HPE Zerto Software Reviews

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

Our primary use case is for DR failover. 

The most valuable feature is the rollback feature that captures every couple of minutes. Whenever we have a server that goes down, we can use that to pull it back a couple of minutes before and it's good to go. 

The disaster recovery has been a benefit to us. The ability to capture or move something to another data center is also a really handy feature.

The near-synchronous replication is Zerto's shining feature. We leverage the most out of it. 

On the technical side, we usually need more of the deeper, not near-synchronous replication. We need it more for the back backups but there's always a fire drill. There's always an emergency that needs something that happened five minutes ago to be restored.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in your environment. 

When setting up Zerto, you have to set up VRAs. I would like to see those not be needed as much. They're a little cumbersome and take up a lot of VM counts.

I have been using Zerto for around four to five years. 

The stability is perfect. 

It feels like scalability is what it's built for. It's seamless. 

I don't usually have to call support. Some of my coworkers are a little more familiar with it, and they have always said that Zerto support is very good.

They're fast, responsive, and willing to look at issues that they're not familiar with.

An interactive chat with knowledgeable staff could be a helpful feature.

Positive

We also looked at VMware. Zerto outperformed it and was more affordable. 

What's nice about Zerto that I don't think we saw with VMware is the ability to use one console for multiple beta centers. It's really nice not having to go into a specific site to come to or from that site. If a site or a whole data center goes down, you can still access it from the other and pull over it if needed. 

We had VRAs that we had to set up. The initial setup was good. The hard part was getting all of the servers into certain groups and then getting the disaster recovery plan for all of those. That was the hard part. Once you have that all setup, initiating those plans is very easy.

We have seen ROI. I'm more on the technical side so I can't give exact metrics. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. It gives me everything I want and everything I would need. Failing over is easy. Disaster recovery is easy. If there was ever an event where I had to roll over a whole data center, I don't really worry about it because Zerto has been there. The setup was probably the hardest part but once you get the hard part done, the rest is easy. 

Sometimes the console is a little hard to understand. Simplifying some of the commands inside of it would help. It's a very minor aspect. Sometimes the endpoint and destinations can get a little confusing and exactly how you want some of the functions to roll over can be a little bit hard to pick up.

The primary use case for Zerto in my company is to manage disaster recovery.

My organization has experienced the benefits of using the tool, which include the ability to test our disaster recovery quickly.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the constant synchronization, ensuring that we have the most up-to-date information should a disaster occur and we need to handle failovers.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is why we first acquired the product.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs is such that it improves them significantly, and it is the reason why we purchased the product. Rather than having to recover from backup, which is time-consuming, it is available instantly.

If I compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is at least five times faster than other products.

It turns out that my organization has not been using all the capabilities of Zerto and we just found from the session, HPE Discover'24, that the things we were looking for already existed within Zerto. I don't have anything to ask for improvement in Zerto.

I don't want any additional features in the product as I would be busy employing the functionalities I recently found out are available in the solution.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

The tool is very stable.

The scalability is fine for our company. We are a relatively small organization, but it has done everything we needed.

The solution's technical support has been solid and very good, and we hope it stays that way under HPE.

In our company, we would recover from our backup software, so things depended on whatever backup tool was used at the time.

When it comes to the product's initial setup phase, Zerto's support has been very strong and relatively straightforward.

I have experienced a return on investment from the use of Zerto. The exercises associated with disaster recovery are faster and we are able to save time now in our company.

Fortunately, the tool's pricing and licensing are not a concern for me at the moment. Other teams handle it.

The evaluation of other solutions against Zerto was pretty quick. In our company, after we saw a Zerto in use, we couldn't find anything else like it in the market.

I have used Zerto to protect VMs in our company's environment.

Considering that there is always someplace to go from where our company is currently, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We are using Zerto for disaster recovery. By implementing Zerto, we wanted fast recovery time.

It helps to meet recovery point objectives. Management is simplified. Its automation capabilities simplify the management of the disaster recovery processes.

It reduces the burden on the IT staff. It is also cost-effective. We could realize its benefits only in eight months.

Disaster recovery through the cloud is very important for our organization. We want to ensure that we are able to retrieve data in a proper manner.

Zerto helps to protect VMs in our environment. It replicates a lot quicker than what we were using previously. There is a reduction in the time taken to replicate. It takes a quarter of the time and protects our VM environment.

Zerto has been very good for our RPOs. It has been within seconds for us. It has also helped us to meet our RTOs.

It is easy to migrate data. We have not had any challenges. Zerto provides the ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration. It is very useful for a smooth migration process. 

Zerto helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It saved three to four hours. 

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Instead of ten people, we now have seven people.

It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time.

It works well. It is simple to set up. It works a lot quicker than what we were using previously. It takes about a quarter of the time. It is important for our organization.

One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless.

The downtime features can also be improved.

I have been using Zerto for one and a half years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It can scale based on the growth of the organization.

We have about 25 people using this solution. It is being used in multiple regions.

Their customer support is good. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using the disaster management solution of AWS. We switched to Zerto because of cost management and recovery point objectives. They were offering real-time replication and automation to help our organization achieve its RPOs and RTOs. We wanted better recovery time. 

Zerto is also easier to use than other solutions.

Its initial setup is good. Its implementation took one month.

It is easy to maintain.

We had support from Zerto.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

It is cost-effective.

We did not evaluate other options.

I would recommend Zerto to others. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

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.

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case currently is for replicating virtual machines on a production site and for backups. We also use it for onsite cloning, and we have a license that enables us to do that.

We don't use Zerto in the cloud at the moment. 

The tool gave us a better way to respond to any problems on the production side and improved how we can recover. The recovery capability is the best part of Zerto.

The solution reduced our recovery time objective (RTO) and improved performance on the IO by around 10%. When we implement failovers and synchronization to VMs with databases, we see a marked increase in performance.         

The solution helped reduce our downtime. Before we implemented Zerto, my organization did a recovery that took four hours. Since implementing, the last time we did a recovery, it took one hour, so the solution makes recovery significantly faster. The cost of three hours of downtime to my company would be very high.   

The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great.

Zerto is easy to use, and it saved us five times in three years; on those occasions, we had problems with our VMs, and we used the product to roll back to a functional state or for failover, which resolved our issues. 

Regarding near-synchronous replication, Zerto is the best application we have right now. We could get another solution to do the same job, but from a design point of view, Zerto is an excellent tool for replication and synchronization, and we don't have a problem with it.

The IT could be better; we have sectioned areas and databases for iOS, Windows, and Linux. Because the solution is centralized, each computer has the VMs from every section running.

The solution is very expensive. 

I've been using Zerto for three years. 

Zerto is highly stable, and I rate it ten out of ten for stability. 

We didn't have to scale the solution, so I can't speak to the scalability. 

I give the technical support full marks; it's simple to open a case and get a quick response from the support staff. We rarely experience issues requiring us to contact support as it is.

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution of this kind. 

The initial setup was straightforward; it wasn't complex at all. It was very simple to install and set up the replication, more so than other solutions. 

The replication functionality is very user-friendly, so that was the easiest part. At the same time, the security aspect of the solution, integrating with our firewalls etc., was the most challenging element of the deployment.

We carried out the implementation via an in-house team. 

The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper.

We are currently evaluating Veeam, and how that would fit into our system, as many of our clients use it, so we wonder if it may be a better option for us.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

My advice to potential customers is to carefully determine the requirements for such a solution and how Zerto fulfills those. Some solutions do the same job for cheaper, so considering the price has to factor into the cost-benefit analysis.

We use Zerto to replicate to a cloud center.

Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs.

We got hit with ransomware about three years ago, so we had to do a full recovery with Zerto. The recovery is the best feature.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SAN, Zerto is a lot easier because you can do it at the actual virtual machine level versus doing the whole LUN. In the latter case, in the event of a recovery, you would have to recover the whole LUN and see what's in there. It is a lot easier to do any operation with Zerto.

We were hit with ransomware about three years ago, and the amount of time that it took us to recover from that with Zerto was weeks less than it would've taken us with our previous DR solution.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is a lot easier and faster because you can choose what to recover and when. In the event of a disaster, for instance, you can recover your most important stuff first.

Zerto certainly reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation. It's so easy to use that one person can do it all in those events. You won't need a guy from the VMware team and another from the storage team. It's all done at the DM level, so, it's easier to recover without having to involve other teams. With our previous solution, we would have needed three to recover, and I was able to do it all myself with Zerto.

It absolutely helped to reduce our organization's DR testing because it's so fast and easy to test without disrupting anything. We can choose what to test, more critical versus noncritical, and how frequently we want to test. About 75% of that saved time is allocated to value-added tasks.

I would like to be able to replicate one to multiple without having to recreate every VPG. That would save us a lot of time. When we add a site or move our DR to a different site, I have to recreate everything from scratch. So, it'd be cool to be able to just repoint an existing VPG to a new site without having to recreate everything.

We started using Zerto in mid-2018.

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's always up and running. Whenever there's an issue at the DM level that affects it, it'll give an alert.

It seems like Zerto would be good for a big environment. Ours is small and doesn't really grow a lot; the size stays static. However, having worked with it for a few years I wouldn't be worried to use it in a bigger environment.

Zerto's technical support is good. Whenever we have issues, which is rare, they are fast to respond. When we had our major issue, I had a lot of calls with them, and we had to work around the clock. They did a good job of passing us through every time zone and keeping us engaged with someone. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used the snapshot and replication of our SAN that we used to have. It wasn't necessarily a true DR replication tool, but it would do a snapshot and then put a copy of that snapshot somewhere else. That was our DR plan before switching to Zerto.

The initial setup was really easy and fast. We had it installed in less than an hour, maybe even half an hour. After that, we created our groups. The time for that would depend on how many DMs you have, but it's easy and intuitive.

We had someone from Zerto walk us through the installation and setup. They explained every step as we went through it, and it was excellent.

We certainly have seen an ROI. When we got hit, we saved a lot of money because we were able to recover RBMs. Without Zerto, we would have been in serious trouble. So, it definitely returned the investment many times over.

The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions.

We looked at Veeam and Avamar. At that point, Zerto was the only one that did CDP, and that was the reason we went with Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate Zerto a ten.

Our main use case for this solution is the data center migration. We are in the process of moving from our legacy data center and all the VMs into our new data center.

In the future, we would like to look more into disaster recovery using Zerto but that's a much longer process and we are still looking into it.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is at least five to ten times faster. It helped us reduce downtime during migrations. There would've been a lot more downtime had we done a standard migration across data centers, powering everything down. This downtime would have cost our company millions.

The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross vCenter V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes. This project would've been years if not for Zerto. We completed it in months instead of years.

The licensing is confusing and complicated.

I have been using this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We used it for our biggest data center and it handled it just fine. We haven't personally had to scale it up, but if we needed to, we definitely could.

Support has been pretty good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I personally have not used other solutions other than just what's built into VMware. When comparing the VMware native solution versus Zerto, it's night and day. It's much simpler and straightforward to set up.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is streamlined with simple instructions. Anybody can do it as long as they understand their infrastructure.

We had a contractor that we brought in to help us with it. 

We have seen return in our investment with Zerto due to the speed and usability and being able to do this huge project with limited hiccups.

I would advise others that the cost of this solution is justified based on the value you receive. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

Our main use case for this solution is disaster recovery, migration and app testing.

Zerto helped to reduce downtime. I worked a lot in a consulting capacity and experienced DR situations where XYZ was down or a data center was down. Using Zerto to get them back up and online was a lifesaver.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery. It's a tool that allows you to do a lot just with one person at the console.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration. 

This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic. 

I have been using this solution for eight years.

This is a very stable product. I've never heard anybody complain about its stability. I would say it's probably one of the best out there.

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is good and their staff are knowledgeable and able to assist quickly with resolutions. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

I've used several other products including Site Recovery Manager. Zerto is the easiest to learn. There is much less of a learning curve. Other tools specific to VMware are now trying to emulate what Zerto has done to make processes easier. Zerto was a huge step in making things more simple to manage. The app works really well and integrates with VMware really well. 

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if those setting it up understand the company's infrastructure. The problems are not directly related to Zerto itself. They're always related to how the infrastructure is set up or how the network itself is segmented and having certain people that have control or access and others that don't.

The return on investment is in the ease and functionality of the tool as opposed to actually a gain from using the tool.

There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for. A lot of people don't like to think about the price until it's already happened and then the price is too high because they would be losing either way. It's better to think about it and pay for it upfront than pay for it after the problem.

We previously used and considered Site Recovery Manager.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.