HPE Zerto Software Reviews

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

I rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery. We replicate up to Azure, and that's essentially disaster recovery as a service.

Overall, the effects of RPO have been great. They are never more than a minute or two, even throughout the production day.

If we can replicate from our native VMware environment up to native Azure, it converts the machines for us. We don't have to maintain another VMware environment somewhere. It's really given us the ability to eliminate the entire data center.

Moreover, there are cost savings tied to this. We don't pay for the rack space, power, or hardware; all of that is gone. Because the machines aren't active, all we're paying for is storage in Azure. So it has saved us quite a bit of money.

Zerto's near-synchronous certification has positively impacted our operations. Any recovery point that's too far in the past, we'll lose transactions when we fail over. We really don't want to do that. Real-time replication gives us a much better sense of security for the enterprise. It simplifies things for us and reduces costs.  It makes management feel really good, too.

Using DR in a cloud environment has been a positive experience. We're saving money. We don't have to maintain the hardware. We don't have the rack space at the other data center. It just simplifies things for us and reduces costs. It's been a positive experience overall. It's pretty easy to use. Once it's up and running, it stays running. We have had a few times when we called support and the support has been very, very good.

Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better.

I have been using Zerto since 2020, so it's been three years.

It's very good. It's very stable. It doesn't require a lot of intervention. 

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have 75 machines protected by Zerto and it does a fine job.  

Support has been very good.

Positive

We used to use Site Recovery Manager when we had two data centers, and it was VMware to VMware. We were using EMC storage. Zerto is a lot easier to use than Site Recovery Manager. It requires less care and feeding. 

Site Recovery Manager occasionally would lose virtual machines, and it was kind of a pain, but Zerto just kept running. So overall, we're really happy with the switch to Zerto.

The initial setup was easy.

Since we don't have to maintain all of the hardware and the second data center, one person can manage the entire Azure environment by themselves. As a result,  Zerto has helped us reduce staff. 

We did an assisted setup with Zerto tech on the line, and It was really painless. It was simple and straightforward. The initial process including getting the servers and everything set up, was pretty short. The process included getting the VMs all added to the recovery groups and things like that. 

The whole process from start to finish took less than a week.

It has proven to be a cost-effective solution for us. 

It could always be less money. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It requires little care and feeding. Not a lot goes wrong with it. It just works.

We are using it for disaster recovery. We have recovery point objectives (RPOs) for our ERP systems, financial systems, and real estate systems.

We only use it for on-prem disaster recovery. We are not using it for the cloud.

When we replicated our data, I turned up the machine, and it was up in seconds. It blew my mind. I could not believe it. We made a change to the database and tried to bring it back, but it did not work. I was floored by how quickly the system came up, but unfortunately, I need to get the rest of it working. We have not spent a tremendous amount of time on it. We are stuck, and we have not been able to play around with the full features of the system.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to get it to be fully functional. We were able to replicate and turn up a VM, but we were not able to bring the VM back because my team was spread thin. However, we worked with tech support and got the VM back.

I have been using Zerto for one year. 

We have not been running it long enough to see its stability.

I have a small group of virtual machines. If I buy more licenses, I am sure it would work just as well. We have fifteen VMs for our core production, financial systems, and real estate systems.

I did not work directly with them. My systems engineer worked with them, and he was not tremendously impressed. He had called their support, and the impression that I got from the engineer was that they had never seen that before, and they did not know.

We purchased VMware Site Recovery Manager, but we made a lot of hardware changes. I never got it working, and I stopped paying for the licensing. I cannot compare Zerto with VMware Site Recovery Manager because I never got VMware Site Recovery Manager working, so I did not use it.

We went for Zerto because we wanted something from a reputable company that I know works and that I can get up and running with the recovery point objectives that they advertise. I was impressed when I brought it up. It met my expectations.

We paid Zerto to help us get it installed, and we paid for the quick start. However, I did not read the contract closely. The person was very helpful, but unfortunately, we did not understand that we had a limited period of time. When we went to ask for support, they said sorry and asked us to buy more hours. That was our fault. It was not explained properly, but I cannot blame Zerto because we just did not read it all. It was a line item on the contract. It was not until they said that I only had six months that I pulled up the documentation, and it was a line item off to the side that said that we had six months total for the start-up, so we did not get the environment fully set up.

When we worked with the quick start engineer, he made some recommendations about setting up a test environment. He made some recommendations here or there, but it failed to launch. When we were working with the engineer, we had some of the same problems that we had after deployment. For example, in some cases, some test machines would never boot up. We then had to redo it and do some other VM. Even at the time when we were working with the engineer, we could not bring it back, and we never resolved the issue because the time expired. Some of that is on us. We get pulled in different directions, and I did not understand the limitation. 

I have not yet seen an ROI. I will see it when I resolve my issues, and I can bring my entire environment over and get it up and running.

I do not have anything to compare it to. It is expensive, but I am not going to squabble about the price when I bring the system up in a disaster. It is what it is.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

At this time, I would rate Zerto a five out of ten. I was extremely impressed at how I was able to bring that system up, but because I have not been able to bring it back, I am in the middle. Once I can bring it back, I will be super impressed and rate it a ten, but right now, I am right in the middle. It worked great for a minute.

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

Positive

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time. 

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication. 

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

We needed to meet the requirements of the client, and, previous to this solution, we would not have been able to meet the distance. That's why we implemented it.

The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The near synchronous authentication is great. It's critical for our organization.

We haven't had to use Zerto for blocking threats, however, we like that we have it as an option.

We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud or the AWS platform. It can do it. We just don't opt to use it that way.

We've used the solution to protect virtual machines.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Our RPOs are eight seconds. It blows past RPOs out of the water. It's great.

The speed of recovery is excellent. We've only had to test it and never used it in production. That said, it works better than anything we've used previously. 

It's easy to migrate data. 

Its ability to keep users collaborating during a data migration is good. It goes very quickly, so it's not a disruption.

The impact on our RTOs is great. It far exceeds what we've needed it to do.

It will save us time in a data recovery situation.

It's helped us reduce our DR testing. It has gone from hours to minutes under Zerto.

It enables us to make better use of our staff. We have reduced the number of staff involved in overall DR management. 

Their data backup and restore have some ways to go. We looked at replacing our traditional backup system with Zerto and found it was lacking about a year ago. We have Commvault, which is very customizable and feature-rich in comparison. Their offering needs to be more robust.

I have used the solution for close to six years.

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it. 

The scalability is very good. It can scale out to quite a lot of VMs.

I've contacted technical support once or twice. It was for integration and customization and they've been great.

Positive

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very straightforward. It took about a day to set up. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The only maintenance is the annual upgrade. It's pretty much set and forget.

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

It's hard to quantify the ROI. 

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

We did look into VMware. It didn't meet our requirements.

The solution has not replaced any of our legacy backup systems.

It hasn't helped us to reduce downtime, as we haven't had any yet.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The only issue is that someone would move the VMs involved around. If you have a global team, make sure they understand the strategy and everyone is on the same page so that issues like that don't arise. We had silos on our side and once we dealt with that, we were fine.

We have critical servers at remote sites that failover or are replicated to our main data center in case of an emergency. If a remote site has a failure, we can spin up that virtual machine from our data center.

We operate a hub and spoke design with a centralized data center hosting our main instance, reaching out to roughly 78 remote locations. We handle the VPGs through the centralized management console at our data center.

We also use the Zerto to replicate from a primary host to a secondary host in case the primary goes down; we have a kind of cold box to which the solution replicates.

Our final use case is if we are updating a plant's entire server rack, and we use Zerto to replicate the old servers onto the new ones, which results in less downtime.  

The product significantly decreased the time it takes to deploy new servers; we can work on them, build them, and then failover the old VMs to the new server with minimal business impact. What previously took hours to migrate the VMs with vMotion typically takes 30 minutes with Zerto, which is a phenomenal time saving for us. Our plants also have the reassurance that when we replicate their main servers back to a data center, we can keep their business running even if they have a total loss of a server rack or power.

The solution has helped to reduce downtime; we had a situation where a plant had its server fail, and we could failover their server to our data center and had them back up and running within 30 minutes. The required parts for a fix took three days to arrive, but thanks to Zerto, they did not have three days of downtime. Additionally, we just updated our hardware at our plants from HP servers to Dell, and we had to move 10 to 15 VMs per location from the old servers to the new ones. We completed this relatively significant move- roughly eight TB worth of data- in 30 to 45 minutes versus multiple hours, a remarkable reduction of potential downtime. Depending on the plant, downtime can cost $100/minute and potentially much higher if they are into online sales.   

The product helped to reduce our organization's DR testing; we previously used a Hitachi failover or manual VM move, but now we have Zerto VPGs at all sites. We can click the failover button, and it's done about 30 minutes later. It's good not to have to failover manually. Regarding time saved, we can get testing for a plant done in 30-45 minutes, resulting in between two and six hours' worth of savings.

The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days.

The solution is very straightforward, especially after using it a few times. We had users who were daunted by it, but once we walked them through how easy it is to failover, they felt pretty comfortable. Zerto is easy to use and doesn't take long to learn, which is nice.  

We like the near-synchronous replication feature, and it's essential as we want to reduce the amount of data lost during a failover. The RPO and RTO are excellent, thanks to Zerto, and we have some sites with poor bandwidth, so we understand the limitations we're working with. Near-synchronous replication allows us to roll back to a specific hour or minute in case of a failure, which is a great feature.  

One of our primary uses for the solution is to protect VMs in our environment, which has an excellent effect on our RPOs. We had a data breach several years ago, and Zerto helped us quickly get back up. We like it a lot because we can failover within minutes once we detect an issue.  

I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent.

We've been using the solution for over five years. 

Zerto is very stable; we only have problems with sites with poor bandwidth, and there's little we can do to get around that. Sometimes VPGs get outdated because those sites can't copy the data fast enough, but the application is very stable.

The solution scales exceptionally well; we add more licenses when required and keep running. We currently have over 400 licenses.

I recently contacted technical support, and I rate them seven out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used Veeam, Commvault, and a Hitachi solution. We switched because Zerto has a better RTO and RP, and it's much easier to use than Veeam. The Hitachi solution was very cumbersome as it was CLI only, and we had to unmount and remount storage.

Comparing the ease of use with other solutions, Zerto is excellent; once we have the VPG, there's a large failover button which allows our entire team to carry out the function. It's elementary. After showing a team member once or twice, they can operate the tool independently. The graphics and GUI show us the failover progression, so we don't have to wonder if it has taken place or how long is left. The tool keeps good stats and informs us of the step it's on. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, but we operate the solution with one team, our server team. Regarding maintenance, a minimal amount is required to keep up to date with patches etc. We occasionally run into an issue that necessitates upgrading to a newer version; for example, we were trying to move some vast data stores, and Zerto support said we needed to increase the timeout count. We keep fully up to date with security patches, and two staff members are responsible for maintenance. 

We have seen an ROI with Zerto, though it's hard to quantify precisely how much. It saved us a significant amount of downtime, and plants lose money when they're down, so it's a hidden ROI in that respect.

As far as I know, the pricing is around $1,000 per VM, but Zerto is changing the pricing model to more of an enterprise-class license. I don't know if there are any additional costs or fees.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Zerto did not reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery, overall backup, and DR management because we already run a very lean staff; there are eight of us on the server team, and we manage over 3000 servers across the company. On the other hand, Zerto enables multiple staff to do the failovers rather than one of two specialized employees. 

None of the time saved in DR testing has been allocated to value-add tasks because the time saved occurs outside our regular business hours.

Comparing the solution's speed of recovery with other disaster recovery tools, Zerto is excellent and rapid; we can restore everything in the VPG simultaneously. A tool like Commvault is single-threaded, so we would have to restore VM by VM, which is very limiting. VPGs are excellent because we can restore everything within them and get on with life.  

We have not used the tool for immutable data copies; we use our pure storage.

When we had a ransomware attack, the solution didn't initially save us time as they attacked our Zerto environment and took it down. Once we had it back online, we could speed up the recovery, and we've since hardened the product with additional security.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery replication between two sites.

We started to use this solution to help with disaster recovery planning and fast recoverability.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have two different SANS by EMC, VMware as our DOS network operating system, and we have a mixture of Windows, Linux, Red Hat, and Cisco switches.

We haven't done DR in the cloud because we don't do anything in the cloud.

We haven't used Zerto for immutable data copies because everything is on-premises. We just use it in a VM environment for the VMDK replication.

It's made us feel more secure, and we used it a couple of times for failover, so it's an essential part of the business operations.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been business critical. It's almost as important as a running production server.

It reduced our downtime. We can recover in five to six minutes versus 12 hours. That amount of downtime would have cost our organization $30,000.

The solution saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware. We got infected, noticed the infection within seven minutes, and restored it to a point in time. We failed over to our disaster site, deleted the infected server, and 24 hours later we replicated back to our corporate site.

It helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It's easier to plan, and the procedure is the same no matter the operating system or the applications installed.

It reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery. It also reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management, but we have not reduced our workforce because of it.

Real-time or near real-time replication is the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential.

The ease of use is great. You just have to be familiar with it, know how to set up your virtually protected groups, and know what fits your environment the best.

I love the solution's near synchronous replication. It's business critical to our organization.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment.

It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual.

Zerto hasn't replaced all of our legacy backup solutions.

I have been using this solution for about nine years.

I would rate the stability 10 out of 10.

I haven't had any issues with scalability. We don't have any plans to increase usage and buy more licenses, but we will if we need to.

Technical support is really good. We've used the solution for more than eight years, and we've only needed to call them three or four times.

I would rate technical support 10 out of 10.

We previously used VMware DRS. We made the switch to Zerto because of reporting and ease of use.

There was a learning curve, but the setup was pretty easy. For our deployment model, we have one VPG per server, so it's one-to-one.

For maintenance, there are quarterly patches, and we set up testing of our VPGs every six months.

Deployment was done in-house.

We've seen ROI in active disaster recovery and failover.

I wish it were cheaper, but I would purchase it again at the same price.

We haven't reviewed any other product in the last eight years, but if I can say that I can get six to eight seconds RPO and RTL, that's incredible.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is just easier to use, it's not as cumbersome, it's straightforward, and training is easy.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

For those who are interested in this solution, my advice is to evaluate it, test it, and buy it.