HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory. 

Before Zerto, we used another solution that caused database crashes and did not offer certainty regarding disaster recovery. Zerto is more configurable and stable.

A DR site reduces downtime, especially with full VM backup and online synchronization. Zerto accomplishes this without affecting network efficiency, as synchronization occurs at specific intervals.

Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent.  

Compared to other solutions, the speed of recovery with Zerto is faster. Our last backup solution, Data Protector, was very slow, but Zerto is rapid even in file retrieval. 

The solution helped reduce our organization's DR testing; it's hard to say precisely how much, but Zerto does faster DR testing than other products.

Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster. 

The platform measures the right speed of storage devices and gives an alert on the VPG if there is latency, but the nature of the alert suggests the solution isn't meeting the SLA. However, this shouldn't affect the health status of the backup. It should provide an express report that we should enhance our hardware rather than express latency as a threat to the backup capability.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is acceptable, we experienced an issue once, but the backup time is speedy.

The solution's architecture supports business owners to expand their disaster recovery capabilities as their infrastructure grows. Additionally, Zerto's ability to integrate with various cloud platforms and on-premises environments further enhances its scalability, offering a flexible and robust solution for organizations with evolving needs.

Customer support is one of Zerto's best aspects; the support is excellent, and we can quickly get through to them. I rate them ten out of ten. The support staff are very kind and always solve a problem. I feel secure knowing I have access to such good support.

Positive

We previously used Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is easier to use and more straightforward to configure. 

Zerto replaced our legacy backup solution, Data Protector. This not only saved on the cost of the old product but also provided more stability and security to our company. We now have a new backup methodology, and it's a significant upgrade.  

I carried out the initial setup with support from Zerto, which was very straightforward.

The only requirement for maintenance is monitoring the solution and updating versions.

I have 20 years of experience in IT, so I was well-positioned to carry out the deployment myself, with the assistance of Zerto support.

We have seen an ROI with Zerto. 

The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable.

We evaluated many other options but found Zerto the best, especially for our HPE environment. It's the most stable and straightforward tool, and even those with limited experience can operate it.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable.

We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly.

I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.

I'm a payroll specialist using Zerto to deploy virtual machines, store data, and a little disaster recovery. 

I saw benefits within a few weeks of beginning to use Zerto. It helps us protect virtual machines in our environment and has improved our RPOs by about five to 15 seconds. It has also had a positive impact on our recovery times. Zerto also improves application availability as our business continues to increase our lifespan.

Zerto saves time and helps us reduce the risk of data loss from ransomware. it has also reduced our DR testing time, but I'm unsure how much. 

Zerto is an easy platform to use. It makes work easier and reduces stress.

Zerto could improve its pricing and customer care. I've never used customer care, but I talked to someone who had, and they weren't given the information they needed.

I've used Zerto for three years.

I experienced some lag twice.

Zerto's scalability is just okay. In my experience, the multi-host support and automated scaling can squeeze performance.

Zerto is expensive. It costs too much for the service they offer.

I rate Zerto seven out of 10.

We use the solution for a couple of functions. One is cyber recovery, and the other is backing up all our infrastructure with the server.

The most valuable feature is the recovery. For example, in our financial operations, we eliminated two other vendors and reduced our costs. 

Having DR in the cloud is crucial for us. We use it as a third copy to ensure stability and protection against cyber-attacks, giving us a clean copy in the cloud. This helps protect our VMs, and our RPOs are close to zero. 

The recovery speed is much faster and less complicated than it was. 

The knowledge base could be improved. Sometimes, it's finicky, especially when moving storage around. We've had to redo entire processes, which was time-consuming and resulted in data loss. This has happened multiple times, and despite following support steps and contacting support, we often had to resolve issues on our own.

I have been working with the product for a year. 

The solution can scale well if you have the needed storage. 

We received conflicting answers and resolutions to the same question depending on who we spoke to. Despite this, Zerto is stable. One of the key challenges we faced was during infrastructure moves, such as moving data or personnel. In these cases, we often had to rebuild our VPGs.

Neutral

We used Site Recovery Manager for VM replication and Veeam for backups. Zerto outperformed these products. 

Deploying the solution involved a learning curve. The knowledge base had conflicting data compared to other vendors. 

HPE helped us with the deployment. Our overall experience with them was good. They answered our questions during virtual sessions. However, we encountered some customer service issues, as the resolution could vary depending on who we spoke to.

We have seen ROI by eliminating vendors and thereby saving costs. 

Zerto's pricing is comparable. Each product has its ups and downs. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

One of our biggest use cases has been migrations. We migrated the virtual machines in one of our data centers using Zerto.

We're in the middle of a migration that Zerto has made much easier. We also use it for many standard disaster recovery cases. It constantly keeps our services running.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is a key component. It's essential.

Zerto enables disaster recovery in the cloud, which is very important. It creates another level of protection to have an alternate location outside of on-premises.

It helps protect VMs in our environment. It's certainly better than a traditional nightly backup.

I've found the migration feature very valuable. It starts like a disaster recovery scenario where you're just replicating the VMs. Then it all gets synced up, and you decide when to make the cutover. 

This is instead of having to do a more traditional conversion of the VMs or shutting them down and migrating the data, which is less efficient.

The seamlessness of a cutover is very helpful.

I have been using Zerto for around five years. 

It offers good stability. 

We haven't scaled it too much, but in our experience, we haven't had any issues with it.

We still use a different disaster recovery solution but for different use cases. 

Zerto didn't completely replace our other backup solutions.

There are cost savings for the migration in particular.

From the migration standpoint, they're flexible with the licensing. You own the license and can apply it to a machine and then pull it back, apply it to another machine, and so on.

For the migration piece, we evaluated different solutions but not for the disaster recovery replication. We knew from the migration piece that it would work well.

For me, it's a ten. I haven't had any issues with it so far. 

I use Zerto for disaster recovery. 

The time it takes to fail a server over to DR has been great. We've seen a reduction in time spent. We can do it in minutes. Being able to go back to certain snapshots, to failover to another location, and then go back to specific snapshots is quite useful. We can roll back easily. 

The off-site replication is excellent. We have workloads that aren't DR-aware. Being able to replicate it to other data centers is great. We don't have another way to do it, currently. 

The near-synchronous replication is good. You get five-second data points. It's not something we advertise to our customers, the developers, however, we've had instances where we needed to go back two hours, prior to a file being deleted, and it's helped. 

We're protecting our VMs with Zerto. It's positively affected our RPOs. It meets the objective. It's the only way we can have a solution for certain applications where we send an entire application to another data server. 

It's a great product. There are a lot of features that it has that we don't use since we are on prem. We strictly use it for DR between our data centers. There are a lot of cloud plugins that they have that we don't use. Our use case is limited. It does everything we need it to.

I've been using the solution for probably four or five years. 

The stability of Zerto is good. We didn't have any issues. Our biggest challenge was trying to get to the clients and I was waiting on an upgrade path - from Windows to Linux. Now there is an upgrade path. Honestly, that has been the biggest challenge we've had for five years. 

The scalability of Zerto is good. You can easily protect other clusters and VRAs. It's very flexible.

Our current environment has 45 VRAs in each cluster. We have two replica pairs, two sites that mirror each other. 

In total, we have 70 ESX hosts.

Technical support is great. They've shown us many things about the manager that we didn't know about. Every time I call, I take notes. They are very knowledgeable and the knowledge-based articles on the site are also helpful. Even if I thought something was broken, they've always managed to fix it. 

Positive

We used to use VMware's SRM. With SRM, for us, it was overly complex. We used an array-based replication with SRM. We had issues where the storage team would go to do work on the array and they would fail the machine over and it wouldn't be right. We would have outages. Every time we did a failover it was a process and we would be missing rules.

This is not array-based and we can test our failover in a sandbox without taking the system down. 

The initial deployment was easy. We deployed VRAs to the host from the manager. It works very well. The amount of VRAs you have to deploy and the amount of time it takes is minimal. It took us about an hour. 

I can't speak to if the company has witnessed any ROI. 

I don't follow the licensing. It was bought for us and we use it. 

We evaluated SRM and a few others. I can't remember which ones we tested. We've been on Zerto since version six. 

The selling point for us, coming from SRM, is that SRM was tied to vCenter. We had to pay attention to versions and there were a lot of ways you had to make sure the versions were correct and it was overly complex for what we needed. We simply needed to replicate a virtual machine and that was it. Zerto stood out as it was easy.

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

We primarily use Zerto for DR as a service but also for high availability purposes. It's mostly deployed at our on-prem colocation data center. We also do a little on the cloud, as well. 

Zerto makes DR a lot easier. We don't have to spin up copies of VMs or copy applications and databases. Zurto just takes care of all that for us. We just did our annual DR test, and it worked exactly how we expected it to. We're big fans. We like the fact that when you migrate DR, it will automatically be configured for us. For example, it sets the IP addresses because they have different IP ranges and various data centers.

It saves a lot of time during disaster recovery. In our tests, we just hit a button on Zerto, it did its thing, and the solution just let us know when it's done. In the meantime, we could go do other things instead of having to, copy app configs, .ini files, etc.

The near-synchronous replication is great. That's one of the reasons that we went with Zerto. I've had a great experience with it and never had an issue. Having this functionality is critical, especially for DR. If our main data center goes down, we need to flip it and have everything almost identical to what it was when the data center went down. We use it for production high availability, so if that host goes down, Zerto will just automatically forward to the replica that it has on another data store.

The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint.

We have used Zerto for around 10 years.

Zerto is highly stable. We've never had any issues or lost connections between the agents on the VMware host.

Zerto is scalable. We're running it in five different data centers worldwide, and we haven't had any performance issues. It covers 70 hosts across all our data centers.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. We haven't had to use support much because it just works. Once we had an issue with a VM that wouldn't upgrade, and they sorted it out for us pretty quickly. I've only used it once, but it wasn't a time-critical situation. If I contacted them during an actual disaster or DR test, then I could see how quickly they can work.

Positive

I've never used anything besides Zerto, but I've done the failover process manually. Zerto just makes it much easier and faster than a manual failover process.

In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster. 

Zerto is reasonably priced for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.

The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution. 

We've used Zerto for failing over and moving a lot of workloads from one location to another during v-center upgrades, during data center relocations, et cetera. We even had a case where we had a need to move over to our DR data center, however, in the middle of running there, our DR data center started having thermal issues, so we had to bring everything back. Zerto made that super easy.

Previously, we were using SRM. In the case of the thermal event, SRM would probably have taken, I'm guessing, an hour or two to do the failover. With Zerto, we were able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes, and it was roughly 150 or 200 VMs that we did in that time period. 

The near-synchronous replication works. It's very quick. I like that I can fail something over and not lose any data. That's pretty important. We want to not lose data. As a healthcare organization, losing patient records would be a very bad thing. 

It's important to have DR in the cloud right now. We're looking at leveraging AVS for our DR site for the sake of not having to run our own data center. Leveraging the cloud is super important. It will help us to get away from on-prem and not even have to deal with a co-location facility. The reliability will be important. There is also the impression that there is going to be money savings around that.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Overall, the RPOs have gotten better. Every aspect compared to where we were with SRM or prior to that, Zerto has improved. It's a lot easier to manage Zerto as it is hardware agnostic. It helps get things failed over and protected quickly. Every aspect has improved with Zerto.  

Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better. We've been building out a lot of new V-centers lately, and new data centers. Whenever we create a VPG, we generally set some very specific settings. If there was a way to set a template or a blueprint, to say that if I'm replicating to a data center from here, these are always going to be my default settings. That would be ideal, instead of having to manually set everything every time. 

There are a few issues we've had with Zerto where it doesn't behave the way we want it to. I'm being told it's by design. Therefore, it's not an issue per se, it's by design. 

I've been using Zerto for three or four years.

I've had no problems with the stability. There have been a few bugs along the way, however, Zerto has been very quick to work through them. 

We have 1500 to 1600 VMs protected with Zerto and most of our DR strategy is being built around Zerto.

I can't speak to scalability. We've been steady-state since we implemented it. It's been protected by the same workloads since then. 

Zerto support has gone downhill recently. When we first started, they were great. However, after the HP acquisition, the quality of support is not as good. The knowledge has dropped and the time to respond is slower. I seem to now get people who ask basic questions that I already answered when I opened the ticket. 

Neutral

Previously, we were using SRM. SRM was a nightmare. Zeerto has been drastically better. 

The pricing is expensive. However, I definitely see the value and my corporation sees the value. 

We did look at Veeam and were using SRM in the past and Zerto seems to be the most full-featured and the easiest to implement. It's also the most powerful overall. Veeam isn't even close to what Zerto can handle right now. 

We're mostly on-prem, however, we've started doing DR into AVS - Azure VMware Service.

I'd rate Zerto eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime. 

The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.

It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.

I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.

We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.

Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.

There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.

I've been using the solution for three or four months.

It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.

We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.

The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.

We've never had to contact technical support. 

Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes. 

We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.

We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover. 

The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use. 

We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.

The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.