HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We are replicating all of our production VMs to a DR site. We also have another offsite vCenter that we are replicating to a DR site for protection and eventual testing.

It makes me feel more comfortable that we have something to fall back on in case of a disaster. We are a large insurance company, so we have a lot of different applications and SQL Servers. We never had a disaster recovery site before, so this will protect us in the event of a disaster.

A good, valuable feature is using the preseeded LUNs, when deleting a virtual machine. Then, I put the VPG back to keep track of where I was at, so I don't have to replicate everything. Instead, I just preseeded LUNs since it needs less replication time.

It is fairly intuitive and easy to use.

You can go back fairly quickly. You push the button and there you are.

I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

It has been stable. We have had glitches between our site and DR site. When the MPLS comes back up, Zerto just kicks right back off, doing what it needs to do.

As we have been growing more VMs in production, I have still been adding to Zerto. So, I haven't had any problems with the amount of VMs and everything that Zerto can handle.

I haven't really had any problems with support. Most of the time, when calling support, I find the answer before they call me back. Or, they will send me an email, and say, "Here, try this."

I would rate the technical support as nine or 10 (out of 10).

We didn't previously use another solution.

It provides us with a safety net.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, which was very difficult to set up. Even as a test, it was hard to set up. With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy. Then, I insisted that the company buy Zerto for me.

RecoverPoint was difficult to set up and use. It wasn't as menu-driven as Zerto. 

We really haven't done any recovery or rollbacks. We are getting there. Later this year, we will be doing those types of failover tests, rollback tests, etc.

We haven't done DR testing. That will probably be done in the next three months.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.

Our use cases are disaster recovery and long-term retention against ransomware.

Zerto was part of our technology transformation initiative about five years ago, not only to protect our customers' intellectual property that we create for them, but also to protect our organization as a whole.

In a way, it has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation since we are contracted with insurance companies to help us recover. This solution allows us to be more self-sufficient, using our existing staff to recover.

Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year.

If something happens, and we are out and about, I would like to be able to interface with it on our mobile phones. That would be great.

I have been using it for about five years.

Their technical support is really good. They do quarterly tests to make sure everything is working and spot on. Our Zerto engineer is local, so we work with him quite often just to make sure everything is working.

I would rate the technical support as 11 out of 10.

Positive

It replaced Veeam. Zerto is a lot easier.

Prior to Zerto, when we were looking at our traditional disaster recovery, we were looking at 30 days plus.

We have been able to reduce our RPO and RTO to a matter of seconds to minutes versus what our technology committee established as our metrics, which was 30 minutes versus a few days.

Knock on wood, we have never had downtime. However, it has given us better peace of mind.

I would rate Zerto as 11 out of 10.

Our primary use case is disaster recovery, as well as data center migration when we went to a new VMware infrastructure platform.

The first benefit was being able to sleep better at night knowing that we can recover instantly. Because we do public safety, we have some databases that are terabytes in size, and were we to have to recover them using standard backup software, it would take a significant amount of time. With Zerto we can recover instantly in the event of an emergency. 

And when we went to a new data center, we had the ability to do a cross-center migration of the systems, and we found Zerto was much faster. We could migrate 25 to 30 servers and have them up and going in less than five minutes in the new environment, with very minimal downtime.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We find that we really only need one person to manage it. That person was able to write up documentation so that any of the other system administrators can jump in and handle it, because of the ease of use.

For me, the most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops.

Also, the ability to adjust the journal is important. If there were a ransomware event and we were not able to recognize that ransomware event for, say, four hours, we could go back, literally per minute, to the previous 24 to 48 hours to have instant recoverability. That, to me, is the big value of the product: to have our systems up with very minimal downtime.

We've been using Zerto for three to four years.

The stability has been excellent unless there is an issue with something on our end. For example, if a virtual replication appliance exists on a specific host and we take the host offline, Zerto will flash alerts at us, which I love. Zerto is always telling us when there's an issue with recovery. But the application itself has never gone down.

We haven't even noticed any over-utilization across our circuits, with the ability to throttle how much it's using. And once the initial sync is done, it's just kilobytes to keep it in sync. We don't see any downtime from using it. We haven't had a disaster situation recovery yet, but when we do, we're confident because our tests with it are successful.

Scaling has been easy in that we had multiple data centers that we needed to combine into one. It was very easy to create "spokes," where we installed different Zerto appliances in the other data centers and then linked them to the master to migrate them over. From a VPG perspective, we've had to scale out and it's never been a problem.

We have about 250 virtual servers. We had about 100 and we recently purchased another 150 licenses so that we could protect the entire environment. We're in the process of applying those licenses to all of them. We haven't applied all of them yet because we like to categorize which Virtual Protection Groups we want them to be in, so that they spin up at certain times. We like to think that out a little.

Their support has been very good. I haven't had to open very many tickets, but the few times I have, I have gotten a response within an hour or two. The support is good. They handle everything all the way through to completion and then they say, "We'll keep this ticket open in case you have any more issues."

Positive

We used VMware's SRM, which was a great solution; there was nothing wrong with it. But with Zerto, it's like riding a bike. Once I learned it and knew how to do it, I could let it run and do its thing. Maybe a month later I would have to jump in and do something, and the user interface is so easy. I don't have to relearn or remember how it works.

Zerto is quite a bit better when it comes to ease of use, compared to SRM. It's very user-friendly. With SRM, I definitely had to do some learning and read some things. With the VPG, it was almost self-explanatory, such as how to set up VPGs, how to recover things, how to do a failover, and how to do a test. Even as a proof of concept for management, I was able to take a VPG, delete a bunch of files on it, and then recover them from a few minutes prior. It was so user-friendly that even my management was able to watch me do it and understand what was going on.

SRM was just kind of there, in place, and it worked. Zerto is the one that I've really dug into and got my hands dirty with. Once we started utilizing it and realized how quickly we could recover. We realized that it could be used for migrating to a new data center. When we called Zerto we found out that that is a use case people use it for. From a speed perspective, the servers were down for less than five minutes when we migrated them. It was really fast with very little downtime.

The whole process was extremely straightforward. I did a little bit of learning in the Zerto University on how to do a quick deployment. There are not a lot of steps to the quick deployment. After just a few steps we were up and going, almost instantly.

After the installation, it prompts you to log in, and as soon as you log in, it starts telling you what to do. It says, "You need to deploy your virtual replication appliances." And then it says, "Great. Now that you've done that, you're ready to create VPGs." It was almost like the application was literally telling me what to do next.

We deployed it ourselves. I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it. But the initial deployment didn't need any technical support. It was that easy to deploy.

We looked at a few other solutions. Zerto was the one that really stuck out, especially once we were given a proof of concept.

Definitely try it out. I was able to leap right into it and use it immediately and do a test case within a matter of minutes. I was able to show management the ease of use and the ability to recover, and of course, that makes management happy.

We work in a public safety environment and we use Zerto for disaster recovery.

It allowed us to migrate very quickly from our old environment to the new environment that we're building out. We were able to move the entire environment over to our new VMware 7 environment within a matter of hours.

Because we work in a public safety environment, we can't have downtime. We've had a couple of situations where we had to do some firmware upgrades. We would fail over to the DR site and Zerto helped us get back up really quickly. It was fast.

We set it up strictly for DR so that we can fail over and do a test failover without causing any problems.

And from the standpoint of ease of use, Zerto is a third faster for recovery compared to other solutions.

The ease of use is one of the best features. Previously, we were using Site Replication Manager with VMware and it was a little bit cumbersome. With Zerto, we liked the fact that it was hardware-agnostic and we were able to spin it up pretty quickly and get it working.

We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for four or five years.

It seems to be very stable. We haven't had any problems.

My counterpart is the person who takes care of this side of things, but from what I've heard, he's had really good luck with their tech support.

We used VMware's SRM. That old solution was a little bit cumbersome and Zerto seemed to be easier to use. It was more straightforward. It was much quicker to set up and the day-to-day use is easier.

I was involved on the VMware side, getting things ready for Zerto. My counterpart was the one who actually implemented Zerto. I believe the Zerto implementation was pretty straightforward. The only complexity involved was learning how it worked.

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

We're using it for migration. Zerto plays a large role in helping us move away from Hyper-V into VMware. We're talking about multiple departments that had to transition their applications and Zerto gave us an opportunity to do it in a much less painful way.

Another key benefit is that our response time has significantly decreased. We're no longer having to rely on the traditional process where you manually execute a backup and hope to God it works okay. And then, you have to run through whatever changes are necessary and cross your fingers that, if you have to restore, it will come back. We don't have that problem with Zerto.

The solution has also helped to reduce downtime for us, absolutely. In most cases, we are able to use Zerto as a momentary backup, run an upgrade or installation, and see whether or not we're going to succeed. We can potentially back it out without anybody knowing about it because it's still within our maintenance window. We never exceed that rather limited time period. That's very helpful. With our existing backup, more likely than not we're rolling into days at a time if something fails. So if our maintenance window was on the weekend, it would roll into the production week and cut into the week by a few days. That would be very problematic.

And the recovery speed is basically as fast as the speed of our pipe, and that's what makes it great. As long as our pipes are fast, we don't have to worry. We can roll in, roll out, or potentially roll back if we have to, within a really small window of time.

In addition, it has definitely reduced the number of operational groups involved in backups. Zerto is not managed by our storage team. It is managed by the team I'm on, which is infrastructure. Because of that, it's all internal to us on the infrastructure team. We don't have to go outside of our team to coordinate with others.

There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable.

There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly. But it really depends on the audience. If we are using it as a technical tool, our team is the audience and we are able to utilize it. But if we were to pass this on to, let's say, the department users, that would become a little problematic. I'm wondering whether or not we can actually expand our offering to those department users. That may be a question.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

As long as our infrastructure is stable, it's stable.

All I have to do is add managers out there and it expands. What it boils down to is that my infrastructure has to be able to support it. I have to have space where I can send the backups to. As long as that exists, we're fine.

The customer support is pretty good. The bottom line is that the customer service is responsive, whether we're talking about technical challenges or even licensing challenges. They've been very helpful in both ways.

Positive

We played a little bit with Veeam, but for the most part, we relied on our storage team to provide us with backups. We switched to Zerto because that team wasn't able to deliver in a timely fashion and they weren't able to guarantee restorability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We have an individual who is our infrastructure expert. He took it upon himself to try it out. He told us what he found out when he did that trial and we started playing with it a little bit more and saw how easy it was to use.

I don't want to create upward pressure on their pricing plan, but the pricing is good. It's affordable.

The amount we had to set aside for our existing backup solution, compared to Zerto, was astronomical. The way Zerto works, it is so easy to scale up and out. It's not going to end up creating undue pushback as far as the cost goes.

We evaluated other solutions, with Veeam being one of them.

There's a lot about Veeam that we only just touched the tip of. I can't say with a lot of certainty what specific features Veeam may have. But there's a reason that we only touched the tip of Veeam and jumped over to Zerto.

One of the things that brought us to Zerto was talking to some of the folks that were here, at VMware Explore, years back, about what Zerto did, how it did it, and where it got its origins. That told us it was something that was definitely pretty solid and worth trying. I have to admit that, after trying it, it hasn't disappointed.

Leaving Veeam aside and comparing Zerto with our existing backup functionality, forget it. The two solutions are night and day. There is no comparison whatsoever. There is a lot of overhead with our existing backup feature that we just don't have with Zerto. We definitely have an easier time managing and controlling it. Zerto is definitely easier to use than our existing backup function.

One of the things that I'm finding with Zerto is that we're discovering new uses every day. As we continue to explore what Zerto can do, we haven't even gotten to the point where we say, "We wish it could do X." I'm not quite sure how Zerto interacts with cloud as a target, right now. That's something I need to learn. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto, it's just me not knowing it yet.

I primarily use it for disaster recovery backup. Also, whenever we need to move things between our different environments, e.g., moving it to different vCenters and Azure, that is primarily done through Zerto

We are in the process of doing a disaster recovery test soon, and Zerto is at the forefront of that. Zerto is really helping out with this. The bigwigs, who don't know anything about technology, come to us and then we explain Zerto to them. Whenever we simulate failures, Zerto has been able to seamlessly and instantly recover. This really gives our team big brownie points.

The most valuable feature is Instant Recovery. Especially when a server needs to be moved over in a crisis situation, Zerto has been there to help me out in a pinch. It is really fast and responsive. It is always there when you need it most.

It is great for reliability. 

I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time.

I have been at the company for about six months and using Zerto the whole time.

It is pretty stable. The only problem I have is with the vRAs sometimes freezing up. Other than that, it has been pretty stable and reliable. I feel like we can count on it.

It is very scalable. I feel comfortable with it. if we needed to expand in an instant we could.

I have only used our customer support for upgrades, but they have been great and helpful. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I have networking issues on one vCenter, then I can just Zerto it over to another vCenter. This instantly fixes the problem, saving us time and money. In one case, our phone system was down because we were having a network issue at one of the vCenters. So, I just moved the machine over to the other vCenter through Zerto. It came back online, bringing us back up.

It is way faster than just manually moving VMDKs, etc. It saves hours of time and a significant amount of money.

I can compare Zerto to Rubrik's instant VM recovery from our backups. Zerto is faster. Since Zerto is instant, it is always watching while Rubrik has to take time and restore everything.

The solution is really good. I am super happy with Zerto.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10. They are great.

We have a production environment that we are replicating to a warm data center, and Zerto keeps our virtual machine-protected groups in continuous sync. It has been working really well for us.

It's given us a sense of trust that if we have to fail over in a DR situation, it's going to be kind of like Apple, it just works. It gives us peace of mind.

We use it to help protect VMs and its effect on our RPOs is that it is exceeding what we set out to achieve. And the RTO is exactly what we're looking for.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. It's at least 300 percent faster than our previous solution.

I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use.

It's hard to say where it could be improved. The few times I've had issues with the interface, which is, for the most part, intuitive, we have been able to take care of most issues without having to open a case.

There are a couple of areas in the interface that are not very intuitive. Most of them are pretty easy, but there are a few areas in the journal and replication that, unless you've done it before, you really have no idea what to do. When I get to those points I'll reach out and ask for a little assistance or do a Google search to find the solution to the problem that we're having. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution.

We haven't had to scale it up yet from the initial licensing that we got, but it seems pretty straightforward that, if we grow, it can grow right along with us, and it's pretty easy.

We have not done anything other than replicate to a warm data center for DR purposes. We have not looked into taking it to the cloud, but that may be something we'll do in the future.

Their technical support is pretty good. The few times I've had to open a case, the response has been a little bit slow in the sense that it's almost like they want me to prove my need for a case; more than I think should be necessary.

If I'm looking for help, I need help, and their first response is to tell me to run logs and to put them up, and "Are you sure you covered this and that?" I have to tell them, "I'm already past that point and I'm ready to speak to somebody."

That would be the only thing that could use some improvement, having quicker access to somebody I can speak to, or at least email with, without having to jump through a lot of hoops first.

Neutral

We used VMware's SRM, which is their site-to-site replication solution. We made the switch because we needed something that actually worked. VMware SRM was very complex, very clunky, and it was constantly falling behind our RPO. Zerto is lean and mean and gets the job done, and I don't have to babysit it.

Also, the ease of use is much better than anything we have used before.

I was amazed at the ease of the installation and how quickly it went. I actually did the install with the support engineer looking over my shoulder, and it was done in 30 minutes.

We went through a reseller to purchase the product, but it was the Zerto engineer and I who did the actual install.

We were pretty happy with the pricing. When we switched to Zerto, we were a little on the small side of things. Zerto was looking at more of a larger-environment customer base. We're in at the bottom tier of supported servers, but they gave us a very good price. It was really a no-brainer for us to be able to have such a good product for our size environment. They came down and met us in the middle and gave us an enterprise-quality product for our mid- to small-size business needs.

It's been a while since we have looked around. We came from VMware, and there were at least two others. Cisco had a product, and IBM had a product, and they were way overpriced.

It has been very consistent in keeping up with our RPO and RTO and we have been very happy with it.

Zerto hasn't replaced our other backup solutions, just so that we have redundancy. We don't own the license for long-term retention with Zerto, so we have an offsite backup in addition to the production environment replication.

Give it a shot. It's quick, it's easy, and reliable, and you can run an evaluation pretty inexpensively. You just need another location that you can replicate to for that.

We're solving the issues of disaster recovery with it. So, our main use case is disaster recovery. We use it to do real-time replication of our data so that if we needed to failover for whatever reason or we had a disaster at our primary data center, we would be able to spin up in our colo disaster recovery location with minimum downtime. Our delay is about five seconds. So, if something negative were to happen to our data center, our DR copy would be within five seconds of the original copy, which is pretty good. We are also using it for testing.

Our setup is on-prem. It enables you to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but we didn't go that route. We went the route of creating our own colo location. So, instead of leveraging Azure or AWS, we decided to maintain our own facility. Our primary data center is on-prem, and our disaster recovery location is a colo location that we control.

The current version that we're using is 9.5, which is the latest. When we installed it, it was probably version 8.

The mere fact that we're able to do live testing has definitely helped us with deployment times. It has helped us with troubleshooting as well.

It saves effort, time, and money. It saves us the effort of having to make sure that information is replicated. It saves us the time that would be required to build that ad hoc, and it allows it to be more of a point-and-click operation than something for which we have to dedicate more time and effort. Especially in our use case, we're not replicating a crazy amount. We're only replicating about 40 virtual machines and about 13 terabytes of data. It's not a small amount, but it's not a crazy large amount either. To be able to load all those 40 machines at one time with one click and then bring them up either in production failover or production test is fantastic. We haven't really been able to find any competitor that can do that at least as easily as Zerto. That was the driving force.

It has helped to reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing. We can now do it in minutes, whereas previously, we could never do a valid test. We could only test that our backups were copied. We could never spin them up and run them all. Barracuda would do point-in-time backups, but we didn't have any place where we could actually deploy and test them all. That's not necessarily a hundred percent on Barracuda, but from basically not being able to do it, we are now able to do it within a few minutes. 

It has saved all the time that would've been spent validating copies of virtual machines. It can now be used to actually test that everything is connected, everything is spun up properly, and everything is connecting and speaking properly. So, there has been a tremendous amount of time savings. People who were responsible for doing it have saved time because they don't have to spend an entire day testing to make sure that the backup is copied properly so that they can be recovered. Now, we can do a test failover in a few minutes and be able to validate it like that.

It helps to protect VMs in our environment. It has been great in terms of RPOs. Prior to using Zerto, depending upon the level of disaster, it took us hours, days, or weeks to recover. Now, the average recovery is nine seconds. That's pretty big. We went from hours, days, or weeks to seconds and minutes to recover.

Its overall impact on our RTOs has been fantastic.

Its main feature is continuous replication. We are able to have continuous replication, and we are able to have the information available as per recovery point objectives (RPOs) and how much data to retain. The real selling point was to be able to have those statistics and be able to test and show that the replication is occurring properly and then to be able to do live passive testing.

We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit.

In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them. 

Everything is meant to be simple. When something doesn't work, even though what you were trying to do appeared to be very simple, there are probably a lot of pieces behind the scenes. So, to be able to narrow down where in those 100 steps something went wrong can be a little tricky. When there is a failure, there should be a more detailed explanation of what the error is and how to remediate it. Currently, it's a little vague. A part of that could be because we use Zerto on top of Hyper-V. VMware still has a very large market share over Hyper-V and a lot of the information and a lot of the deployment plans are geared towards VMware. So, sometimes, there are new features that first roll out to VMware and then come to Hyper-V.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It's a very stable platform, but sometimes, we've had instances where we've upgraded versions and went from version 8 to 8.5 or to version 9 to 9.5, and there were issues. When you deploy, depending upon how many host machines you have, something might go wrong with the deployment to a host. In that case, you have to do a decent amount of work so that you can remove your virtual machine and restart the underlying host, which is something that you try to avoid doing, but sometimes, that's required in order to resolve the issue so that you can do the upgrade properly and allow that. When there is a problem like that, it can affect the performance of the system, but that falls more under maintenance and upkeep. In general, it does run pretty smoothly. It comes down to the fact that whenever there is a problem, it's a problem. That's the same with anything. Everything works until it doesn't, but in general, it works more than it doesn't, which is what you want. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

Their tech support is pretty good. We've had issues where we have reached out to them, and in general, they're pretty responsive and helpful. A few times, we've had them jump on to do screen shares and pull information and do deeper dives into some of those errors that didn't have detailed inputs about the area we need to look into, and their tech support has been pretty good. Based on the help that they provided for the issues we had, I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were using point-in-time backups provided by Barracuda. The issue with that was that we were taking point-in-time backups, and we were saving them in the cloud, but if we didn't have a location to restore the data to, the backups weren't very useful. They were useful from the backup standpoint but not from a disaster standpoint. In such a case, our primary data center would be wiped out. We would have our cloud copy, which would probably be a day old, and then we would have to take that cloud copy and download it somewhere where we don't have machines. So, we would have to buy servers or buy something to download our backup copies to and then spin them up. That could potentially take weeks. Now, we already have the hardware in place, or if it was a cloud, we would leverage the cloud, but we already have the hardware in place. So, at any point, it's a matter of enabling, going live, and saying failover, and then basically, having our DR copy become live. So, the time to recover was the main reason for going for Zerto.

We still have the Barracuda solution in conjunction. A lot of that is due to the fact that we already have a long-term contract. We have a five-year contract with Barracuda. We probably don't need to renew that, but there are benefits of both. We have kept both solutions because they do slightly different things. The way we use Zerto is that it's focused mainly on disaster recovery. Barracuda gives us more of a long historical recovery for easily recovering things such as files. We have backups of virtual machines that might go back four or five years. You might argue that it is not worth it because a lot of the data that is multiple years old might not be of value.

The way it would work with Zerto is that we could keep a live copy within Zerto for 30 days. After that, we would have to take that data and throw it somewhere else for long-term storage, which would incur additional costs and adds a little bit. Because we already had Barracuda, we leveraged Barracuda for long-term retention. We don't use Barracuda for disaster recovery anymore, but we use it for point-in-time recovery. We take a backup that gets shipped to the cloud to have an extra copy that is just there, which then becomes part of a historical backup where we could go back six or seven months, whereas Zerto is only for recovering files up to a few days. Anything older than those few days would be recovered via Barracuda.

Zerto can do a backup for or recover data longer than that period of time, but it becomes a little bit different process. When we looked at Zerto three years ago, the ransomware, journaling, and being able to go back a few hours and restore your entire environment back to a point in time were nice features, but they weren't the selling point. The selling point was disaster recovery. So, that's the main thing for which we're using it. We are not looking at the ability to go back 30 days to recover a file. I definitely see it as a plus, but because it wasn't the initial selling point, and the way that we architected things, we don't necessarily use that right now. However, when our contract with Barracuda ends, instead of renewing, we could consider just buying long-term retention through a cloud provider and then maintaining a longer history with Zerto.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done. We were pretty much able to have it up in a few hours, but it also depends on your use case and the complexity of your deployment. Like anything, there are a thousand ways to skin a cat. So, it depends upon how you want to have it set up. It depends on:

• How complex groundwork do you want to put in?
• How isolated do you want your test case to be?
• How isolated do you want different things to be set up?

There could be a little bit more complexity, but in general, it's pretty simple to get going. Obviously, there is a lot that goes into it, but the actual work of setting it up, once you have those decisions made, is pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy.

We definitely did a lot of planning, but we did the actual deployment or the actual configuration of it before we engaged with the professional services aspect of our deployment plan. When we bought the software, we had a project management plan and support from Zerto directly. We pretty much did all the setup ahead of time by ourselves. So, in our case, the setup was very simple and very easy.

It does require some maintenance. There are always service updates that are available, and occasionally, there will be little bumps in the road that require maybe reinstalling or updating something. In terms of general maintenance, as compared to other solutions, its maintenance is probably a little bit less than other solutions. Maintenance is still required, but it doesn't require an extreme amount of maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

When we went to locate this software, we worked with ePlus. They made several recommendations on different solutions, and from those recommendations, we narrowed it down and picked Zerto.

I liked them a lot at the time. The sales rep that we had there was fantastic. Unfortunately, a few months after our project was purchased, our sales rep left the company, and then we just never really connected with any of the new people. That has not necessarily something to do with ePlus. They're a large, great company, but what really separated them and made that project beneficial was the account manager that we had during that time period. He was fantastic.

In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie.

We did look at other similar solutions, but what made Zerto the solution that we went with was the fact that it included the recovery of the actual virtual machine. Other solutions had the ability to do the same kind of synchronous or near-continuous data replication. However, if we had the underlying data replicated but our virtual machine's copy or our virtual machine configuration was different or was not at that target location, we would have to then configure those machines to load the underlying data. The feature that made Zerto useful was that it handled that and replicated the virtual machine information as well. So, we didn't have to do that. Once we configure and specify it to replicate a virtual machine, all the data that's associated with it and its configuration is replicated. We don't have to deal with additional steps.

Three years ago, when we were looking at disaster recovery options, a lot of the solutions were targeted at replicating the underlying data but not necessarily how to get that data usable. Getting the data usable part is often the trickiest and the most time-consuming part. So, when you don't have to take that into consideration because it's already being copied and it's current, your downtime associated with a failure event is reduced. That was definitely a selling point for us.

We looked at Veeam, and we looked at how we use Pure Storage for our underlying data storage. They have the capabilities of doing synchronous, real-time replication, which has improved a lot in the past three years. So, the limitations that made it less appealing a few years ago might have been removed now, but at the same point, that's only the underlying data. We would still have to recreate virtual machines that will spin up that data. There is no other real solution that I'm aware of that does this as nicely. Even some of the other Microsoft native solutions aren't as nice and user-friendly. They definitely don't give you the ability to do testing. We couldn't spin up a replicated copy without causing issues. Zerto allows us to spin up a test version of our production software or our production VMs without affecting the production copy.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done, but once it's running, it's very simple. If it's set up right, it literally involves a few clicks. Testing and failover can be done in a few clicks, which makes a very complex thing simple. So, if you set it up and you have the groundwork done, then with one or two clicks, you could do major testing, and you could do major failovers. From that standpoint, it's extremely simple to use once it's up and running.

They have a lot of other features that we don't really leverage 100%. We use it only for disaster recovery, but it also contains features for ransomware where you can recover files. Although we don't use that feature, that's definitely a benefit. We have recovered files from time to time but not because of ransomware. We maintain a history of up to 30 days for each of the virtual machines that we have. We have a different solution to recover files older than 30 days.

We don't really use Zerto for immutable data copies, which goes into the ransomware where you expect not to be corrupted by ransomware. We use it, but we've never had a case where we had to recover from a ransomware instance or anything like that. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery and continuous replication. We have a separate backup tool that takes point-in-time backups. In terms of the 3-2-1 rule for our organization’s recovery strategy, our separate point-in-time backups give us three locations. At a point, we have three copies of the data in different stages.

It hasn't reduced our downtime in any situations because we didn't need to do disaster recovery. So, from that standpoint, we don't have any baselines before or after.

It hasn't directly reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, but the amount of time required per person or the time required by people for validation has greatly reduced. We never had anybody dedicated to it as their only function, but the amount of time that's required to do testing is significantly less. So, there has definitely been a saving of time. Similarly, there has been no change in the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery management. In theory, it wouldn't because, in most IT organizations, a lot of people wear different hats at different times. We didn't have a dedicated person or a dedicated team only to validate backup and recovery.

Compared to other solutions, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

It's deployed on private cloud. I have two data centers, one in New Jersey, one in Ohio, which is my job site. I'm using a Zerto instance for my servers and another for my VDI machines. I can replicate everything.

When COVID started, everybody started to work from home and the internet connection to our New Jersey data center was saturated. But we had the same internet connection in Ohio, so why not use it? We needed to spread the load between data centers, so I used Zerto to failover 60 of our 175 users in New Jersey to Ohio, and they were able to work for nine months from Ohio. They were able to connect to their machines from home via Ohio, and it worked perfectly. Later, when we realized that the COVID situation would continue, we increased our internet connection to New Jersey and, using Zerto, I migrated all 60 users back. When COVID happened, Zerto saved the day. We didn't have to stop our business for a minute. It was seamless.

We also had problems, a few times, with SQL Server. That was pretty early on in our use of Zerto, and I used Zerto to recover it from our other site. We were on SQL on the other site for a week until they figured out what was going on and fixed everything. After that, I used Zerto and migrated back to New Jersey. That was a big save.

When I started with this company we used the Double-Take solution. It was very cumbersome and very difficult and we could only back up some servers. And when something happened, we could only have a limited number of people connect. When we started using Zerto, I was able to give every user a machine. Everybody could now log in to their machines and see all the applications, everything the same as it was before. People couldn't believe that was possible. To do it we created a fully virtualized environment.

In addition, we are a very heavily regulated organization because we're working under SEC guidelines. We have large institutional clients like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. For them, we have to prove our resilience and our ability to work in any situation. If we cannot do that, they will pull their money out. We run DR tests and we share the test results with them. Our clients want to see them. We couldn't do that without this solution. Zerto gives us the easiest and the most reliable way to do it. When we ran DR tests before we had Zerto, it was always very difficult. It would take almost a day to bring things back. With Zerto, I can have everything back in 15 minutes. In 15 minutes everyone can connect and start to work.

With our old solution, in a DR situation, we would need three system administrators working for hours before they got things to a point where a few people could start working again. And it took almost 24 hours to get everything back. And at the end of that time, we were exhausted. The first time we did it with Zerto, for practice, we clicked a couple of times and just sat back and watched.

It decreases the time it takes to recover and the number of people needed to do it. We were planning to hire a person who would be dedicated to our DR solution, before Zerto, because that was the only way we had found it could be done. When we installed Zerto for a DR test, we were surprised how easy it was to do it. When we hired another system administrator, because we had grown as a company, I gave him something like a half-hour lesson on how to use Zerto and he started to use it himself.

The continuous data protection is very important. Even if it's synchronous, right now we are at seven seconds difference, so we practically have all our data available, always.

Our old solution, Double-Take, required a lot of scripts and they were prone to mistakes. Zerto is so easy to use that when I showed it to my manager, he said jokingly, "Huh. I could use it myself, I don't need you." Zerto is most elegant. When I look at what's going inside Zerto, I see there is a ton of scripting but it's hidden from me. I just need to specify what I want to protect and where I want to protect it; very simple stuff. When they first brought in the solution, I saw what they were doing, how they were running all these commands, but again, I don't need to do any of that. If you do things right and you test it, it will just work with no issues at all. Nobody can come close to the elegance of Zerto.

I have been using Zerto since 2010 or 2011. We got Zerto when it was at version 1.2. They had just started.

I just upgraded to 9.0 U1. We ran our tests for IT a few days ago, because we made some network changes. And Zerto just worked perfectly.

From what I understand, if instead of 15 servers you need to protect 100 servers or 2,000 servers, if you properly plan everything it doesn't matter how many servers you have. To bring back 15 servers or 115, 15 VMs for 115 VMs, there is no difference. It will take the same amount of time.

Their technical support is great. When we have issues they work with us and troubleshoot until we figure out what is going on. I have no complaints. 

Initially, we used Double-Take on physical servers. We had five physical servers in our data center at that time. Later, we migrated all our servers from physical to virtual, using Compellent storage at the time. We were able to replicate our storage for DR, but it took a long time because there was a lot of manual work that was not scriptable. After that we found another solution, but it also required a lot of scripting and it was pretty cumbersome. It worked but it was pretty difficult.

Finally, Zerto came to us and we tried it. It was just day and night, a big difference between the previous solution and Zerto.

If you give me two Windows Servers, it will take less than 24 hours to replicate everything and you can already run a DR test. It's really amazing.

Initially with Zerto, every time there was an upgrade, I practically had to do everything from scratch. I had to recreate the groups and everything else. It didn't work well and I told them, "This is a big issue." In version 5, I believe, they resolved this and I could pick up my environment and restore it. When I upgraded my Zerto from version 8 to 9, it worked great and automatically. After half an hour I was running a brand new environment.

Every single penny we have invested in Zerto has been worth it. It has allowed us to grow our business and acquire more clients. Our clients are very happy with our DR solution. That's why they give us more money. For a company like ours, the more money we manage, the more revenue we have. From that perspective, Zerto has paid for itself 100 times.

It was a little bit expensive. It took a long time for us to get DR for our workstations. It's one thing when you have 15 servers, but when we needed to bring on almost another 200 users, and each was the same price as the servers, it was too expensive. But Zerto worked with us and gave us a solution that was pretty decent in terms of price. For my company, it was a good solution.

We bought those initial 200 licenses and we pay for maintenance every year, but it's stable. We don't have any issues. We get support, we can upgrade to a new version when we want, and they will support the changes on the ESX host.

I have looked at Commvault and HPE but I haven't found anything I like, so far, as much as Zerto.

Initially, when we looked at some of the other solutions, before Zerto, we were thinking that we would have a special person who would constantly build scripts. But Zerto is so simple that I  don't spend much time on this side of things anymore. My manager said, "I don't need to worry if you go on vacation because I can just open the console and click 'Failover,' and that's it. Everything will be done in the background." Zerto is an incredible solution.

It's not only about how much easier it is to install, set up, configure and, after that, run tests for DR. It also works. With previous solutions, DR tests failed a few times because they didn't work well or took too long. We would start a DR test at nine o'clock in the morning and we still couldn't bring things up until three in the afternoon. People couldn't wait that long. They hated those DR tests. Now, when we run DR tests at nine o'clock, everybody is back by 10 o'clock. We're really happy with this kind of scenario.

When we talk to other vendors I say to them, "Okay, you want me to try your solution. Can you promise me, when it comes to DR tests or real DR, that in 15 minutes I can start to use my DR system?" They ask me, "Who gives you this ability to run in 15 minutes?" I tell them, "Zerto. I've done DR tests with Zerto for many years, and within 15 minutes we are up and running." They are surprised.

The main thing to figure out before going with Zerto is, from a business point of view, what your company needs. What level of protection do you need? What regulations do you have to conform to? Can you survive with a seven-second difference in the data? Is 15 minutes enough or not?

Also, you need to take into consideration, from the licensing perspective, not only the Zerto licenses, but that you need to have a license for ESX, vCenter, hosts, and hardware. You need to count everything before you decide to go with Zerto. In our case, we're doing private cloud, and we needed to build that private cloud first. You have to decide if that is workable for you or you're okay using Azure or some other public cloud provider. Once you work through all that, Zerto will definitely be very good for you.

One issue we decided on, from a business perspective, was to divide our users into two groups: level one and level two. Level one users should be able to connect after 15 minutes and level-two users will be brought back after all level-one issues have been resolved, which should be within a couple of hours. When the business made that decision, we created the groups.

We're also working with Zerto as a ransomware backup solution. Right now we are using seven-day journaling but we're putting it on external storage or cloud. We're thinking about a one-year solution where we can go back to any particular point in time, bring the server back, and get all the files. We upgraded our version so we can start to use external storage. Zerto is one of the greatest applications we have for security and vigilance.

They did everything so well that I don't know how it can be improved. It's one of the best solutions among all the different components I have. I would rate most of the other solutions we're using between seven and nine out of 10. Only Zerto is a 10, along with my malware solution, Minerva Labs. Both companies are from Israel and I always grade both a 10 when I talk to others.

We use Zerto to enable our hot site configuration. We have two data centers. One of them is in one of our corporate buildings, which is our primary, and then we have a co-location center rack that we rent for our hot site backup or app. We use Zerto to replicate our servers and our VMs between those two sites. So, primarily, it is there in case of a disaster or malware attack, etc.

We also use it to restore files on the fly for users if they accidentally delete the wrong file or something like that. From a restoration standpoint, it is closer to the frontline of our security posture. We would first look to restore items. For removing the threat and everything like that, it obviously wouldn't be involved, but from a restoration standpoint, it would be frontline.

We have not yet used the cloud with Zerto. We just use on-prem physical servers. 

The primary focus of Zerto was to give us the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster. We've gotten pretty close to using it a couple of times, but fortunately, the disaster didn't quite hit us. So, there is the peace of mind to know that we can fail over at any time and keep our operations. We're spread out over a good chunk of the state of Nebraska, and if there is a disaster in one part of the state, our other branches will still be operating in the event of that disaster. So, our primary focus was just to get something that can keep our other branches running in case a disaster happens to a different branch or one of our data centers. So, that peace of mind is what we wanted out of it, IT-wise and management-wise.

It has improved our ability to restore files rather quickly. Previously, we had to use hard backups that we had to pull from nightly backup jobs, which used to take an hour or two, whereas now, we can restore them in minutes and get people working again. So, that's one clear metric that we've done in terms of improvement from the file restoration standpoint, but its primary focus is just a disaster recovery capability.

It provides continuous data protection very well. I have no complaints. It replicates, and we can easily maintain 10 to 15 seconds failover time and replication times. So, we can fail back rather quickly, and when we've done it, it works flawlessly.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes. In the times that I've restored back servers to previous points in time, usually, I'm doing upgrades on those servers in the evening or the middle of the night when nobody is using them. I basically restore those servers back myself. I get the replication process started again and the reverse protection done on my own without any help. I can fail it over and fail it back before the next business day. It is a very easy and one person's job.

It has helped in reducing downtime in those instances where server upgrades go wrong and we can just fail back the server to a previous state before we did the upgrade. It would save probably a good day's worth of downtime on that particular software. We have a server that runs all of our loan processing software. If the upgrade that went wrong broke that software, fixing it would have taken at least a day. So, by being able to restore back to a previous version, we saved the downtime that probably would have costed us thousands of dollars. There would also have been a lot of unhappy customers who couldn't get their loans. It would also have led to bad public relations and things like that.

The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do. It is pretty easy to use. I've done the restoration of servers several times, not as a disaster. When an upgrade on a server goes wrong and it messes things up, I can just fail back to a previous version and try it again. So, that has been really helpful.

It is very easy to use. By using their training materials and their site, it doesn't take long to get up to speed as to how the software works and how to configure it. Once you get into the process, it probably takes just four or five hours to get your sites up on-prem, at least for more simple configurations, and get the data replicating between different VPGs. So, it is very easy, all things considered.

We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement.

I have been using Zerto for about six years.

It seems pretty stable. We really haven't encountered any serious bugs or issues. It is doing its main job of replicating our servers. We can pretty much count on it to be there ready and waiting if something should happen. So, it has been pretty good.

We just use the on-prem version. So, as long as we have the capacity to keep up with it, I feel comfortable scaling it up. We don't have a lot of VMs. We probably have about 20 to 30 VMs. We don't push it too hard, but I feel pretty comfortable in growing our infrastructure. It will be able to grow with us.

We just use it on the 30 servers we have. We actually maintain IT infrastructure for two banks, and we have it at both banks in the same configuration with two individual VMware hosts that we replicated in between. We just do it on-prem at the moment. We probably will maintain that structure for the foreseeable future for the next couple of years. We may look into the cloud features a little later on to see what those can offer us. We will then also see moving our infrastructure into the cloud and seeing what we can do with that. 

In terms of users, we have an IT staff of seven. Probably four to five of them use Zerto in some fashion. Two to three of us maintain it and set it up and configure it. Others use it to restore files for users on help desk functions. So, at least 75% of our staff uses it on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure all of our staff have touched it at some point to pull reports, help users, fail servers over, or do things like that. 

I probably had to use their tech support three or four times over the past six years, and usually, they're pretty good after we supply them with the logs and the stuff that they need to get to the root cause of the issue and then getting it fixed. They're good. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

We used traditional backup with a software called vRanger back in the day before we got Zerto. I don't know if that software exists anymore. We basically use Zerto to do replication between sites. It is for quick and instant disaster recovery, but we still do the physical backups with Veeam. So, it has basically augmented our restoration capabilities rather than truly replacing our backup solution. It hasn't saved us any costs in managing our legacy solutions. Adding Veeam and Zerto together, I know we're paying more than what we paid before we added them or before we had either of them. The additional features are what we really wanted out of it, so the extra cost is worth it.

So, we use Zerto to give us a quick replication and file restoration ability, but we also use Veeam to do traditional physical backups that we can store offsite. If something happens to a server, we can quickly fall back on the replicated snapshot and restore the server quickly. We use the physical offsite backups with Veeam to store those on portable hard drives that we store in the vaults. So, there are air gaps so that ransomware can't get to them.

Zerto provides both backup and DR in one platform, but because we don't use Zerto's backup features, this feature is not super important for us at this time. We may look at that again to see how they've evolved that product over the past few years to see if it is more valuable to us, but as of now, it is not critical because we don't use it. In our eyes, Veeam and Zerto do two different things. So, we use both products to accomplish separate goals.

Zerto is easier to configure and set up than Veeam. Veeam can be a little tricky to make sure you have all the settings correct. From a restoration standpoint, they're probably both on par with each other. It is pretty easy to restore things in Veeam. It is just the initial configuration of getting everything lined up that is a little tougher.

It has been pretty straightforward. Initially, when we first got out of the gate with Zerto, we did have a third party to help us set it up, but we rebuilt it about a year later. We did that on our own, and it was surprisingly easy. It pretty much took a quick and free training course on their site. After that, I was up to enough speed to get it set up for us. It took four or five hours of training, and it was very easy. It took a day when I implemented it.

In terms of the implementation strategy, basically, we just wanted to get two sites set up, one on each data center. So, we set up two sites there with the appliances, and then we set up an individual VPG for each VM server. After that, we got them replicating. We set up our retention time and all that, and we were done.

For its deployment, there are two people at most. Usually, there is one. Zerto is easy enough to use, and one person can usually do whatever task is necessary to do in Zerto, whether it is setting up configuration or servers or restoring files. Usually, it is only a one-person job. If it is a more in-depth configuration, then you might need one more person for another pair of eyes to make sure everything looks right.

We initially had a third party to help us set it up, but now, we do it on our own. They are probably called The Integrators now. Our experience with them was not too bad. Once I learned how to set it up and how much work was involved and stuff like that, we probably overpaid for what it was at the time, but we weren't 100% familiar or comfortable with it at the time. So, it was a good experience. Obviously, they knew what they were doing, and they got it set up correctly. There was nothing wrong from a technical standpoint. Only the pricing standpoint was probably a little off but not too bad.

We have not done a return on investment. We aren't planning on doing one at this point. We know what we've got out of it, but we have not done a formal ROI.

Its licensing is yearly. You can do multi-year contracts, which is what we did. You pay per VM, and you replicate a license per VM. So, we bought about 20 licenses. We paid somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

There is an initial upfront cost. Basically, you buy the license, and then you have a maintenance cost on top of that. So, the upfront cost is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. The maintenance is $5,000 to $10,000 over a three-year period.

We did look at other options. VMware has a replication software capability as well. We did take a look at that. Zerto was an easier and cheaper solution to accomplish what we were looking for, and it has been pretty good.

It is a really good product for creating yourself a DR site that you can basically fire up in an instant. If you're looking for getting a hot site for your company and you are looking for something that in the event of a disaster or ransomware can quickly restore files for you, Zerto is a good product for that. I don't think it is terribly expensive for what it does, and it is really easy to use. I would definitely recommend Zerto if you're looking for a hot site setup.

We have not had to use it for ransomware yet. We've been fortunate. That was actually one of the reasons we did get it back in 2015. At the time, we were getting hit by ransomware.  We've invested heavily into security measures since then and haven't gotten hit with ransomware. So, we haven't had to use it for data recovery in situations due to ransomware, but it is a part of the incident response plan in case we do have to use it that way.

We do not use Zerto for long-term retention. We will probably evaluate the idea, but right now, we're pretty happy with the long-term retention product that we use. At this time, there is no firm commitment to switch over.

Zerto has not particularly reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. It has probably reduced the manhours required to maintain, but we're a Jack of all trades staff, so everybody has their hands in everything. So, it really hasn't reduced the number of staff, but it has reduced the overall hours of maintenance a little bit. It has also not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management. There is still a decent amount of staff involved in the overall process, but the overall hours for maintenance have been reduced.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that having a good DR configuration setup doesn't have to be a painful process. Zerto is a good software for just giving you that capability without you having to have a deep background and a lot of complicated software. The ability to restore and the ability to have a DR site on the fly is really valuable to our company. So, that's what we've been doing.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of 10.