HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use it for disaster recovery. We were looking for faster recovery time objectives. Our primary use case is protecting virtual machines in our environment.

It's improved our testing frequency, and that has definitely helped.

And the effect on our RPOs has been very good because of the continuous replication; you get more checkpoints. Compared to other disaster recovery solutions that we've used, it's much more efficient when it comes to recovery. It's much more resilient and provides a better experience. It's a better product than the traditional backup and recovery methods we were using.

Zerto has also helped reduce downtime in some situations. We can recover systems in minutes, versus hours. There has been a significant improvement in our RTOs.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce our DR testing on the order of hours and days.

The ease of use is one of the most valuable features when it comes to making changes and configuring. It's very easy to set up and configure. It's a great product.

Another very important feature, because I work in a very high-transaction environment, is the near-synchronous replication, and it works well.

They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it.

I have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

It's very stable.

It's scalable. I plan to increase our usage of the solution.

I have not contacted their tech support.

We were using typical backup recovery from tape or disk. Zerto is far easier to use, simpler, more efficient and reliable, and more effective than traditional disaster recovery tools.

It has not replaced all of our backup solutions. It's another tool to prevent a disaster.

Our deployment is on a private cloud. We have compute, storage, and network that we replicate to. The initial deployment of Zerto was straightforward. It took less than 30 days to get it fully operational.

We used it in our test environment first and, once we validated that everything was functional, we included our production environment.

The maintenance involves keeping the versions up to date and there are agents that have to be updated as well.

We had a managed service provider set it up and deploy it. On our side there were one or two people involved.

I can't quantify the ROI because we haven't used it in a disaster. It's more of a cost-avoidance solution, protecting the organization.

The pricing is very reasonable. There are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

We looked at Symantec, Veritas, CommVault, and Rubrik.

Have clear requirements on what your RTO/RPO requirements are, and which applications will be involved. You need to have clear business requirements and align Zerto with your business continuity plan.

Zerto is very innovative and they're constantly making improvements. It took some time to realize some of the benefits but it's been a great journey.

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.

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

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

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

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

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

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

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

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

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

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

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

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

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

Neutral

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

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

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

The price is reasonable.

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

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

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

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

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

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

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

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

Positive

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

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

The initial setup was not straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and DR testing.

Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another. 

It gives us peace of mind that we can recover our systems in minutes or hours instead of days. Zerto is also helpful for insurance purposes. Our insurer wants to know how long we'll be down in a disaster. Of course, the company owners love Zerto because we won't lose business if something happens.

When we had a firmware failure, it saved us time performing a failover to our DR site. It isn't easy to calculate, but it saved us days and possibly weeks of downtime. 

A firmware update on our SAN went wrong, crashing the entire device. We're in Rhode Island, and it failed over to our DR site in Tennessee within 18 hours. Our users didn't notice because it happened on a Sunday. They had all their data when they returned to the office, and we reverted the following weekend. Without Zerto, some applications would've been down for days, if not weeks. 

Zerto has also improved our DR testing. In the past, we had to test over the weekend, but we can now do it during the work week without any outages. Our IT staff doesn't need to come in over the weekends, so it doesn't affect their personal lives. Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by about 50 hours. 

The interface is easy to use. It's not intuitive per se, but the average IT expert will have no problems using it. A non-IT person might have a little difficulty at the beginning.

I love Zerto's near synchronous replication because I can get up-to-the-minute data back in a disaster. This capability is essential because a disaster could cost the company money and even cause it to go out of business. We can sleep better at night knowing we can restore our systems in minutes.

Surgical blocking of unknown threats is a feature that's available on the cloud, but we're on-premises. However, it's certainly a feature I'd like to have, especially with all the malware and vulnerabilities. It's great to know that Zerto offers this capability, but we don't take advantage of it because we're an on-prem customer.

Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter.

Zerto is highly stable. We haven't experienced any noticeable bugs. We're sometimes too stable. Sometimes I want to upgrade my VMware ESX host, and I can't because they have not approved it on their matrix. They usually take about a month or two to accept it as a supported system, which is probably the industry norm or better, but I want it faster. 

I rate Zerto support 10 out of 10. Zerto's support team is knowledgeable and goes out of its way to help. Instead of just throwing KB articles at you, Zerto support walks you through the solution.

Positive

We previously restored everything from scratch using tape backups, but we had no software disaster recovery solution. It hasn't replaced our legacy backup solutions because we do not use Zerto as a backup. Our hardware backups are still online and working. 

We do not use Zerto as a backup solution. It is mainly for recovery. However, we use Zerto/Keepit for Office 365 backups. We still back up to tape and restore using Zerto. It has made the recovery around 20 times faster. 

Deploying Zerto was straightforward, and I did the job by myself.

We've seen a solid return with Zerto

Zerto costs more than most, but we negotiated a fair price. 

We have Veeam Backup and Replication, but we don't use it for disaster recovery. We also tried another solution for Office 365 backup. We prefer Zerto replication for the speed and support. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. When implementing Zerto, you should consider your internet speed and the difference between the WAN connections at the sites you want to replicate. You need enough bandwidth to handle the volume. 

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.

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.

We use it for storage and replication. In our organization, our team is responsible for the disaster recovery process.

Before, we were able to test about 16 virtual machines in production. Now, we can do the same exercise with 180 virtual machines, in less time. And previously, we needed our whole team to execute the manual process with Hitachi. Now, we use half that number of personnel in this exercise.

The speed of recovery is definitely better with Zerto versus the previous mechanisms we had. It has helped to reduce downtime without a doubt. On two occasions when we used Zerto for recovery, we reduced the downtime by about 80 percent.

We had an issue with change configurations in a database and we couldn't roll back those changes. We used Zerto to recover the state of the virtual machines to 10 minutes before the changes.

It has also exceeded our expectations when it comes to RTO.

The replication and recovery features are the most valuable. We have been able to recover files with Zerto. First, we enable the virtual machines on the recovery site and then we navigate to find the file that we need. On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem.

It's an excellent tool for the replication of VMs.

We had some issues with replication, especially on Linux, but we have already resolved them.

I would like them to enable more backup configuration features. I'm not sure if Zerto can give us immutable files for ransomware protection. That could improve the backup.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

The stability gets a high grade from me. I don't recall any issues.

Our principal site is located in one city and the recovery site is in another city. They are connected by an extended LAN.

In terms of scalability, it is good because, on the two occasions that we have done the upgrade process, they were "hot," meaning we didn't need to turn off our servers and that's very important for us. We always have our tools available.

We have opened cases on several occasions for update processes and for issues that we had at a moment when we were doing an exercise and replicating a VM to the recovery site. Their response was immediate and they were very efficient in coming up with resolutions.

Positive

We didn't have any previous backup solution.

The pricing is a little more expensive in comparison to other tools.

Knowing the backup options that Zerto has, we could be using it to back up our entire company's virtual machines, but we are just using its replication and backup for some virtual machines, but not all of them. That's because we are limited in terms of our license. We are only replicating about 30 percent of our virtual machines, those that have been identified as the most important for the organization.

We checked out Veritas Risk Advisor and Veeam.

It is meeting our RPO expectations and we are happy with the RPO.

We have previously used Zerto for data center migration projects. We have another data center migration coming up within the next year where we will be using Zerto as well.

We had pretty strict requirements when it came to cross data center migration capabilities. We wanted to ensure that no plugins or drivers were needed. We also wanted a simple deployment. Zerto very easily fit that bill.

The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to synchronize data to the remote destination prior to the actual live migration date. This saves a massive amount of time during the actual migrations, and has been extremely beneficial. Having the data already synchronized on the evening of the migrations makes the final moves fast, easy, and seamless.

The interface is very easy to use. The product is easy to understand. We have had great success in using it for migrations. The benefit for us has primarily been the ease of use and stability of the product.

The VPG model has caused a bit of a concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. SRM is very easy when we have entire data stores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings of VMs. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work closely with our applications teams to create VPGs and determine how the VMs will be grouped. This will probably be beneficial in the long term, but short term it will create more work for our team.

I spoke to a Zerto engineer who mentioned that we could do a VPG at the cluster level and a VPG at the datastore level. However, the one issue we've seen with VPGs is if the synchronization fails the entire VPG has to be recreated. Even though we can cover our environment at the cluster level or datastore level, that wouldn't be ideal. We really need a simpler solution for DR that will cover all of our VMs at once, instead of spending a considerable amount of time on VPG creation. 

We have been using Zerto for about three years.

The stability is very good. All of the components that we set up for Zerto have been very stable. 

Scalability has met our needs.

Support has been excellent. We had a couple of issues initially with a VPG that wasn't functioning properly. Support was very quick to respond. They were able to assist us and resolve the issue very quickly. We have only had to call support one time.

Positive

We also use Site Recovery Manager. SRM does not have the same feature set for migrations that Zerto has.

The product was easy to deploy. At the time, the only thing that we wanted to improve was to have an appliance for the ZVM, instead of a Windows server. I understand an appliance is available now. This will be very beneficial in the future.

The deployment was straightforward. We basically went through the documentation and then had a planning meeting with Zerto. Once we understood all of the requirements we were able to deploy very quickly with really no issues at all. We deployed Zerto in less than a week.

We implemented the product ourselves. Zerto's expertise has always been very good.

Our migrations were all successful. We had no issues at any point during the project. That is what really sold us on Zerto.

The licensing costs are not cheap. It is an expensive product. However, you do get what you pay for.

There was really no other product that compared to Zerto. Zerto had exactly what we were looking for in a data center migration product. It had the ease of use and interface that we were looking for, that is, very simple and straightforward.

Zerto's ability to copy the data first, then synchronize just prior to the migrations made it much faster and easier for us to use than other solutions.

Understand the VPG configuration. Understand that you will need to make some decisions as to how to cover your VMs. We eventually went with one VPG per VM for our migrations. This is because we discovered if the VPG has a problem, then you need start over and recreate the VPG. If you choose to cover 50 VMs on a VPG, and if that VPG fails for some reason, then you need to restart the whole process. So you need to consider your VPG design and how you are grouping your VMs.

We haven't used it yet for disaster recovery, but that is something that we will be looking at over the next year.

We have had great success with the product. It is one of the very few products that we have recently used that literally had no issues and worked exactly as designed. At every single point in our migration, it was successful. We had multiple migration waves that occurred over a period of a year and a half. We literally had no failures during that entire time, which is of rare in the industry and made us very happy. Now that we have another data center migration project coming up, we decided we were just going to go straight back to Zerto.

We purchased Zerto for our business continuity and DR approach to make sure that workloads are available. We have 1,000 servers but are only protecting 250 of them because they are our core servers. The ones we don't currently protect are Tier three applications.

We have had many instances where VMs were corrupted by an application owner, where they were installing something and did not create a snapshot in VMware for it. Instead of tapping into our backups, with just two clicks, we were able to restore the VM back to its original state. It helps a lot in the day-to-day running of our business.

In some instances, there is data within transactions that I need to recover that might be lost. When using Zerto, I might be losing five seconds worth of data instead of losing ten minutes. That helps a lot. Zerto also helped us reduce downtime and we have been able to recover VMs fairly quickly by just clicking two buttons. Within a minute I would have a VM up and running and ready to go with no issues at all.

The RTO and RPO are the most valuable features. I get six-second snapshots for every single time that data gets replicated. I can go back six seconds past whatever happened. The frequency of the snapshots depends on your latency. It could be as frequent as every two seconds.

The overall management plan could improve. If something happens with the VM on the vSphere side, the error codes are pretty weak. If there was a way to click on something within the UI that takes us to a support page or article, that would be very beneficial.

We have been using Zerto for six years. 

This is a stable solution. Most of the time, the issues that we have had with our ZVM going down are caused by us. 

This is a scalable solution. We deployed it in eight different locations. 

The support could be better. Overall they do have the answers for me when I need them but it takes them some time. The Level 1 support team that I contact first when I call in could be more knowledgeable about products and be able to resolve an issue instead of having to wait for a Level 2 or Level 3 person to assist.

I rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I've seen and looked into the VMware SRM. We also use another company, Cohesity, for our backups. They also have a solution for replication. When comparing these solutions, the RTO and RPO times are fairly reduced when using Zerto to get to a point where we need to be functional right away in an event of disaster recovery.

We have experienced ROI using this solution. It helps a lot when we use Zerto to test out certain applications. It offers a lot of value for our upper management to see how this product helps us in the event of a DR.

The pricing for this solution could be cheaper. They have two licensing tiers. When we purchased it, they didn't have a license for the cloud model. Certain things that I used to get with the basic licensing are no longer available. They are only available in the Cloud. Overall, the licensing model could be simplified. 

I would advise others to test drive the solution themselves. They should play with it, see how it works themselves and try to break it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.