done all in one day.

It has reduced staff stress. We are not big on cutting staff because we run pretty thin. We have even seen growth in the amount of staff involved in backup and DR management. There will be two leads going forward, sharing the primary duties.

The most valuable feature is the failover testing and being able to do that in a granular fashion. We can pick and choose what we want to fail over and at what time, then how quickly it fails over. We fail them over into a bubble, which means our developers and other testers can go in and do whatever they want. They are not impacting production outside of the bubble.

The reporting function is a big thing that we like. Our upper management and execs are always like, "Hey, we need to report about what you did." So, we can print out a report that is 200 or 300 pages long, and go, "Here you go." It was a little overwhelming the first time they got it. They were like, "What?" I am like, "You asked for a report. This is the report."

For the last three years, I was a secondary admin. We got into a situation where they were like, "Hey, you're the lead. You need to immediately be the lead." I was like, "Okay, alright." So, I was able to go in and create the protection groups and replication servers. We run VMware so we were able to push that out to the hosts, uninstall and decommission stuff. I was able to get that squared away within a day or two. It is very easy to use. If I can do it, anybody can do it.

The Zerto’s near-synchronous replication is very important. We used to say, "Hey, if we don't have this and if the building blew up from a gas leak, then what would we do?" Now, it is not just disaster recovery, but there are departments of insurance requirements for federal requirements going, "Hey, do you have a disaster plan in place that will successfully run? Can you provide me with those reports?" It also checks that box since we have requirements that need to meet for customer data. They need to be able to retrieve that data, either at the running site or production site. Or, in the case of a disaster, we will need to provide them with that information. So, it checks multiple boxes.

You can create a VPG and put anywhere from one to 17 servers in that group. We build them one by one. If something changes in VMware, it would be nice to be able to go in and change that VPG, having it update without messing up. When you change them now, it only applies to the copies from the points when you changed it. I wish it would purge that older data from the past. Right now, we have to build a new VPG, which is not a big deal as it is just a few screens. 

We have been in the Zerto world for four years, and I am the lead on Zerto now.

Stability-wise, I would probably give it 10 out of 10. It is very stable. If there is something not running correctly, then it is an outside factor. It is either the admin or a connection to the other site. With the dashboard, it will show you that you have this many protection groups built. Everything is an individual green square, but when there is a problem, then you will see red. It is very simple. If it has a problem, you will see something. I have not dealt with a problem where Zerto is just not working. It is usually user error or sort of outage. It is reliable.

As far as Zerto replication and DR purposes, it has not caused us any outages.

I have answered stuff for Zerto before, and they are like, "Why do you like it?" We say, "Because it works." For so long, we had stuff that didn't work for so long, and this solution works.

As long as you have the license to protect the VMs, then you can scale it as big as you want. 

We are currently protecting 325 VMs. We have plans to expand in the future.

My dealings with the technical support have been top-notch. They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We had Double-Take and were replicating to a site with SunGard, then we swapped. It was kind of a nightmare for us to get it working the way that we wanted. I am sure it is a great product, but the way that we needed it to work was just not working. Then, we went to VMware SRM, which worked great and went off without a hitch.

We then wanted something with a quicker recovery point objective (RPO), and that is when Zerto came in. They allowed us to failover in a granular fashion. We could pick and choose how we wanted to fail over in DR tests. That is a big part of our DR testing. Enterprises want to be able to know that they have a successful test and can run in a failed over environment, so the test is 50% of that. The other half is, “If we had to declare a disaster, where would we be?” The RPO is two to three seconds with Zerto. I have talked to people with Unitrends and several other companies who say that you can’t get an RPO that low, but that is what we have. Today, it is very fast today.

When we need to do our DR test on a specific day, Zerto has allowed us to be able to do that in granular fashion. With SRM, you had to fail a group of servers over. While that may have changed, at the time you could only do them by storage volumes. With Zerto, it didn't really matter. It has been like, “Which ones do you want to fail over? Do you want to do just your SQL servers?” This has allowed us to have a more granular approach to testing and DR testing. It ensures that we can do it in a certain way and confirms that our actual DR plan is a good plan.

We didn't have anything that worked for so long. I think Zerto kind of showed up and was in the great spot where they couldn't be any worse than what we had.

I was not involved in the initial setup. This has been kind of thrown in my lap, and it has not been a nightmare at all.

The prior admin hired services for updates. Going forward, I will probably do them myself.

We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%. I am not saying that the products I mentioned earlier are bad products. They just didn't work well for what we wanted.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our RPO. It is a double-edged sword where our RTO and RPO have allowed us to almost not miss a beat. In a DR test, we are more staging and moving systems over, and this is more of a tactical approach. With some of the moves that we are making with SQL and using blue-green environments, I don't think we see a problem at all. We feel very good about it. 

We bought it through a reseller.

We are very fortunate because our budget is pretty big, and I am not making that up. Staffing may be a little thin at times, but as far as budgeting what we buy, the price for this solution has not been so outrageous that we don't buy it.

I think there is a support cost.

I was a big proponent of using SRM because I manage the VMware environment. Being a VMware product, I was more in their corner. So, it was mainly between SRM and Zerto. We also might have looked at Rubrik.

With other vendors that we used, we would sometimes start on the weekend, e.g., on a Saturday morning at 6:00 AM, then we would go through at least Thursday of the next week. It would be a long, arduous process. Sometimes, we would go only two days because we could never get past a single spot, then the entire test would be a failure. With Zerto, it has reduced our DR testing time drastically. It went down to where we think we can do a test in a single day. We were able to pull it off last year in two days with failover and failback tests as well as reports.

Zerto provides ease of use when building out jobs, then having them failover as you want, one by one or selecting five or six VPGs at a time. One of the big things that we do is with SQL. We want our databases online before doing any testing. There also needs to be domain controllers turned on for people to be able to log in. It is like, "Alright, we are going to fail over the domain controller." Next, they go, "Alright, we are going to fail over our SQL stuff." Before, when we had those SRM groupings, it would be a bit harder. You had to wait for everything to finish. Now, it is granular, where you can pick and hit one by one what you want. The database administrators can go in, and say, "Alright, we are online. There are three more that just came online." They are able to test it, and it just works. Having something that works was a big thing for us.

It has not replaced any of our legacy backup solutions. We use Veeam for any backups or system restores at this point. So, Zerto's role is just for DR.

We have luckily not had to use Zerto in a data recovery situation for ransomware. We have had one instance where we were in a spot like that, which was about two years ago, and we were able to restore it back with Veeam.

Until the last few cases, VMware support is some of the sorriest support that I have had.

I would recommend Zerto because it works. You will need to do a PoC first though.

Immutable data copies are something that we are looking into. For example, if I have a recovery point of two, nine, or 10 seconds, then we get hit with some sort of ransomware attack or something like that. We would like to have immutable data that is unchanged. So, we are looking into this feature now.

I am sure it has enabled us to do DR in the cloud, but we are not a big fan of putting that stuff in the cloud. We are not a fan of putting it on somebody else's computer if we can put it on our computer. We have been very happy having a DR site approximately 150 to 200 miles north of our main site. We are kind of running it in our own hybrid cloud at the moment.

As far as testing, there are probably 70 people who test.

I would give it a nine out of 10. It has done what we wanted. We have been very satisfied with it. We are Zerto fans.