HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We currently utilize Zerto as our disaster recovery solution. With Zerto, we replicate production virtual machines to our DR site. This approach enables us to recover and bring everything back online in a disaster swiftly. Our recovery point objective can be as low as five seconds, depending on the replication point.

Additionally, we employ Zerto for scaling purposes and for conducting upgrade testing. This entails spinning up VMs in an isolated environment, allowing us to perform various tests. For example, a few years ago, we tested the upgrade of our active directory domain controllers. By validating processes within this environment, we can ensure their smooth execution in production. These are the two primary use cases for Zerto in our organization.

Zerto is very user-friendly. We can select the VMs by installing a small agent specifically designed for the host. This agent identifies all the VMs. Zerto integrates smoothly with VMware, which is our primary core platform. I believe it also functions well with other hypervisors, although I am only familiar with VMware. Therefore, the integration with vSphere simplifies the process of creating groups, runbooks, and other components necessary for building our disaster recovery environment.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication performs admirably. Many times when I check, we are only about five seconds behind in terms of production time. Of course, this does depend on network performance. There have been instances where the delay exceeded five seconds due to network blips or other issues. However, for the most part, we consistently remain within a five-second range of our production environment.

As a manufacturer, a significant portion of our operations relies on timely execution in order to ensure efficient production and timely delivery of our products. We closely coordinate with external partners and customers to minimize downtime and maintain a seamless real-time production process, which is crucial for us.

The ability to conduct faster disaster recovery testing and the potential for quicker recovery in the event of a disaster have been greatly improved. Before using Zerto, our approach involved log shipping and manual recovery, which meant that the best we could do was recover the previous backup from the previous night, assuming the backup was successful. This process would take hours or even days. However, with Zerto's automation, we can now recover within seconds—five, ten, or twenty seconds from the point of the outage. We can bring systems back online automatically and at a significantly faster pace than our previous manual approach allowed.

Zerto has significantly improved our recovery time objectives compared to what they used to be. Previously, we would have to restore from backups from the previous night and manually configure systems. Therefore, the recovery time objective has likely decreased from days to approximately an hour, or perhaps even less. It's challenging to determine the precise timeframe in a real disaster scenario since we conduct disaster recovery testing. However, it is undoubtedly much better than it was before, although pinpointing the exact time of an actual disaster is somewhat different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing from several days of preparation to just a single day.

Zerto is easy to configure and manage. The ability to quickly bring up VMs within a test environment allows us to test our disaster recovery functions and ensures that they would function just as well in an actual disaster scenario. This enables us to swiftly recover in the event of a disaster.

Zerto could be easier to configure when we need to perform data testing and establish network connectivity outside of the isolated environment. We encounter situations where there is a desire to test a printer during disaster recovery testing. However, due to the presence of an isolated environment, doing so can result in complex configurations. 

Zerto needs to improve its support for VMware Lifecycle Manager. This creates a problem with VMware's ability to automate the complete VMware stack upgrade.

I have been using Zerto for ten years.

Zerto is highly stable. It is rare to encounter any issues with it. Typically, any problems that arise are due to changes made on our end that may have inadvertently affected it. However, Zerto remains an exceptionally stable product.

To the best of my knowledge, Zerto can scale to the extent that we require. I am not aware of any limitations, as we have not encountered any thus far.

The technical support is generally very prompt in responding, and highly knowledgeable, and they will continue working with us until the problem is resolved.

Positive

We previously used Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and completely replaced it with Zerto.

Zerto is much easier to use compared to RecoverPoint. Previously, with RecoverPoint, we could only program-specific logs, and the VMs we wanted to replicate had to remain on those logs. If we moved the data off those logs, replication would be lost. However, Zerto keeps track of the VM regardless of its location, making it superior to RecoverPoint in terms of configuration and management.

Zerto is a more cost-effective product than Dell RecoverPoint.

The initial setup is straightforward. We need a virtual machine, install it, push it through, and configure it to communicate with the host for deployment. I mean, it's a very straightforward process. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The human resources necessary to perform a disaster recovery test are undoubtedly available. It is more economical than RecoverPoint. Now, it has been many years, and I am uncertain about the cost disparity. However, on the whole, there is a decrease in various aspects regarding the product's cost and the number of work hours needed for disaster recovery testing which is a clear return on investment.

The pricing is straightforward. We are on an enterprise licensing model, and it is based on a per-VM basis. We have the option to purchase them in blocks. This approach is quite cost-effective as we do not replicate our development and testing environments. We only replicate the production environment. Therefore, we are not paying for the entire setup, but only for what we are actually replicating.

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Currently, we have a separate product that we use for backup, which has immutability features. However, we do not currently employ Zerto for immutability purposes.

We have considered using the cloud for disaster recovery, but currently, we maintain the same hardware at both locations. However, since we conduct all of our firmware testing and upgrades on our disaster recovery site first, we have decided to keep our own disaster recovery site instead of attempting to do it in the cloud.

We could easily transfer data to the disaster recovery system. One of Zerto's functions is to replicate data from virtual machines or migrate entire virtual machines, although we haven't utilized it for that purpose.

The only maintenance required is typically software updates. Whenever a new version is released, we must go through the process of upgrading Zerto. Other than that, unless there are any issues, it generally operates smoothly.

We just need to ensure that we know the number of virtual machines we would be replicating so that we can obtain the correct licensing. Otherwise, we will have to backtrack. If we underestimate, we will need to provide additional licensing. It is important to determine this information upfront, as well as the bandwidth between our site and the replication location, as it also affects our recovery objectives.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery purposes. We do not use Zerto for backups, only for the redundancy of the data center.

Zerto uses a rapid user interface that is user-friendly. Zerto's Near Synchronous Replication is helpful for our 12,000 servers.

Zerto runs behind the firewall to help block unknown threats and attacks. 

The solution has improved our RTO and we rarely experience any issues during failovers. We use Zerto on-premises and Azure for the cloud. We have a very good RTO whenever we have a failover from Zerto to the cloud.

Zerto reduced our downtime by approximately 15 percent by increasing our recovery speed. Zerto also helped our organization's disaster recovery testing by reducing the time it takes to bring up virtual machines on the DR side to 15 minutes.

Because Zerto's GUI is user-friendly, it is easy to execute a failover, so we require 1/3 of the employees to perform the task during recovery situations.

Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover.

Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved. When we have a VPG, we typically have multiple VMs and more than ten terabytes of data. This can cause long failover times due to data limitations, and sometimes the VPG can become full.

The technical support response time could also be improved. We often have to follow up multiple times to get a response, and when we do get a response, it is not always from the correct person who can handle our case.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 3,000 people that use Zerto in our organization. Zerto is deployed in multiple environments and multiple databases in two countries.

The technical support's response time is slow.

Neutral

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

Zerto is more cost-effective than Azure.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

We wanted a solution that would help us reduce our recovery time objective, and Zerto does just that.

We use VPGs to maintain data consistency in our environment. We do this by placing multiple servers in a single VPG, which belongs to the same application or database.

Zerto can recover data quickly when the data size is under ten terabytes. However, recovery can be slow for data sizes that exceed ten terabytes.

The distance of our data transfers will affect the RTO. Data transfers within one region will be quicker than those across multiple regions.

We also use Azure Cloud and are currently migrating Zerto to the cloud. Both use a GUI interface and both have good failover tests.

I recommend Zerto but it does have data limitations when using a single VPG.

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and business continuity. We have also used it significantly for transferring workloads between different environments.

Zerto's Near-Synchronous Replication is very important and was one of the main factors that drew us toward the solution. Some of the other solutions now have a similar feature that wasn't available before or doesn't support RDMs that we use. Fortunately, we haven't been hit by ransomware, but if we ever were, Zerto would be a great help. The fact that we would be able to easily pick a point with minimal data loss compared to having to go to a backup is a major advantage. 

We have definitely been able to do some functions that we wouldn't have known how to do without Zerto. For example, we get hardware refreshes every so often. We are still using Dell VxRail, but for some of our clinical workloads, we created a new cluster for PACs and radiation oncology. We had to move many workloads from Dell VxRail to this dedicated cluster, which was traditional SAN. Zerto saved us in this situation, as we were able to start a VPG and move the workloads. Additionally, we have different data centers, and if someone decided they wanted the workflow to run in a different data center, Zerto saved us a lot of time by not having to rebuild the system. Lastly, it gave us the ability to test failovers with staff to prove that it would work before we had to trigger a live migration.

We primarily use Zerto to protect our virtual machines.

Before we found Zerto, our backup environment was so slow that it could take multiple days to recover certain servers. This was not practical, so we looked for a better solution. Zerto has had a much greater effect on our Recovery Point Objectives than we could have achieved with any other solution before it. We could have potentially lost a day's worth of data, whereas with Zerto it is only a matter of a few seconds. Therefore, for any critical workload, Zerto is the best choice.

Our only other option was to recover from a backup. We found that for larger VMs, it would take days to do that compared to using Zerto. Zerto would spin up in a matter of minutes, and with the recording running through testing, we had the actual times recorded that we could accomplish all the tasks. It was drastically different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our DR testing. Before Zerto, we never had a DR test plan. It is still a work in progress, but Zerto makes it much easier to test functions as we can get reports on the test runs. This makes it easy to hand over to someone explaining the details of how long it took. Whenever we have done testing, it has been easy to perform and not very time-consuming.

Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail them over is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live. Additionally, the support and RDMs, which many products do not have for this type of workload, are useful. Furthermore, the ability to easily move something between different sites and the general ease of Zerto is great.

Zerto's ease of use is the best I've seen. We initially looked at different options such as Veeam Backup & Replication and VMware SRM, but Zerto appeared to be the most straightforward. We have had other options come up since then, but they are not nearly as user-friendly as Zerto. Zerto is quite straightforward.

The only challenge we have encountered is with rotating passwords on our VMware nodes. With secure boot enabled, which is the case for newer systems, it is not easy to rotate passwords and we would have to reinstall the VRAs. This is not ideal, especially when our security team wants to rotate them weekly. Aside from that, everything has gone smoothly. The updates are easy and it does not hinder us when updating the VMware. The only issue is that we have to wait three months after a major release. This lessens the complexity of the update of the software itself. Other than that, there is no issue and it does not hinder us from running different versions of VMware.

I have been using the solution for over five years.

Zerto is stable and we have never had any issues.

We have not increased our original purchase, but Zerto would scale if we needed it to. As new projects came along, we were supposed to identify if Zerto would be a use case. We have enough licenses for everything that has been added so far. We do eventually want to go into the cloud and potentially add more workloads, and Zerto seems to be sufficient for that.

I always find the technical support to be quick in responding to us, and the issue seems to be resolved almost instantly. It has been nothing but positive with support. They are definitely one of the better companies to deal with in terms of support.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We had someone from Zerto come down and set up the system in just a few hours. They provided us with knowledge transfer on how to create VPGs and other items and gave us an overview of the architecture of the whole solution so that we were confident in managing it ourselves. We have done all the updates ourselves.

The full deployment including the planning phase took a couple of weeks and required a few people.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of a Zerto specialist.

Zerto has been more of an insurance policy. We haven't had to use it yet, but if that day ever comes, it will be invaluable. Zerto has already helped us in other areas, such as moving workloads, which has saved us a lot of time that would have been spent rebuilding and decommissioning. more of a safety net.

We do renewals and haven't added any additional licensing yet. When we purchased Zerto, we felt it was worth the cost as it would protect us from any potential problems and give us peace of mind knowing that any critical items could be recovered quickly.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

When we bought Zerto, our goal was to be able to failover to the cloud. However, we have not yet fully adopted the cloud, so we have not yet upgraded our license or paid any connection fees. Our goal is to upgrade the license once we are ready, but that has not happened yet.

Zerto's ease of use, and straightforward use, is the reason we chose it over other solutions. We don't want to be in a situation where, during a crisis, we have to hunt around and try to figure out how to use something. It's nice to have something that is straightforward and easy to use, instead of adding stress to an already stressful situation.

We are still using other products for backups. We have not really ever used Zerto for backups. I know Zerto has changed its licensing model, but when we initially started using Zerto, we had to license every VM for basic protection, which was more costly than other backup solutions. I know Zerto has changed and we can now buy a backup license for VMs. However, due to the time, we are locked into a certain backup product, we will look at other potential solutions when the contract expires.

We have Zerto deployed across two of our data centers.

We have one person that maintains and monitors Zerto with an additional person who acts as a backup.

The maintenance consists of updates and tweaking of journals for VPGs.

If we have any specific use cases that we want to discuss with the Zerto team, they will often arrange a peer meeting with organizations. Zerto did that for us when we were using Meditech MAGIC so that we could make sure that anyone else with experience running it could help us. We were able to do a trial run with Zerto to get confident. I suggest taking advantage of doing a trial to make sure Zerto meets our needs, and if we have any unique workloads, then talk to the Zerto account team to try to arrange a conversation with someone else who is doing the same thing.

We mostly use Zerto to replicate applications and database servers between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. We have a number of business applications, Oracle servers, and three sites that we replicate to our DR site, and Zerto works well.

We deployed Zerto on private cloud and on-prem.

Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution.

We use Zerto to protect our virtual machines and virtual database servers.

Zerto has reduced the staff involved in the data recovery situation because we don't need to involve the backup team. We only require a couple of people to do a failover.

As our backup is managed by a separate team, we can use Disaster Recovery without involving the virtualization team. We do not need to involve the storage or backup teams, as Zerto takes care of all that. Therefore, only one or two people are needed for overall backup and management.

I appreciate Zerto's near synchronous replication, point-in-time restore, brick-level restore, and file-level restore features. We haven't had to use the feature in a real disaster recovery scenario yet, but we tested it thoroughly. The only manual part was changing the DNS from the production IP to the DR IP. Everything else worked perfectly. 

Zerto is user-friendly.

It would be beneficial if we could gain insight into DNS record reporting from the DR side, however, this is not a realistic expectation due to the fact that different companies use different hardware and different methods of DNS management. It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic expectation as these products are usually managed by the middleware or a network team, which has no relation to their application.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is certainly scalable and easy to deploy. We do not use as many licenses as they have available, but we are in the process of rolling Zerto out to all business users and applications.

Zerto's technical support is great.

Positive

We previously used SAN replication and storage replication. We also used some products from Veritas, but now we use Zerto, which is easier to set up. Zerto is great.

The initial setup is straightforward. I had no prior knowledge of Zerto when we first deployed the solution, so I had a few conversations with engineers, but other than that, it was relatively easy to learn and I was able to understand the whole process. The deployment took less than two weeks to complete.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Zerto is a great solution that does exactly what it advertises and I definitely recommend it.

Zerto requires regular updates and maintenance. However, it is mostly a "set and forget" system, which is very convenient. This allows me to focus on other tasks.

Zerto has its own use cases, so we cannot replicate an entire site, but if we have to select certain products or applications that need to be replicated, such as a DR site, then it is an excellent solution to use. However, Zerto is not suitable for everyone and it would be difficult to do it on a large scale. For specific applications, it is great. I could not replicate my whole data center with Zerto, as it would be too complex. Nevertheless, Zerto is great for certain applications.

Our biggest use case is real-time replication to a secondary site in case of the need for a disaster failover. We also use it for file-level protection and restore, but the main purpose is to help add another layer of protection in the event of a disaster.

The biggest improvement we have seen is that Zerto has taken our anticipated recovery time from between hours and days down to seconds or a minute. Zerto has also helped us to protect VMs, and the effect on our RPOs has been incredible. Pre-Zerto, it was days if not weeks. Now it's six seconds. I don't even know if you could compare it to the RPO of our old solution. It's 100x. If we were to recover using our old system, we would lose between a day and a week's worth of data. With this, we lose virtually none.

And in terms of our RTO, recovering and validating the system has gone from between hours and days, to now happening in a matter of 30 minutes to a few hours. It has helped reduce downtime by days. Similarly, our DR testing has gone from being a multi-day process to a multi-hour process, and we use almost all of that time we save for bolstering value in other projects.

As for the number of staff involved in our backup and DR management operations, Zerto has helped us decrease it.

It has also allowed us to locate our DR in the cloud. We currently use Azure, and this ability is incredibly important as it has enabled us to reposition our resources in an environment that is separate from our main environment.

The most valuable features for us are the analytics and reporting. Being able to see a snapshot of our environment, and knowing where we stand in our recovery atmosphere using Zerto, are really valuable aspects.

The near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10.

We also use Zerto for immutable data copies. We have two recovery locations and both of them are immutable, both for short-term and long-term recovery. Using this component has essentially enabled implementation of the 3-2-1 rule for us. Zerto has been pivotal in that process. Before that, the process hadn't changed in about a decade and a half. This enabled us to take a leap into the 21st century in that facet.

Zerto's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms. Zerto does have an API, but a lot of those automation platforms have prebuilt runbooks to enable that process, whereas Zerto does not.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's incredibly stable, to the point that we don't have to second-guess whether it is functioning properly.

Its scalability is infinite. We have yet to run into an issue of resource allocation or scalability.

Their support is very good. Debatably, it's the best support we have seen out of all of our vendors.

Positive

One of our previous solutions was VMware Site Recovery Manager. We switched because we have some servers that have a lot of transactions and we weren't able to afford to lose even an hour's worth of data. Zerto takes that potential data loss down to seconds.

And Zerto is much easier to use.

Our deployment is both on-prem and, for replication, in Azure. The initial setup was straightforward. There was a learning curve in transitioning from our old environment, but it didn't take very long to learn.

It took us about a month to fully deploy.

Outside of updates, it doesn't require any maintenance.

We did it in-house with support from Zerto when needed. On our side there were two or three people involved, but it was primarily done by me.

It's expensive, for sure, but for us, it comes down to the fact that we do not replicate our entire environment using Zerto. We replicate the mission-critical servers and services, so the yearly cost of Zerto is heavily outweighed by the potential cost of an outage. It's expensive but worth it.

We very briefly looked at solutions such as Veeam and the option of continuing to use VMware SRM. The biggest difference was the de-snapshotting of the environment into journals with extremely low RPOs, versus scheduling a snap at a certain time.

Overall, Zerto is pricey and it fulfills a very specific need, but it is incredibly worth the investment if uptime and recoverability are priorities.

Our use case has evolved over the years. Initially, we strictly used Zerto for its original purpose: continuous replication of our virtual machines. We had a ransomware attack and needed to instantly restore virtual machines on or off-site without too much aggravation. That has been successful. The product expanded since then, and we're using many other features now.

We haven't replaced our other backup solutions yet, but we're considering it. I need to do some more testing of my databases and mail servers. It depends on how we utilize the cloud in the business. We're currently using an on-prem data center with a reserve disaster recovery site, but we're contemplating a transition to Azure. For example, if we are using Exchange Online, I'll need to find an appropriate backup solution. It may be something in the Azure stack, but I don't know yet.

We plan to use Zerto for cloud disaster recovery eventually. I'm in an upgrade cycle because I need to upgrade various backend elements to put me on 9.5, which I think is the latest release. That will give me immutable storage and benefits like single sign-on and multifactor authentication, which insurance companies increasingly request for all our applications. I plan to start shifting workloads into the cloud, and Zerto is one of the tools that will help me with that.

Zerto is deployed across my organization's entire computing infrastructure. We've got several different departments in the firm, so it handles many workloads. That sits on a Windows environment, and it replicates a data center where we just buy some shelving space. Including equity partners, consultants, and other visiting members of staff, we have around 250 users over seven sites.

Zerto is the ideal solution from a technical perspective. I have confidence that I can quickly and effortlessly restore data and train my IT colleagues to do the same. Ultimately, the benefit to the firm is knowing that everything's protected. My colleagues don't need to dive deeply into what I do because it's my specialty. It has been a massive game-changer to have that confidence in data recoverability. The rest of the firm considers it part of the suite of tools I've implemented. 

I've been working in IT for nearly 30 years. In the old days, you would need to know precisely the configuration, whereas now you only have to press a few buttons, and you're in the same situation that you would've been after maybe hours or days in the past. That's happened in a short period of my career. 

We've seen a massive improvement in our RPOs. It used to take hours, if not days. When I started working here 17 years ago, recovery took weeks because of the lack of preparation. Now, it's done in a matter of minutes. You've got to practice it, and the Zerto tool has a timer where it asks you to check your DR every six months. I do that religiously. The RPO is theoretically in minutes, but I've never had to do it. 

Zerto has also had an overall positive impact on RTOs. You don't need to maintain a massive set of documents to recover your systems. You can spin them all back up in your reserve site. Obviously, you must do them in the correct order. Then, you can then test your functionality, and you should be good to go. It massively reduced our RTOs.

Our RPO went down by about four hours, and the recovery time may have gone down from five or six hours to less than an hour. Some firms that invest in this can get it a lot lower than that, but I would say we're well below an hour now to restore the entire system.

Downtime comes in so many varieties, and you need a Swiss Army knife with the tools you need to deal with them all. Zerto is only one piece of a toolset I use, but it's one of the major elements. It offers the basic flexibility to have different destinations for your data and the ability to spin it up quickly. When recovering from a disaster, you typically deal with an issue you've never seen before.

Sometimes, you might have a failure that only affects a third of your network, or it's a ransomware attack that only affects specific VMs. You have no idea what will hit, so flexibility is essential. You need to be able to do it and get on with trying to recover your data rather than having to remind yourself how to do it. I've had to do that a few times with software. You practice it because you can't remember it, whereas you don't need to do that with Zerto.

The cost of downtime is hard to quantify with a law firm. There's an evident revenue impact when the system is not running. It means people are not earning fees because we're a professional services firm. However, the effect's size depends on the disaster type and how long you are down. If you're down for weeks, that will damage your reputation, which is everything in the legal field. It's a massive advantage if we can get our services online quickly. 

The solution has also reduced our DR testing time considerably. You're prompted to test every six months, and I can run through the test in a couple of clicks. I go into the reserve site and ensure the servers are spun up. I verified that all the services are running as expected, and they can see each other. Completing the test cycle takes me maybe 30 minutes.

Previously, it might have taken a few days to do a disaster recovery trial because I had no way to restore data accurately without affecting the live data. Zerto creates a sandbox environment where you can test without affecting operations. In the past, I might have needed to disrupt business for a couple of days to run a full test. 

I can allocate that saved time to more valuable tasks. When I'm not maintaining the system, my role is to be a Solutions Architect, deliver new projects, and provide third-line support to help users with their day-to-day tasks. Zerto frees me up to concentrate on developing my team and working on value-added business projects. I estimate that it reduced my system management overhead by 15 percent. 

I can't say with certainty that it would reduce the staff need in a real-life disaster recovery situation because we never know what we'll get. We take disaster recovery seriously because we don't see the form disaster will take. People from marketing will be involved in communicating with our client base. Elements of management need to intervene to ensure the staff members are safe. "Disaster" is such a broad term. You could have a fire in one of your buildings or a ransomware attack. However, it would be easy for me to perform the disaster recovery by myself from the Zerto control panel.

Continuous replication is the primary feature we use now because we originally purchased Zerto. I'm starting to utilize the long-term retention and instantaneous file restoration features, which have been introduced since the original purchase in 2015. Initially, we deployed Zerto as a second data storage point, but ultimately it will probably facilitate some of the migration of my workloads up to the cloud. It's evolving with the network and how we deliver computation.

Near-synchronous replication is handy for instantaneous file restores. Over the next few years, I think I will have to be more flexible about how I run my network. We're transitioning from an on-premises to a hybrid setup and, finally, a cloud environment. It's crucial to have the ability to move around data recovery points, some of which are local, and it's becoming increasingly important as we move away from traditional backups. 

Currently, I'm still maintaining another backup regime due to the complexity of recovering some of my applications. Near-synchronous replication isn't one of the most vital factors yet. Continuous replication to remote sites is the primary concern and reason for the purchase. We are waiting to upgrade to version 9.5 before we start using immutable data copies, but I'm excited about that feature. Immutable backups will be a real game-changer because we'll have an incorruptible backup sitting in the background.

It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

The stability is excellent. I've never had a problem with it.

The scalability's been fine. I increased my licenses from 20 to 35 or 40. It scales horizontally too. I used to replicate to one destination: my data center. Now I replicate to two destinations, and I'm starting to replicate into Azure Blob storage, as well.

I rate Zerto's support 10 out of 10. They always answer my questions, but I have very few issues because it's so simple and flexible to use. It's well thought out. Software often isn't designed with the user in mind, but this one has been. It's aimed at the right professional level. It's obvious if you've got enough technical knowledge. It's so robust and easy to use that I rarely contact technical support.

Positive

I did use a different solution that was part of the EMC stack for my storage area networks. Zerto is probably 10 times easier to use. When you work for a small or medium-sized organization, you aren't generally exposed to a variety of solutions because there are higher opportunity costs for time spent learning and setting it up. 

When I was doing the assessment, I got some experience with SAN-based recovery tools integrated with VMware, but those didn't seem to work well. Zerto is simple and actually works. 

I purchased Zerto to simplify installation and configuration. I set aside a couple of weeks to install it, and I managed to do it in one afternoon. Managing the solution is pretty straightforward for someone with technical skills and experience. I find it simple to use, which is one of the reasons I like it. A lot of the products in the legal sector where I work are incredibly complicated and hard to use. This isn't one of them.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to install. Based on my previous experience with the EMC solution, I expected to be deploying it full-time for two weeks. I set up the prerequisites in advance, which included creating a couple of Windows VMs. We installed, set it up, and started replication within a couple of hours. I have a team of people, but I completed the installation myself.

Zerto is relatively low maintenance, which is another bonus. It just churns away. You need occasional upgrades and bug fixes. I spend an hour or two on maintenance every six months or so. Apart from that, the only other maintenance I do is testing every six months. 

Obviously, it would be nice to have it for free. Nevertheless, a lot of effort has gone into making it a top-notch product. An excellent product with expert support is never going to be cheap. I think it's fairly priced for what it does and the benefit it brings to our business.

I've gone from a standard license to an enterprise license with an increasing number of VMs. Enterprise covers on-prem and the cloud, whereas the standard license is strictly on-premise. I'm not an expert on Zerto's licensing, but I know that I've increased my VMs and the range of destinations as part of an upgrade.

I didn't evaluate any other solutions because I instantly liked Zerto. I'd been given permission to look for new products to protect us in the future, but when I saw a demo of Zerto, it was pretty much over.

Virtually everything is fairly straightforward. The upgrade cycle is painful in other products, but easy to do in Zerto. The integration with the mobile app is seamless, so I can monitor the system from wherever. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. It's given me tremendous peace of mind and confidence that the network can be recovered quickly and accurately. I would suggest future users take some time to do an in-depth trial. 

If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. In my job, a decision is sometimes obvious, but it's tricky in other instances. You might need to draw up a weighted scoring model and check a couple of suppliers. This time, it was so clear. It's hard to quantify the pleasure of getting a nice piece of software that just works.

We use the solution for running demos for HPE partners and customers, regarding disaster recovery and backup.

Although our primary use case is to show demos to partners and customers, we think it's really valuable.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery and that the RTO takes less than ten seconds. It's a reallypotent tool.

The near-synchronous replication is really good and an advantage for customers. This feature is really important because we can show it to customers and partners, helping recovering from ransomware, and does provide huge value.

You can protect your VMs in the environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful. 

Also, the ease of use and speed of recovery are wonderful. 

I'm happy with the solution, but I would like Zerto to support other hypervisors too

And the price could be cheaper, but it is reasonable.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

It's very stable. 

The scalability is really good. 

We have used SRM from VMware and RapidDR from Simplivity. In comparison to those products, Zerto is really simple to use and helpful. 

We are constantly trying new products. Zerto has the lowest RTO, you can recover a lot more quickly than using other solutions. 

The initial setup is very easy.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

Our clients think it's quite expensive but I advise them to consider all of Zerto's features.

You need to start with 25 VMs, which sometimes is too much for SMB clients in some countries. It would be better if they had the option to start with a license for less VMs, like 5 or 10.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten because of the low RTOs, the ease of use, and how helpful it is for clients.

Our primary use case is for seamless migration to our client's cloud environment, ensuring a non-destructive migration with minimal downtime. We focus on cloud adoption and migration, and Zerto assists with the smooth migration of client workloads to the cloud environment. 

Additionally, Zerto provides disaster recovery solutions, data protection, and ensures minimal disruption during migration.

Zerto has significantly improved our organization's IT resilience by ensuring security, protecting against ransomware, and enabling seamless cloud migrations. 

It has enhanced our flexibility, ensured reliable recovery, and minimized downtime. 

Overall, it has increased our ROI by helping secure our digital ecosystem and improving client satisfaction.

The most valuable features of Zerto include its simplicity, ease of use, and automated features like failover and failback. It facilitates hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies, providing seamless migration with reduced risks. Zerto automates the complexity of manual tasks, which is beneficial for streamlined operations.

Zerto could improve by offering more flexible pricing models, especially for startups. In the Indian context, cost is a concern for many businesses, and a pay-as-you-go model would be beneficial. Additionally, more cloud support is needed beyond the major providers like AWS and Azure, such as support for Alibaba and Oracle Cloud.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable, straightforward, and reliable. It consistently performs well in recovery situations.

As a large enterprise, we find the scalability of Zerto to be very good. It effectively supports our extensive use across many users.

I rate the customer service and support highly. They provide assistance with initial setup and other issues promptly.

Positive

Previously, we used different solutions like vMotion and NetBackup. We switched to Zerto as it provides faster recovery and minimizes recovery time, which was a limitation in the previous solutions.

The initial setup was smooth and straightforward, with the support team providing help, particularly in configuring work storage.

Our ROI has increased by about 15% since implementing Zerto.

I would rate the pricing, setup cost, and licensing around a seven on a scale of one to ten. The pricing model could be more flexible to accommodate startup companies with lower budgets.

Zerto is adaptable and straightforward, making it easy for new users to adopt. The solution has significant advantages in recovery and offers good scalability.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of a ten.