HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use Zerto for disaster recovery as a service and site-to-site migrations. 

Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments.

The most valuable feature is the overview Zerto gives you, providing quick insights into where your VMs are and whether they're replicating. It's an easy interface to work with. Configuring Zerto to failover in Azure is pretty simple. The biggest challenge is moving from on-prem to the cloud, but that's not an issue with Zerto. The problem is the difference in hypervisors.

I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother. 

I've been using Zerto for about a year now.

I haven't faced any stability issues. The only problems I've had have been self-inflicted, so it's pretty good.

Zerto's scalability seems pretty robust. I've had a few larger VMs that have been a little troublesome in terms of the RTO, but they are also outside of best practices. There should be no issues with scalability if you're working within the defined parameters of what's acceptable.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I've used their support pretty extensively. I would say the majority of the experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. Their response times and issue resolutions are satisfactory.  

One thing I would change about Zerto support is the fact that you sometimes can't find the answer you need online. Sometimes, Zerto reaches out with an answer to that particular issue, and it's in a document that the customers can't access without going through support. It doesn't feel like that information should be limited to internal use. I should be able to find that online without going through a support channel. 

Positive

I've also used Azure's native Azure Site Recovery solution, and there are definitely some benefits to using Zerto, such as the fact that it works at a hypervisor host level over individual VMs with agents. The performance is probably a little better in most cases. 

Zerto is easier to use than ASR overall, but the setup is a little bit more involved. After the installation, the daily use is pretty simple compared to Azure. With Azure's native solution, there's a lot more that you must do repeatedly throughout the lifecycle of any virtual machine or system that you're trying to protect. Zerto is much simpler in that regard.

The on-prem deployment is super easy and works well. Migrating from on-prem to the cloud involves a lot more steps and things you have to configure so that it can communicate into the cloud and build everything that it needs to. That takes more time. It probably requires twice as much time to deploy on the cloud. 

We see the biggest ROI from Zerto's real-time test environment. If we want to do a proof of concept on a hundred servers, we can spin them up within a few hours and have them ready to start testing stuff with real data to see how that might look if we were to deploy that into production. It's an excellent, accurate test environment that we don't need to maintain.

Zerto's pricing is competitive, given the benefits and ease of setting it up. It may seem more expensive upfront, but you're going to save that over the long term by spending less engineering time configuring, reconfiguring, etc.

I rate Zerto nine out of ten.

I used Zerto in my last company for disaster recovery. It was a hospital, and now, I work for a bank where we use it for both disaster recovery and migration. We are doing a major migration.

Currently, we are doing disaster recovery only on-prem, but down the road, we will also go to the cloud. We are planning to go to Azure, but we do not know what we will actually use at that time.

We can recover a VM at any point. It probably takes five minutes, which is very important for us because if I lose my active node, I will have my production up in a couple of minutes.

We did reduce the migration time. I do not have a number, but it is better than VMware SRM. We are a big VMware shop, and we have now started buying HPE.

In terms of Zerto's effect on our RPO, I do not have the numbers because I am an implementation engineer, but the numbers should be good.

The migration and ease of use are valuable. It is easy to set up and easy to flip. We just need to click on Move. It can Re-IP at the same time. This is something very useful for us. Disaster recovery is also valuable. 

Its user interface is good. I have no complaints. The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA.

So far, we have not seen any issue. We will know more down the road as we use it more and more, but right now, we are okay.

It is very scalable. That is why we did not go for Veeam. We went for Zerto.

Our environment is very big. I work for a large bank. 

I have not yet called their support. I did not have to call them.

We switched from VMware SRM to Zerto. VMware SRM is good, but if I do not do error-level replication and I do only vSphere replication, it is not good. The vSphere replication is not as good as the Zerto replication. Zerto is faster. It takes less time.

I did not do the implementation, but my team deployed it. Because I have used it before, my guess is that it is not complicated to deploy.

We have seen an ROI. If I do a vSphere replication from vCenter to vCenter, and of course, we can do long-distance vCenter migration these days, it would not be as good as Zerto replication.

There is a lot of confusion with Zerto licensing. They have a migration license and a replication license. They should simplify the licensing process. 

The migration license costs a lot of money, and it is only on a one-time basis. If you use that license, it ties to that VM. I might re-migrate that VM in the next five to ten years. It is another environment, but my license is stuck there. 

The replication license is fine, and I have no issue with its pricing model, but they should simplify the migration license. It should not be tied to a VM. They can reduce the price because a lot of people do not buy it because of the price. A long time ago, Double-Take Software used to do what Zerto is doing now. It is another replication software.

I was not in that group, but they did test Veeam. I also used Veeam in my last job. I am not sure if I am qualified to compare, but Veeam seems to be for a small to medium company, whereas Zerto is an enterprise software.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten because we do not yet know everything.

We are using it to back up and replicate our critical infrastructure to allow us to replicate back when we are in a disaster recovery situation or a test.

When we were in a disaster recovery (DR) test, we could not pull back the data in a timely manner. Zerto allows us to pull the data back in a timely manner. We also can create better RTOs and RPOs. We wanted an RTO of fifteen minutes and we've managed that.

To be able to replicate back to production is the most useful aspect of the product. It allows us to do a disaster recovery test and recover within eight hours. I couldn't do that before.

I'm also working with near-synchronous replication. It's very important to be able to keep my production and replication in sync.

I like the idea of Zertos being able to block unknown threats and attacks. In fact, one of my machines had a little encryption on it, and it detected that encryption, and I had to go look at it. It was nothing, in that instance, however, it was a neat feature. We could see that it was definitely looking for encryption and malware on our side.

Our disaster recovery testing is a lot easier and is much better with this product. Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems. We're now down to five minutes, well below our original 15-minute RTO goal.

Instead of being up all night, trying to get data back, I would no longer need to stay up all night. I've saved about four hours.

The product is easy to use.

I haven't noted any areas of improvement just yet.

I'd like to see a way to do a one-stop shutdown of replication so I know I'm not missing data and can do my DR test. 

I'd like to get better recovery point objectives and get more data back from our DR site faster. 

The pricing could be a little bit lower.

I've been using the solution for about two months now.

The solution is stable. I have never had any issues. 

I have not tried to scale the solution. 

I have the solution for multiple locations in one department. 

I've had two cases resolved via technical support. They helped me resolve issues I had with the installation. It did take me a few tries to resolve the issues.

Positive

We have used Veeam in the past. It's pretty good for certain things. However, it was hard to get continuous replication. Zerto is much easier to get that constant replication that we need. In terms of speed, for Veeam, it's about an hour right now across our secondary data center. It's not as fast. We moved to Zerto to get more data back from our DR site faster.

I was involved in the initial setup. The initial setup is easy. Veeam had an easier setup, however, once we got Zerto going, it was easier to scale up and test. It's easier to manage in the long run.

The deployment had a bit of complexity. The problem we had was that the VRAs would not install and we had to turn off some security features. The ESXi server was not well documented. 

We set it up in multiple locations in one department.

It took us about three weeks to deploy the solution. 

The maintenance is simple. I handle the maintenance myself. 

We handled the initial setup in-house internally. I managed the process completely by myself.  

It's just been a few months. We have yet to see a return on investment. 

Zerto is a bit more expensive compared to Acronis or Veeam. That said, for us, the pricing was still reasonable. That said, we couldn't do all of our machines. 

We also evaluated Nutanix and Acronis.

We chose Zerto since it has very good integration with HPE servers. It's also an industry standard. Many people are using it. 

I've never used its immutable copies features. I've just discovered the feature and need to look more into it.

I didn't use the cloud while using this solution. I have used the solution to help me protect VMs in my environment. 

I haven't had to migrate data just yet. The solution has yet to help us reduce downtime. It also has yet to help us save time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We haven't had an incident as of yet. While it's saved time, we haven't been able to test all of our machines and all of our servers yet.

At this point, the solution has not reduced the staff involved in data recovery.

This product augmented what we have in terms of legacy backup solutions. It did not replace anything. 

My advice to others is to use Zerto for critical servers and things that need to be watched carefully for malware and encryption. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use Zerto to replicate our gold systems. Gold systems refer to those that require recovery in a disaster recovery environment within 24 hours, with a maximum allowable data loss of one hour. Therefore, the Recovery Time Objective is 24 hours, and the Recovery Point Objective is one hour.

I would rate Zerto's ease of use a nine out of ten. The setup of virtual appliances required for data replication is straightforward and effortless. Some of the automation and tooling, such as changing IP addresses or running scripts after a disaster recovery process, is also very user-friendly and simple to configure. 

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is commendable. Usually, the data is only a couple of minutes behind. Hence, we are not employing synchronous replication, but asynchronous replication proves to be sufficient for our needs. It does not appear to deviate too far out of sync or fall too far behind, thereby effectively maintaining up-to-date data. Near synchronous replication holds significant importance as these systems are our critical business assets.

Zerto has helped us improve our organization by enabling disaster recovery both on-premises and in the cloud. We are transitioning towards cloud-based recovery. Our previous solution, before Zerto, only allowed us to replicate data in our on-premises data center, preventing us from migrating to the cloud. Zerto has unblocked us, allowing us to leverage cloud-based recovery now. We were able to realize the benefits within three to four months. The implementation was relatively quick and completed within a couple of months. Everything tested well.

Zerto enables us to perform disaster recovery in the cloud instead of a physical data center, and this is the reason we made the switch to Zerto.

Having the capability to perform disaster recovery in the cloud is of utmost importance to our organization. We are implementing disaster recovery in the cloud to facilitate the shutdown of one of our data centers.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment.

The speed of recovery using Zerto is good. The automation really helps make the recovery quick and easy.

Zerto's overall impact on our recovery time objectives is positive. It is fulfilling exactly what we needed it to do, making it a valuable tool. Additionally, it proves to be fairly cost-effective and easy to set up and use.

Although we have not experienced an actual disaster, Zerto has been instrumental in aiding our disaster recovery testing. Every year, we conduct a DR test to recover systems, conduct assessments, and validate our processes, and for this purpose, we have utilized Zerto. The results have been outstanding, as Zerto has saved us approximately 500 hours of time annually.

Zerto has automated the recovery process by utilizing those playbooks and re-IPing. This has significantly contributed to the reduction of DR testing efforts.

50 percent of the time that Zerto has saved has been allocated to value-added tasks.

Zerto can replicate data rapidly and cost-effectively. We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud. We use Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, and Zerto can recover data from both of these platforms. Therefore, it is not limited to a specific cloud provider like the Azure Site Recovery Manager. 

Zerto has good role-based access controls. For cloud recovery, it allows replication over the Internet instead of private networking, which is really nice.

I would like Zerto to enhance the continuous backup aspect. If Zerto could replace Veeam from a backup perspective, that would be highly beneficial. Currently, we use Veeam for backup and Zerto for disaster recovery. It would be ideal if we could consolidate both functions into a single product rather than using two separate ones.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

I would rate Zerto's stability an eight out of ten. We encountered a problem once, but it was resolved.

I would rate Zerto's scalability a nine out of ten.

We previously used EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point. The reason we replaced them is that they utilized sand-based replication, which couldn't be used to replicate data to public clouds. As there are no sands in the public cloud.

Zerto's ease of use, when compared to EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point, is slightly better. For instance, during the setup process, we didn't require expertise in storage area networks, unlike our previous products. Therefore, it takes fewer skilled resources to set up, configure, and start using Zerto.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment took two months. We identified the core machines that we were previously replicating and gradually migrated applications one set at a time. An application could consist of two servers or even five servers. We can perform these migrations in waves.

For the deployment, we had two engineers, one support person, and one architect.

The Zerto team assisted with the implementation.

We have seen a return on investment.

Zerto is slightly expensive, but we do see the value in it.

We evaluated Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Among them, Zerto had the best feature set for near real-time asynchronous replication.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The speed of the RPO using Zerto is the same as our previous solution. We haven't lost anything, but we haven't gained much from an RPO perspective either. We had good technology; it was just limited by the cloud because there hasn't been any significant change.

We use Veeam as our backup product to perform some of the point-in-time recoveries.

We have only around six end users who log in to the console in total. Zerto is deployed in our primary data center and is also replicating to a secondary data center where it is deployed.

We have people who monitor whether the synchronization is proceeding well, but there is very little day-to-day overhead in terms of maintenance.

Zerto is a solid industry-recognized quality product.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery, backup, and ransomware protection. The 3-2-1 backup strategy requires us to have two backups of our production data on different media. One copy is on disk and tape backup, and the other is hosted off-site for disaster recovery. With journaling and the persistent backups we take nightly, it almost obviates 3-2-1 because it renders some unnecessary aspects. 

We adopted Zerto, hoping to speed up our recovery time and improve the overall security of our environment and data. We haven't realized the full benefits, but I expect we will improve our security posture and disaster recovery speed.  

Zerto would enable us to do cloud-based DR instead of a physical data center, but we are based in a very rural area of Colorado. We're deep in the mountains, so leveraging the cloud is challenging. We have little-to-no cloud presence, but Zerto can enable us to move our disaster recovery into the cloud because it is agnostic to the backup target. That could easily be a cloud provider. We only need redundant and reliable circuits to the cloud.

The impact on our RTO is theoretical because we haven't had to do any critical recovery. Based on our testing, it should significantly improve our RTO because the backup technology is more efficient than our previous solution. RTO is one of Zerto's strengths. Zerto enabled us to test our DR plan. Our disaster recovery needed a lot of help when I joined two years ago, and it's one of the projects I have been working on. Zerto is central to our DR plan. It's the primary cog in that machine. Zerto cut our hardware and maintenance costs by about 50 percent.

I like the fact that Zerto is target agnostic. It doesn't care what type of storage it writes to. The journaling is also excellent. You can easily and quickly restore to seconds before an event. The immutable data copies feature is one reason we adopted Zerto. That's one of its selling points.

Zerto is easy enough to use. It's as usable as any other backup solution. We're accustomed to dealing with complex options and everything available to us in the suite. 

I tried a file-level recovery, which should work on any server. However, the server we need to protect the most is the one giving us problems. We couldn't do a file recovery without restoring the entire server to a recovery partition that isn't part of the production and pulling the files off it that way.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is excellent when it works. I'm trying to be nice to them because I like the product a lot, but we're having a lot of difficulty with it in our environment.

There is a disconnect between the sales pitch and what we can do with Zerto in practice. We've been trying to reconcile that for most of the year. There should be more continuity between sales and implementation to ensure the solution is implemented how our presales engineer pitched it to us. 

They need to have some accountability. Maybe the implementation engineer should be on the line so that they know what is presented and agreed upon regarding the implementation in our environment. The implementation should have been precisely what we were expecting. 

I was part of the pre-purchase team as the information security manager. I handed it off to my infrastructure team to implement, and they practically had to start from scratch. Zerto handed it off to their professional services to implement, and I assigned the job to my team. 

There were a lot of questions and things Zerto couldn't do on its end. HP purchased Zerto as we were engaging with them. I don't know if that was related to our frustrations, but I know that acquisitions can make a product messy for a bit. I don't want to blast Zerto. It's an excellent product, and I would love it if it could work as advertised. I've seen it do some of that for us. We've had a rough start, and we're still trying to find that sweet spot.

I have used Zerto for nearly a year.

Zerto isn't reliable in our current environment. We keep running into these weird little issues. At one point, we didn't have complete backups on a couple of key servers for more than a week because of this issue. If we had gone down that week, it would have been ugly.

Zerto seems pretty scalable. We bought something that we can add on to and increase the horsepower. Every change we've made has been smooth.

Their support and account management teams have been pretty amazing. They are bending over backward to make it right with us, so they deserve a lot of credit for that.

We used Avamar. Zerto's recovery is faster, and it's a little more straightforward. Zerto is an improvement in RPO, RTO, ransomware protection, immutability, and cost. Avamar costs nearly 75 percent more. There's no significant difference in ease of use. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. After the deployment, there is a lot of maintenance. It throws out lots of errors, and we sometimes need to rebuild some of its components. Our backup guy is a little frustrated at times. 

We haven't seen a return aside from saving money on the annual license because we've had to invest so much time into getting it to work.

Zerto's price seems fair. It's competitive. 

Dell Avamar for Data Domain offers functionality similar to Zerto, but we weren't taking advantage of it. We also looked at Rubrik, but it's a cloud-based solution, and it's a little costly. We're not in a position to leverage cloud solutions at this time. Avamar costs too much to get the same features. Doing a rip and replace was more economical than keeping the hardware in place and adding the functionality.

I rate Zerto a six out of ten. I only give it a low rating because of the issues we've faced lately in our environment. If we didn't have those issues, I'd probably give it an eight.

If you plan to implement Zerto, I suggest double-checking everything. Confirm the configurations and ensure your backup targets are sufficiently sized. You must know what you want from the product, and that requires guidance from the sales engineer. Make sure the plan is solidified and you have a document that spells the whole thing out.

Zerto is primarily used for disaster recovery. In rare cases, it is also used for backup, but only for long-term storage.

We deployed our on-premises infrastructure in two data centers in Russia located in two cities, and multiple regions with combined infrastructure. We also had two data centers in Europe.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. When I started to pilot the product in 2016, I was able to deploy all required components in one or two hours without any help from Zerto engineers. I only used the provided documentation and user interface. In the years since my engineers have also had no issues with the implementation or configuration of the product. Zerto's ease of use is one of its best features.

To ensure good synchronization and replication of changes in a timely manner, we need to have a very good storage subsystem. In our case, we replaced our old storage subsystem with a new one that is based on full flash storage. After that, Zerto started to replicate changes at lightning speed. Many companies experience issues with Zerto if they do not have full flash storage. When full flash storage is implemented, Zerto is the best replication solution because it is highly dependent on the latency of the storage. Therefore, any kind of storage that is not based on full flashes, such as hybrid storage that combines flash and disks, is not a good foundation for Zerto implementation.

Prior to implementing Zerto, our disaster recovery tests had a 70 percent success rate. After implementing Zerto, all DR tests were 100 percent successful. This represents a significant improvement in our DR capabilities.

We used Zerto to replicate our virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery data center in another city over a single connection.

Zerto can achieve very low recovery point objectives due to its efficient use of resources and compression techniques. However, our company has different RPO requirements for different-sized companies. Since our company is small, our standard RPO is four hours. Zerto exceeded this requirement by achieving a typical RPO of about 15 seconds.

Zerto is a very easy and fast tool to use. However, it is important to note that Zerto requires some time to accept changes after migration. This means that if we do not finish testing within the required time frame, we may run into issues with storage space, as Zerto will continue to collect logs and other data. If the testing period is short and we are comfortable switching between data centers frequently, then we should have a very good experience with Zerto. Compared to VMware SRM, Zerto is much more reliable. I have never had any issues switching between production and the DR data center with Zerto, while I have had to start DR exercises from scratch multiple times with VMware SRM.

We always define and perform the required RTO values in our company. RTO is the time required to recover from a switch. It is about how long it will take IT staff to restore the environment. With Zerto, we can now do this in hours, typically one or two hours, for all switching activities. We have 70 virtual machines configured in Zerto, so it takes about one hour to switch all of them. This is four times faster than our previous solutions, such as VMware SRM or storage-based replication.

Zerto has saved us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes. It is very easy to use, so we do not need to spend extra time training engineers on how to use it. All of our engineers were able to start using Zerto immediately. Zerto is also very fast at replicating data. For example, when we set up a new replication, the initial replication was completed very quickly. Another advantage of Zerto is that it does not require additional steps to change the size of virtual disks. With our previous solution, VMware SRM, engineers had to perform additional manipulations in VMware when changing the size of virtual disks. This was a complicated process, but it is not necessary with Zerto. Overall, Zerto is a very user-friendly and efficient data protection solution. It has saved us time and money, and it has made our data recovery process much easier.

Zerto has saved us around 50 percent of our time.

The most important thing to me is Zerto's ability to deliver continuous protection for all data without any issues or incidents. Zerto is a rock-solid product in terms of protection. We migrated to Zerto from VMware SRM because we had a lot of issues with VMware SRM, including the loss of one server.

Zerto's price has room for improvement.

I have used Zerto for six years. 

I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten.

Globally we have around 200 engineers that use Zerto.

Zerto's technical support is excellent. When we first started using Zerto, we had Russian technical support to help us with some complex tasks, such as configuring unique virtual machines. Our engineers had no communication issues with the support team. Later, when we were in a stable period, global technical support was also very helpful. I cannot recall a time when technical support was unable to help us. Overall, I give Zerto's technical support five stars.

Positive

For many years, the company globally used a variety of different solutions for data protection and disaster recovery. These included storage-based replication solutions based on IBM and EMC storage, as well as special appliances from Dell EMC. For smaller companies, VMware SRM or VMware replication without SRM was used, with manual configuration of replication. In order to simplify and unify its data protection and disaster recovery strategy, the company decided to adopt Zerto. Zerto was initially implemented in a small region, the Middle East/Asia. After a couple of successful migrations of data centers in this region and a parallel unsuccessful DR exercise in EMEA, the company selected to use Zerto globally. Following this, smaller companies in Russia started to receive a recommendation to implement Zerto instead of any existing solutions. Zerto has been a success for the company, providing a unified and simplified data protection and disaster recovery solution that has improved the company's overall resilience.

We used one internal engineer to perform the initial setup on two data centers in two days. In general, this involved installing two virtual machines with Zerto Virtual Manager on each data center, creating the corresponding network access rules, and then deploying Zerto replication agents to all virtualization hosts. The last activity was automated, so it took about one hour to deploy Zerto for all virtualization hosts. The replication took one week.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto is a premium disaster recovery solution. It is not the cheapest option on the market, but it offers a number of features that make it a good value for businesses that need a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

I give Zerto a ten out of ten. Based on my experience with different replication solutions, Zerto is the best one I have used. I am very disappointed that my current company decided to stop using it due to existing standards. Zerto is not cheap, but it is very stable, available, fast, and easy to use.

The most time-consuming part of a disaster recovery test is the testing of small and medium-sized enterprises, business users, and other stakeholders. IT-led environment restoration activities typically take up about 30 percent of the overall DR process. Zerto can reduce this time by 50 percent. Overall, this is not a significant impact, and Zerto is a very stable and reliable solution.

Zerto has not reduced the number of employees involved in data recovery situations. This is because we have a small team, and we always use engineers to perform disaster recovery activities related to storage and virtualization infrastructure. As a result, we have not had to reduce the number of staff members used for these activities.

Zerto did not replace all of our legacy backup solutions. Our legacy backup solutions were dependent on IBM Power servers, which required corresponding backup agents. Zerto is not compatible with these agents, so we use a separate backup solution for these servers. This separate solution is still in use.

We have two data centers, each with its own equipment, servers, storage, network equipment, and so on. In each data center, we deployed two separate VMware vCenter server infrastructures connected using an L2 line. There was no L3 connection between the data centers. This created a flat L2 network with two data centers and two vCenters on each data center. After that, we deployed two VM servers configured for replication. This allowed us to have a highly available and resilient infrastructure in the event of a failure at one of the data centers.

Regarding Zerto's maintenance, we configured some monitoring for related Zerto services. However, we do not have any daily routine procedures to manually check Zerto to ensure that everything is working properly. Instead, our engineers spend one hour per week reviewing monitoring items and other metrics to ensure that Zerto is operating as expected. From my perspective, Zerto is a self-operating system that requires very little manual intervention.

Zerto is very easy to pilot. I recommend that any customer pilot Zerto before making a decision on whether or not it is the right solution for them. Zerto is a self-selling product. When I piloted it in 2016, I was able to install it in hours and start using it immediately without any help. I believe that a pilot is the best way to see how easy and beneficial Zerto can be.

Zerto is used as our go-to disaster recovery failover software for the replication of key systems from our main office to our main data center. We primarily use it to protect VMs.

Being able to offer the level of disaster recovery RPO that we do has been a game-changer. Offering that level of RPO would have taken other methods to accomplish, but this has been straightforward.

It has been compatible with our VMware environments as time has progressed. We started using this in 2013. To make it easy and even more seamless, they spanned a Layer 2 subnet from one site to another using networking strategies. That way, when we fail over a VM or an asset, it does not change IPs at all. It has definitely given us a level of recovery that we would not have been able to accomplish as easily otherwise.

Recovery with Zerto is faster because, in the past, I believe our organization implemented asynchronous replication and used replication methods that were specific for storage. Having synchronous replication and an RPO that is essentially nothing, between sites, has definitely increased our response time. It allows us to immediately fail over seamlessly. It has also reduced RTOs throughout, since the recovery point objective in general is just a second. The smaller our RPO gap, the faster the RTOs we get.

In terms of downtime, there was a particular situation where we had an unexpected double outage of our WAN link. Unbeknownst to us, both of the fiber runs, although they were from the same company, ran through the same place, along the same train tracks where there was maintenance going. We were able immediately to fail over to our secondary site and keep downtime to zero.

That was an outage that I now know, in hindsight, lasted a couple of hours and it was during the peak closing of the US market for trading. It would have cost us millions. It would've been bad if something had gone wrong, since we needed to trade "now, now, now," but would not have been available. Thankfully we were able to trade.

Another benefit is that it allows for automated testing and non-impactful testing with the ability to spawn VMs in a test. We can perform any type of DR and integrity testing at will without impacting our production. I can't really quantify it but I know that DR tests definitely move a lot quicker now. Normally, DR testing would happen over a weekend. And it used to be the case that we would fail over everything immediately. We still have tests where we do live failovers with Zerto, because they really want to say we have done them. But we have averted investing time in monthly and quarterly tests over a weekend because we can present the automated testing that happens by Zerto with that test network. Without that, we would have to do monthly live testing, so it saves us time.

The most valuable feature is its ability to do failovers from one site to another.

It's also very intuitive, simple, and very straightforward. Its layout doesn't seem very complicated. It shows its features upfront. When I first started using it in 2016, I had not heard about the product, but coming to this company and having to take over managing it was not challenging at all. I was able to intuitively start using it. I have not had any issues with the interface. It's a clean interface and that has allowed me to intuitively use and configure it.

The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor. The other option would have been establishing VMware's native HA approach, where you have to spawn new VMs. It's not as transparent as Zerto, it's more under the woodwork. Zerto's ability to offer that level of synchronicity and immediateness has enabled us to offer that level of SLA for our processes in case of a disaster.

Recently, I started to try to deploy vVols instead of VMFS volumes in my VMware environment and I did encounter an incompatibility. It seems that for Zerto volumes to be protected, there's some sort of limitation with drives having to be either thick-provisioned or thin-provisioned, I forget which. But there's some sort of inherent limitation that causes an incompatibility with vVols and VMware. That has to be overcome somehow. It has to be flexible enough to be able to do its thing.

And for an additional feature, and I'm not sure if this is already in the works, I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins. We have our three main ZVR appliances, each one of them associated with one of the hosts, but as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which. Better management of those ZVR appliances would help, if you have to vMotion them off of something.

If you want to migrate a ZVR appliance from one storage to another, you can't really tell what's what and there are multiple pieces related to this ZVR appliance. I would like to see that cleaned up a little bit with better management features for ZVR appliance maintenance overall.

I've been with the company since May of 2016, so I've been using Zerto for that long—going on seven years. Through the years, I have become a Zerto-Certified administrator because Zerto offers a free course on it.

It's very stable and very hands-off. I have so many other things to do and the last thing I need to be doing is babysitting Zerto, and that's not the case. Thankfully, it's one of those solutions that you set and forget. You pop in every once in a while and make sure the VPGs are still green and thinking. 

The only thing that has happened over the years is that the data store that this thing was on might have run out of space, but that was for other reasons. As long as you keep an eye on it, it will probably always be green and you'll never have to do anything.

I've been able to engage with their support many times over the years and I have not had bad experiences with them. They've always been very efficient and prompt in taking me out of very sticky situations.

Positive

We already have solutions in place for backup, such as Rubric. We used to be a Veeam shop.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

We have two environments, one in our main office and the other in a data center. We have virtual protection groups that protect VMs in the main office and we are able to move them from failover to the data center as a DR strategy. That will change in the future when we move all assets that currently exist in our practice office into the data center as its native location. For now, it's office and data center, but in the future it will be data center and data center.

Our Zerto environment is VMware vSphere 7, and ESXi 7. It's mostly Windows VMs but there are some Linux VMs in there. It's a mixture of thick and thin-provisioned drives, all on VMFS data stores. Those are VMs that it protects and that it is able to move from one place to another.

As for maintenance, Zerto is really hands-off. It's just the usual software updates and that's about it. 

I believe the next step is that the recovery ZVMs (Zerto Virtual Managers) will turn into appliances, so they will be full Linux appliances. That will be great because we won't have to patch the Windows box underneath. Once that migration happens, it'll be even easier to manage. The only other thing that I have to do every once in a while is when we have another VM to protect. I edit the VPG and keep moving.

We have seen ROI due to the lack of losses from downtime that has been avoided.

The pricing seems reasonable. It's still within what we consider to be value-add. Currently, we're running 50 licenses. We're probably going to downsize because there have been organizational changes in our environment and we don't protect as many VMs as we used to.

We have not looked to change over since I got here because Zerto has been that good.

We don't really leverage the restore point backup capabilities of Zerto, although we do, in our virtual protection groups, configure it to have at least two hours' worth of restore points since the last RPO. We also haven't ventured toward DR in the cloud, although there will be initiatives in the future, but it's just something we have not done yet. At least for the assets we're covering with Zerto right now, we've limited ourselves to being able to pivot between data centers.

Currently, we are using it to provide DR coverage for key assets, but I am also going to use it to move all these assets from the practice office in downtown Chicago to the data center, which will be its permanent location. I am going to leverage Zerto's move capabilities to relocate those VMs, Windows Servers, and Linux boxes to the data center permanently. And then I'll establish a recovery relationship between data centers.

For the cost of the product, its value-add, and the return on investment, which is twofold, you should definitely consider Zerto. The hands-off approach and stability of the product alone will give additional dividends. Invest in the solution. It's pretty great.

Zerto is a 10 out of 10 for me. It's one of the easiest pieces of software that I have to manage and one of the most reliable over the years.

Our primary use case is for backup and disaster recovery. 

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capabilities. The fact that we can have a clinic across the country backup in as little as 45 minutes is incredible. 

Zerto has enabled us to do disaster recovery in the cloud. This ability is very important because we have over 419 hospitals across the country and being able to quickly get a hospital up in Colorado while I'm in Alabama is impressive. The speed is impressive and it's easy to get it back up.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been fantastic. Coming from our C-suite level and getting reports of how long hospitals are up versus if we do have disaster recovery, the amount of time to recover using Zerto is fantastic. We can have them back up in as little as 45 minutes. I don't have to hear all the bad sides of it, they're very happy when the hospital's back up and making money. 

The other company we used before was Commvault, and we had had multiple issues with them with fragmented backups. Some backups weren't taking properly, and we did have a DR situation with them, and they were not able to recover all the data. That was our big push to find something else, and that's where we found Zerto. 

Zerto's ease of use compared to other solutions is a ten out of ten. 

As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it.

I have been using Zerto for around one year but my company has been using it for about two. 

The stability is a ten out of ten, we haven't had the issues with them like we did with Commvault. I have no complaints.

Scalability is seamless. We're able to add another server and within the hour build on top of that. 

If we're ever out of licenses, I could just send an email out and say that we need to add some more, and it's done. 

Our environment is large. We have 419 hospitals across the country. 

Their support is a ten out of ten. I have not had any issues with them. It's been fantastic every time I've had to deal with them. They've resolved all of my issues. 

Positive

The deployment was easy and seamless. We put in a ticket. They get our new servers added and within an hour we have new deployed servers on the solution.

We see ROI in the uptime of hospitals that had a disaster recovery scenario and how quickly they're back up and making money at those hospitals.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.