HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We have two primary use cases. One would be to use it in reaction to a cyber-terror event, particularly ransomware, because Zerto has point-in-time backup. If we find an area that needs to be restored, as long as we figure it out within 24 hours, which is approximately the amount of time we have replicated, we can go back to a point in time. Let's say the files got encrypted at 9:30 AM. We can say restore our 9:29 AM copy of what the data looked like at that point. We have not needed to use that, thankfully, because we've been educating our users very well.

The other case that we would use it for is because we're in a hurricane area. Our particular office is actually in an evacuation area, typically, meaning that we're close enough to the coast that should a hurricane event come through, they generally force us out of the area. What we would do if we needed it, and thankfully we haven't yet, would be to shut down our primary on-prem services to make them a little bit more resistant to water damage. Obviously, if they're not running, they're a little bit less likely to get zapped if there is some water damage. Then we can bring up the copies that we have at our data center and run remotely from that if. It doesn't have a full copy of our entire environment, but it does have a copy of our ERP system, as far as sales are concerned. We wouldn't be able to ship anything, but we could look at orders and help our customers. We could even take orders if we needed to, although we wouldn't be able to process them.

Zerto is a replication solution. It copies our setup which is on-prem to our data center, which is also somewhat local, about 15 miles away. It doesn't really do anything in the cloud other than move data across it. We're not replicating to any cloud-based services like Amazon or Azure. Essentially, we're using it at two on-premises locations: Our primary location, which is what is being replicated, and the replicated copy is being stored at another on-premises location, nearby.

Zerto is purely a business continuity and disaster recovery tool. We don't want to have either one of our primary use case events happen, but if they should happen, it gives us an extra layer of protection. I've got Amazon backups with stuff in completely different regions, but Zerto is more for those two specific scenarios I mentioned. In addition, if somebody deletes a file and it's really important that they have the latest copy of it, Zerto gives us that option. But it really comes down to the ransomware reactions and the hurricane support, because hurricanes are fairly common in this area. The last hurricane event here was before I had Zerto and we had to shut everything down. We really couldn't do much while the hurricane came through. The business wanted something that would give us some protection in that scenario. That's the business continuity aspect. At least we can provide some business capabilities this way. With Zerto, they'll also be able to access a limited functionality version of our system. It definitely provides upper management with a little bit of comfort that we won't be completely down in either a ransomware or a hurricane event.

We're a smaller company. We're owned by a portfolio company, and they're the ones who made a lot of these extra layers of protection happen. Zerto provides me with the comfort of one of those layers. It enables me to make a strong case to my board of directors that, "Yeah, we're good." There's a guy in our board of directors who's something of a tech guy. I can look him in the eye and say, "Hey, we're not bulletproof. We can never be bulletproof, but we're about as close to bulletproof as we can be, especially for a company our size." That's important to the board because they have other companies that aren't as well-protected as we are. I've had conversations with a couple of the guys at those other companies, because they're interested in looking at something like Zerto, and I have been highly recommending it to them. It's a reasonable cost, it provides several layers of protection from ransomware, and if necessary, against natural disasters. I'm very happy to say that Zerto is one of those layers and provides us with very good protection for what it specifically does.

We had two ransomware events prior to being owned by the company that owns us now. Both were events where somebody clicked on a link that they shouldn't have and something ran and encrypted some of our stuff. Now we're much more solidly protected from that, and Zerto is definitely one of the big things protecting us.

If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building. In most cases, Zerto is definitely one of the front lines. It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases the time it takes. As long as it's one of those scenarios in which we foresee using it, it's great. When we did our two failover tests, it was easy to failover to the other location where we have the replicated copies. The last time we had an actual ransomware event, which was before we had Zerto, it took me 30 hours to restore all the data that I needed to restore. I would imagine Zerto would take 10 to 20 percent of that time.

In terms of saving staff time, I only have three people on my staff, so I'm not going to save human resources by using Zerto. That being said, what it does save me is the trouble of having to use another solution that would take a lot of time. I only engage my guys who work on Zerto for six to 10 hours a year, versus having somebody on staff. That's a significant savings for us, because we don't need somebody on staff who knows how to do things with it. It is pretty easy to use for somebody who's familiar with it and uses it on a regular basis. For example, when I do the upgrade, I'll pay guys to do it because that's what they do.

We have secondary, older equipment where our Zerto backup copy resides. We moved that old hardware to our secondary location and got new stuff in our primary location. Our primary location now copies, via Zerto, to the other location that has our old equipment. It's not quite cloud, but it is in a different location. And it's definitely saving us money in the long-term by not having to pay for cloud storage because we have put it on our older stuff, and it works fine for that scenario.

We did a test turning it back on and rethinking it, and that took a reasonable amount of time. A lot of that is not actually limited by Zerto. It's more limited by your pipeline between your backup location and your primary location. Zerto was very helpful, and it's very easy to use from that standpoint. Once you reconnect the two sites, it does a snapshot check of where it left off and then it copies back over the changes that happened while it was running on your secondary site. That's not automatic. You have to touch it. But it's certainly not super-technical.

Our two primary use cases are Zerto's biggest features for us. That's what we use it for. There may be other situations where it can come in handy, but those are our two primary scenarios.

In terms of providing continuous data protection, Zerto has been great so far. Thankfully, we haven't had an event where we have really needed to rely on it, but we have done a couple of tests prior to hurricane season where we disconnect our primary facility. We then go over to our secondary facility where the replicated data is and we bring everything up and then we do remote access to that location to make sure that it's all working properly. It's very capable. I've also done a couple of test scenarios on ransomware reaction where I'll go in and restore a folder, after hours when nobody is in the system, to emulate a situation where we might need to go back and restore kit encrypted files. So far, it's been great.

Regarding the ease of use, there's a web portal that I use to verify that everything is working well. It has a lot of notifications and it emails me if there's anything going on that's out of the ordinary. For example, if the connection to one of my other sites goes down, it will let me know that it's not able to reach that site. I'm very happy with the way the interface works for my needs, and my tech has been pretty happy with it. Our installation is rather small. We only have 14 servers on it. I'm sure there are other companies that have hundreds, but I imagine that they would see the same capabilities. The web portal is pretty well organized and easy to navigate.

I have been using Zerto for just about three years. We just re-upped the maintenance on it and, until that point, we had a three-year plan for it.

We're on version 7.5, but I've had some discussions with my partner where we have the replication stored. We're doing an upgrade, but we ran out of time before hurricane season so we decided to hold off until after that. We're going to move up to 8.5 as soon as hurricane season is over, but I didn't want to risk getting into a situation where we didn't have Zerto working at all. And version 7.5 has been working fine. There was no real need to do the upgrade, other than to stay current.

We're about a version behind. I generally stay at least a half-a-version behind to let everybody else do all the sorting out of anything that they might find with the new versions, and then I jump on the second-oldest version, once that's a little more mature.

The stability of Zerto itself has been fine. We have some network instability that affects it, but I see the alerts come through and it's not Zerto that is having trouble. Zerto itself is very stable.

Scalability is not really applicable to our situation, but I would imagine that it would be easy to scale if needed. We would just buy additional licenses and strategize a little bit about how we were going to add them.

We only have 15 server licenses, but I expect we'll have some growth as we have a couple of projects upcoming. We're probably going to need another server, so even though we're retiring a few servers, I'll leave the licenses. I won't probably be in any position to make it bigger any time soon, but you never know. Our company always has its eye out for acquisitions. Last year we picked up two companies, although they didn't really result in any major increase in our infrastructure. Maybe we'll pick up somebody similar in size to us and all of a sudden we'll need to protect 10 more servers. I don't have any plans for downsizing Zerto.

If I were to nitpick, I would say that I wish I had a better account manager. Our sales guy has changed a couple of times. I would like a little more responsiveness from our account manager. I've had a couple of issues where getting in touch with him has been a little difficult, and I end up just going around him and dealing with support and support has handled it right away.

I've only had to deal with their tech support a few times, and I would give them a nine out of 10. They've been pretty responsive. They've answered my questions. They've gotten things taken care of.

Before Zerto, I just restored backups. We have Veeam as our primary backup system. Veeam is a traditional backup system. In those ransomware events I mentioned, I literally had to go through and restore a bunch of stuff from different servers from our backup repository, which is onsite. I had to go back and restore this folder and that folder and this folder and that folder. I would sort of have to do that with Zerto, but it would be a lot easier. I could just pick the folder and pick the time, and say, "Go." With Veeam it was definitely a much more complicated process.

We didn't "switch" to Zerto, we added it. We still have our other solution. While there is disaster recovery where you're recovering from a disaster, business continuity is how fast you recover from disaster; how quickly you get the business going again. Zerto reduces our RPOs. It was more a case of added protection and it reduces our recovery times—even though thankfully we've never had to use it—compared to the last time we had to recover.

Zerto came highly recommended from our primary VAR, which is Presidio, the place we bought it from. They said it would do exactly what we needed it to do, and the price was reasonable. I took the recommendation, did some research on them. It's possible I looked at reviews on IT Central Station and someone there said, "Oh yeah, Zerto is great." That's good enough for me. I didn't need to spend a ton of time on it. As long as they've got good reviews from multiple sources, which I did find when I researched Zerto, and it came highly recommended from our VAR, those were two pros and I didn't need to go looking for a con.

I didn't actually set up the software. I had to pay somebody else to do that because it was a little beyond my team's capabilities. Our deployment took about six hours from start to finish. The guy that I worked with said that he was pretty happy with it. He had to send in a couple of help tickets, and they were very responsive and were able to help him get through the issues that he had.

He's from an IT support firm called Creative Network Innovations, and they also have an onsite data center, so they offer data center support services in addition to regular IT support services. In this case, Zerto is data-center related. We use Creative Network Innovations because it's related to what they do for us, and they have people on staff who are comfortable working with it. Even though they don't necessarily do Zerto all the time, they were able to step in, take a look at it, and sort it out for us, so that was good.

I wouldn't necessarily say that they're experts in the software, because they learned it for us. They're not typical Zerto implementers, but that speaks to how easy Zerto is to use. They had never really used it, but they were able to pick it up, plug it in, and get it working for us.

In terms of deployment time, the Zerto piece didn't take long. It was about six hours. What we had to do in terms of setting up networking, that was a little different. The whole project, including Zerto, took about 12 to 16 hours. And when we did our first failover test, that probably took another six hours, because we had to figure out all the nuances of how to make it handle the various servers that we have.

It depends on the size of your installation. Because we're fairly small, it didn't require a lot of involvement. Most of it is Windows-based, so it's not that hard to install and set up. Things like getting access through the VPN, which weren't necessarily Zerto-specific, are what took a little time, but the Zerto piece was pretty fast.

It's a backup piece for us. We didn't really get that fancy. We basically identified the servers we needed to replicate offsite. Then we installed Zerto on our primary location and we installed Zerto on our secondary location. And we created the communication.

In terms of users, I'm the only one in our organization who monitors Zerto, and I do very little of that.

I would estimate that if I had to recover from a scenario like the last one that affected us, it would take me 10 to 20 percent of the time it took me at that time. That reduces the amount of time that our system is down and, therefore, the amount of money we're losing because our system is down. It does provide some cost-benefit, but it's hard to quantify, because nobody has said, "In our company, we lose $X an hour when we're down." But when things are down, people are not happy. If nothing else, it means I hear less griping, and that makes me happier.

They have an enterprise-type of licensing scenario, which we didn't qualify for because we don't have enough. Ours is pretty straightforward. It is site-based, but the payment concepts are based on the number of servers. In our case, we have a quantity of 15. When we bought it, there was an initial purchase amount plus maintenance. When it came up for renewal, we did three more years, and it was under $10,000 for my 15 servers.

It's very reasonably priced. It's a little more than $3,000 annually. That works out to about $20 per server per month.

Our backup recovery software, Veeam, is working on a product that will compete with Zerto. But it's still very new. It has not been out for very long, so I don't anticipate us going away from Zerto any time soon. That being said, when our renewal comes up with Zerto, I might reevaluate and look at Veeam and see if their solution is going to cover what Zerto does, because then I have one vendor to deal with, not that I dislike dealing with Zerto. It's just sometimes it's nicer to put all of your stuff into one package because the interfaces are uniform.

At this point in time, Zerto is safe with us. We've got them for three more years, and it does exactly what we need it to. Is it going to be our daily backup and our long-term retention? At this point in time, no. I'm pretty happy with what Veeam does and how it integrates with VMware, not that Zerto does a poor job. Zerto covers a different area.

It's kind of like if you were wearing armor, as a knight of old, but you were missing a piece on your back. If somebody stabbed you in the back, if you had armor there, you wouldn't worry about it. Zerto covers our "back." It covers stuff that Veeam doesn't. It handles point-in-time backups and it gives us a faster recovery in certain scenarios. It's not going to necessarily protect us from a full on-premises failure, because I don't have it doing that. I bought it specifically to defend us from certain types of attacks. We have Zerto handling 14 servers but we have a total of 20 servers. It's not backing up the other six, Veeam is, but that's because I don't need those to be protected from ransomware. I need them to be protected from system failure or catastrophic disaster where our primary location is under 20 feet of water from a hurricane, or the whole thing burns down. Zerto is not going to protect us from that, although it possibly could. We just don't use it for that.

It provides us some niche protection and we're happy with the niche that it protects.

Because we're a smaller company, I would never need a full-time person to do disaster recovery, whereas a company with several thousand employees and multiple billions of dollars of revenue would probably have a team for that. I would imagine those guys would save people if they had Zerto, but that's just me imagining that, rather than it being fact.

If I had 1,000 servers, it might require more of my time, but we have 14. We have a board of directors that wants things to be bulletproof, and they're willing to pay for it. Do we need Zerto? Probably not. Is it nice to have? For sure. But we certainly don't use it in the typical use environment, which I'm sure is a lot more servers than we have. That being said, we still use it, and I highly recommend it, even for companies of our size, although it's probably not the sweet spot for a lot of companies like ours. It's kind of pricey for smaller companies, but for what it does, I think the value is exceptional.

For companies of our size, if you don't have somebody on staff who can use Zerto, you want to find the right help. Your VMware person should be able to help you with it. Make sure that you're comfortable with what you're trying to accomplish. I thought it was a pretty smooth implementation, as you can tell from the time that it took. That might be in part due to the people we enlisted to help us. I can't say that everybody's installation will go that smoothly, but I would imagine that if you have a pretty solid VMware-type person, you should be pretty good with the Zerto piece. It's really a matter of working on the VMware side of it. There is also a little bit of networking, depending on where you're backing up to.

If you're backing up to the cloud, you obviously need somebody who is cloud-savvy who can get the proper connections to your AWS and secure them.

Overall, make sure you have somebody who is VMware-savvy. You don't necessarily need somebody who is specifically Zerto-savvy. The guys that I worked with said that it was pretty easy to work with, even though they hadn't worked with it before. But again, ours was a smaller installation. A Fortune 500 company is going to need a little bit more capability. They're going to want to look for a Zerto-certified implementer, which I presume there are. We didn't bother with that because we're smaller and we didn't really have anything particularly difficult in our implementation.

In terms of preventing downtime, in our situation Zerto hasn't helped reduce that, but it's not because Zerto is not capable of doing so. It's just that we haven't had a situation like that in which it has needed to be used. We haven't had any incidents that required the use of the Zerto fallback.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that I wish I had known about it six years ago. I wish that I had known about its capabilities. Given that it's on version 8.5, it's been around for a while. I really wish we would have had it when we actually had a need for it.

If we ever need it, we're confident in it, given the test scenarios we've gone through where it's been great. It's a nice "warm blanket," and it's good to "cuddle" underneath it, because I don't have to worry about it. If I have an event, I'm pretty confident that I can get us back up and running quickly. Is it going to be instantaneous? Of course not. But it's going to take significantly less time than it would take if I had to react via a manual backup.

Zerto is "the bomb." I'm definitely happy we got it. Overall, it's reasonably priced. It's one of the less expensive business continuity and disaster recovery layers that we have. That being said, it doesn't do everything. We're a smaller shop. There are only three people on my IT team, including me. It's definitely been a very helpful tool and comforting to know that we have it in place. It makes it easier to sleep at night. For what we need it for, it does everything we need.

Zerto is a nine out of 10 and maybe even close to a 10. It's solid. It's a good product. It does what we need it to do. Since we haven't actually had a live event, I can't say that it's perfect, but in the tests we have run it through it has been great. The only blemish has been dealing with the account manager, which could be situational. I've only had to deal with him a few times. The last time he didn't even respond to me. That being said, it's been three years, and maybe he's moved on and nobody is monitoring his email box. And when I reached out to support, they took care of me right away. So the account management is a minor blemish. Everything else, as far as the product and support go, has been fantabulous.

For one client, the use case was to facilitate data center migration, and for another client, it was for failover and failback of the data center for DR. We wanted to have controlled failover and failback of related applications for DR.

We have not used it for disaster recovery in the cloud. Everything has been on-prem so far.

Zerto helps in automating disaster recovery capabilities. It allows automation and orchestration of complex activities.

We have used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Zerto’s overall effect on our RPOs has been pretty good.

It has also been effective for our RTOs.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime, specifically for failover and failback, but it is hard to qualify the time saved.

Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes because we have not been impacted by any such issue.

Zerto has helped to reduce the organization's DR testing. There is about 20% reduction.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation, but I have not seen any reduction in the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

Its ease of use and scalability are valuable. 

I also find the near-synchronous replication to be valuable. It is extremely important for organizations.

There should be more comprehensive cyber recovery capabilities.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is deployed across multiple locations. There are roughly about 4,000 VMs.

We might use it to migrate to cloud solutions. It is to be decided.

I have not reached out to them myself.

We were using SRM. We switched to Zerto for automation.

Zerto is highly effective in terms of ease of use as compared to other solutions. Zerto is also pretty effective in terms of its speed of recovery.

We can easily migrate data using the Zerto console.

Zerto has not yet replaced all of our legacy backup solutions but it will.

Our setup is all on-premises. I was involved in its deployment to some degree. It was pretty straightforward to deploy.

It took about three months. It was an enterprise-wide solution.

It was a combination of in-house staff and a third party. The third party was a VAR or value-added reseller.

It required just a handful of staff for deployment. It does not require any maintenance from our side.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.

It is not a bad pricing model.

We evaluated other options on paper, not physically.

Zerto is an effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities.

The biggest lesson that I have learned by using Zerto is the need for application involvement and defining protection groups.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager. 

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried. 

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a  vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario. 

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

Our customers are mostly satisfied with RPO, which only takes a couple of seconds. It does not cause big problems. It usually takes a couple of seconds. You do not have to perform any specific actions to keep it running because it mostly runs by itself and even resolves some of the issues itself. Zerto is very much related to VMware infrastructure. If VMware infrastructure is running fine, then Zerto runs fine as well. Zerto itself does not cause any problems.

I cannot compare it with others because we are mostly using Zerto, but we are very satisfied with it because within a couple of minutes, or even seconds, we are able to recover a VM or multiple VMs. Other recovery systems might work similarly.

Its ease of use is valuable. You do not have to do much to install Zerto or implement Zerto on the infrastructure. It is not very complicated. It does not have large requirements. There are mostly network requirements. It is required to be connected to two sites or more, and then you just install Zerto Virtual Manager. You also install virtual replicators on the ESXi host and perform replication of VMs.

I do not have any specific ideas right now. I know they moved to the appliance version with Zerto 10, but I do not have much experience with that because we are still using Zerto 9.5 and 9.7. The appliance will be faster and more secure. It will be good.

I do not need any additional features. The replication is real-time. We are very satisfied that this is happening all the time. We do not have to touch anything. When we implement it in a proper way, everything works fine. We just let it be.

I have been using Zerto for around two years as an engineer.

If the VMware infrastructure works fine, then Zerto works fine. I have only observed a couple of issues, but usually, Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs work fine. They are not very problematic.

I do not have much experience with scalability. One of the customers has eight vCenter servers, and each one of them has Zerto implemented. They are all connected with each other, so sometimes replication goes to a couple of vCenters. Another customer has only two vCenters but with a large number of ESXi hosts in VMs. There are around 500 VMs that we have in production for one customer. 

I have contacted their support multiple times. They are quick to respond. They are happy to help. They are happy to connect by Zoom to have a session to share the screen. I am satisfied with them so far. I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something, but overall, it has been very good.

Positive

I have implemented Zerto from scratch on the infrastructure. In most cases, I am not configuring the network. There are other engineers to do that, but if the network is working and I have all the information I need, then installing Zerto Virtual Manager and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) is very smooth and simple.

If everything is configured as it is supposed to be, it does not take long. It also depends on whether you need to deploy a Windows VM or appliance. If you need to deploy an appliance, it will take a little more time. Deploying a VM and installing Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs takes a couple of hours.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room to improve, but I do not have anything specific that can be improved.

We are using Zerto as a DR solution for our environment as well as for migrations. When we do data center migrations, we use it to move our servers over.

We are only on-prem at the moment. We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud.

In the old days, during data center swaps, it used to take days to move our workload environments over, whereas now, it literally takes an hour for hundreds of servers to migrate. Literally, in under a minute, an app stack can move down and up in a new data center. It is reflected in the uptime support to our customers. Our company is very happy with the product.

Essentially, you just tell it to go and pull the trigger. It is all automatic, so you can sit there and watch the shutdown within vCenter, and then on the remote side, you can see it coming up. You can literally have your environment up and running in under a minute. You just have to prioritize what goes first, and that is a business decision.

Its automation and the ability to replicate and keep an RTO of just seconds is valuable. It is all automatic. Everything is pretty transparent on the backend. It is just point-and-go.

Its near-synchronous replication is amazing. It is a lifesaver. You can see it replicating in real-time in seconds. The overall impact on the network is negligible as well. It is a great tool.

From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option.

I have used it across several employers. I probably used it for a total of four or five years before it was bought out by HPE.

It is amazing. You just look at the dashboard, and it is pretty much all green unless you have some replication or journaling issues, but that is not the product's fault. 

Scalability has not been an issue. You deploy it, and it just ramps up and goes. It is all in the background and automatic.

We have about 700 servers and 130 VPGs.

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very responsive and technical. Even when there is no issue and you are looking for a root cause or just a question, they are very responsive. They exceed their SLAs.

Positive

My current employer already had it in place. In my previous role, it was evaluated against a few other competitors, and it ended up being a replacement for VMware's Disaster Recovery, which at that time had a lot of issues. Zerto came in and helped us out. We implemented a few new things that Zerto did not have, and I have not looked back.

Zerto is easy to use. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of ease of use.

Currently, we are still on version 9. We have deployed that. Overall, it is very easy once you get the Windows Server. I am excited about the new version 10 coming out that takes away the Windows server requirement.

We did not use an integrator or a reseller, but we are in contact with our engineer from Zerto. I personally know him from a previous job and as a friend as well. If I have questions, I am sure he will help me out.

Uptime for our customers is important. When we are able to do transitions and not impact customers or minimize that impact, that is a financial gain at the end of the day in terms of the satisfaction that customers get, as well as the overall view of the company. As a whole, the management sees that we are doing this stuff in minutes and hours versus days. So, overall, the company is not looking to move away from Zerto anytime soon.

I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. It scales well. It just works. It is amazingly simple. Everything is pretty much automatic. I cannot remember when I had to open a case because Zerto was not working.

We utilized Zerto to facilitate the migration of servers within a data center from one location to another and employed it for disaster recovery purposes.

Zerto is user-friendly. The feedback I received from my team during the migration was that it was effortless to use. I wasn't directly involved in the implementation, but I participated in the decision-making process for purchasing and analyzing Zerto. However, the feedback I received from our team indicated that it was quite straightforward to use.

The benefit to our company was the ease of moving our servers using Zerto, which saved us a lot of time. I would like to emphasize that during the data center migration, it saved us a significant amount of time. Additionally, during the disaster recovery tests, when we actually used it, it worked exceptionally well. Zerto provides us with peace of mind. In the event of an incident, the ability to recover our data effectively also grants us peace of mind.

We utilized Zerto to transition from one cloud to another, ensuring that all of our operations and applications are now in the cloud. Having disaster recovery in the cloud is an important necessity for business continuity.

We use Zerto to help protect our virtual machines.

Zerto has helped reduce our disaster recovery testing.

With Zerto, we would not require additional staff or hire a third party to assist with disaster recovery.

Using Zerto for the migration was incredibly valuable, enabling us to save tremendous amounts of time. Thankfully, we have never had to utilize the disaster recovery feature. However, if the need arose, Zerto would be instrumental in preserving our business.

Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

Scalability is really good. We deployed it fairly quickly across our environment.

The technical support is responsive and helpful.

Positive

The feedback I received from our team was that the majority of the deployment went smoothly, but there were some technical aspects that were not covered in the deployment documentation, which they had to figure out.

The deployment required two people at times, but the majority of it was completed by one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto has saved time during our data center migration, and we are utilizing it for our disaster recovery. However, we have not yet calculated the return on investment for it.

Zerto previously had a perplexing licensing structure, but they have since resolved it by implementing a unified license.

We evaluated Veeam Backup and Replication before choosing Zerto. Zerto offers live recording, allowing us to rewind to the exact moment when the incident occurred. At the time of our selection, Zerto was the only company with this capability.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

For organizations planning to implement Zerto in-house, I recommend reviewing all the setup documentation beforehand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for ten years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

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

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

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

The technical support's response time is slow.

Neutral

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

Zerto is more cost-effective than Azure.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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