HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and business continuity. We have also used it significantly for transferring workloads between different environments.

Zerto's Near-Synchronous Replication is very important and was one of the main factors that drew us toward the solution. Some of the other solutions now have a similar feature that wasn't available before or doesn't support RDMs that we use. Fortunately, we haven't been hit by ransomware, but if we ever were, Zerto would be a great help. The fact that we would be able to easily pick a point with minimal data loss compared to having to go to a backup is a major advantage. 

We have definitely been able to do some functions that we wouldn't have known how to do without Zerto. For example, we get hardware refreshes every so often. We are still using Dell VxRail, but for some of our clinical workloads, we created a new cluster for PACs and radiation oncology. We had to move many workloads from Dell VxRail to this dedicated cluster, which was traditional SAN. Zerto saved us in this situation, as we were able to start a VPG and move the workloads. Additionally, we have different data centers, and if someone decided they wanted the workflow to run in a different data center, Zerto saved us a lot of time by not having to rebuild the system. Lastly, it gave us the ability to test failovers with staff to prove that it would work before we had to trigger a live migration.

We primarily use Zerto to protect our virtual machines.

Before we found Zerto, our backup environment was so slow that it could take multiple days to recover certain servers. This was not practical, so we looked for a better solution. Zerto has had a much greater effect on our Recovery Point Objectives than we could have achieved with any other solution before it. We could have potentially lost a day's worth of data, whereas with Zerto it is only a matter of a few seconds. Therefore, for any critical workload, Zerto is the best choice.

Our only other option was to recover from a backup. We found that for larger VMs, it would take days to do that compared to using Zerto. Zerto would spin up in a matter of minutes, and with the recording running through testing, we had the actual times recorded that we could accomplish all the tasks. It was drastically different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our DR testing. Before Zerto, we never had a DR test plan. It is still a work in progress, but Zerto makes it much easier to test functions as we can get reports on the test runs. This makes it easy to hand over to someone explaining the details of how long it took. Whenever we have done testing, it has been easy to perform and not very time-consuming.

Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail them over is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live. Additionally, the support and RDMs, which many products do not have for this type of workload, are useful. Furthermore, the ability to easily move something between different sites and the general ease of Zerto is great.

Zerto's ease of use is the best I've seen. We initially looked at different options such as Veeam Backup & Replication and VMware SRM, but Zerto appeared to be the most straightforward. We have had other options come up since then, but they are not nearly as user-friendly as Zerto. Zerto is quite straightforward.

The only challenge we have encountered is with rotating passwords on our VMware nodes. With secure boot enabled, which is the case for newer systems, it is not easy to rotate passwords and we would have to reinstall the VRAs. This is not ideal, especially when our security team wants to rotate them weekly. Aside from that, everything has gone smoothly. The updates are easy and it does not hinder us when updating the VMware. The only issue is that we have to wait three months after a major release. This lessens the complexity of the update of the software itself. Other than that, there is no issue and it does not hinder us from running different versions of VMware.

I have been using the solution for over five years.

Zerto is stable and we have never had any issues.

We have not increased our original purchase, but Zerto would scale if we needed it to. As new projects came along, we were supposed to identify if Zerto would be a use case. We have enough licenses for everything that has been added so far. We do eventually want to go into the cloud and potentially add more workloads, and Zerto seems to be sufficient for that.

I always find the technical support to be quick in responding to us, and the issue seems to be resolved almost instantly. It has been nothing but positive with support. They are definitely one of the better companies to deal with in terms of support.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We had someone from Zerto come down and set up the system in just a few hours. They provided us with knowledge transfer on how to create VPGs and other items and gave us an overview of the architecture of the whole solution so that we were confident in managing it ourselves. We have done all the updates ourselves.

The full deployment including the planning phase took a couple of weeks and required a few people.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of a Zerto specialist.

Zerto has been more of an insurance policy. We haven't had to use it yet, but if that day ever comes, it will be invaluable. Zerto has already helped us in other areas, such as moving workloads, which has saved us a lot of time that would have been spent rebuilding and decommissioning. more of a safety net.

We do renewals and haven't added any additional licensing yet. When we purchased Zerto, we felt it was worth the cost as it would protect us from any potential problems and give us peace of mind knowing that any critical items could be recovered quickly.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

When we bought Zerto, our goal was to be able to failover to the cloud. However, we have not yet fully adopted the cloud, so we have not yet upgraded our license or paid any connection fees. Our goal is to upgrade the license once we are ready, but that has not happened yet.

Zerto's ease of use, and straightforward use, is the reason we chose it over other solutions. We don't want to be in a situation where, during a crisis, we have to hunt around and try to figure out how to use something. It's nice to have something that is straightforward and easy to use, instead of adding stress to an already stressful situation.

We are still using other products for backups. We have not really ever used Zerto for backups. I know Zerto has changed its licensing model, but when we initially started using Zerto, we had to license every VM for basic protection, which was more costly than other backup solutions. I know Zerto has changed and we can now buy a backup license for VMs. However, due to the time, we are locked into a certain backup product, we will look at other potential solutions when the contract expires.

We have Zerto deployed across two of our data centers.

We have one person that maintains and monitors Zerto with an additional person who acts as a backup.

The maintenance consists of updates and tweaking of journals for VPGs.

If we have any specific use cases that we want to discuss with the Zerto team, they will often arrange a peer meeting with organizations. Zerto did that for us when we were using Meditech MAGIC so that we could make sure that anyone else with experience running it could help us. We were able to do a trial run with Zerto to get confident. I suggest taking advantage of doing a trial to make sure Zerto meets our needs, and if we have any unique workloads, then talk to the Zerto account team to try to arrange a conversation with someone else who is doing the same thing.

We mostly use Zerto to replicate applications and database servers between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. We have a number of business applications, Oracle servers, and three sites that we replicate to our DR site, and Zerto works well.

We deployed Zerto on private cloud and on-prem.

Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution.

We use Zerto to protect our virtual machines and virtual database servers.

Zerto has reduced the staff involved in the data recovery situation because we don't need to involve the backup team. We only require a couple of people to do a failover.

As our backup is managed by a separate team, we can use Disaster Recovery without involving the virtualization team. We do not need to involve the storage or backup teams, as Zerto takes care of all that. Therefore, only one or two people are needed for overall backup and management.

I appreciate Zerto's near synchronous replication, point-in-time restore, brick-level restore, and file-level restore features. We haven't had to use the feature in a real disaster recovery scenario yet, but we tested it thoroughly. The only manual part was changing the DNS from the production IP to the DR IP. Everything else worked perfectly. 

Zerto is user-friendly.

It would be beneficial if we could gain insight into DNS record reporting from the DR side, however, this is not a realistic expectation due to the fact that different companies use different hardware and different methods of DNS management. It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic expectation as these products are usually managed by the middleware or a network team, which has no relation to their application.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is certainly scalable and easy to deploy. We do not use as many licenses as they have available, but we are in the process of rolling Zerto out to all business users and applications.

Zerto's technical support is great.

Positive

We previously used SAN replication and storage replication. We also used some products from Veritas, but now we use Zerto, which is easier to set up. Zerto is great.

The initial setup is straightforward. I had no prior knowledge of Zerto when we first deployed the solution, so I had a few conversations with engineers, but other than that, it was relatively easy to learn and I was able to understand the whole process. The deployment took less than two weeks to complete.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Zerto is a great solution that does exactly what it advertises and I definitely recommend it.

Zerto requires regular updates and maintenance. However, it is mostly a "set and forget" system, which is very convenient. This allows me to focus on other tasks.

Zerto has its own use cases, so we cannot replicate an entire site, but if we have to select certain products or applications that need to be replicated, such as a DR site, then it is an excellent solution to use. However, Zerto is not suitable for everyone and it would be difficult to do it on a large scale. For specific applications, it is great. I could not replicate my whole data center with Zerto, as it would be too complex. Nevertheless, Zerto is great for certain applications.

Our biggest use case is real-time replication to a secondary site in case of the need for a disaster failover. We also use it for file-level protection and restore, but the main purpose is to help add another layer of protection in the event of a disaster.

The biggest improvement we have seen is that Zerto has taken our anticipated recovery time from between hours and days down to seconds or a minute. Zerto has also helped us to protect VMs, and the effect on our RPOs has been incredible. Pre-Zerto, it was days if not weeks. Now it's six seconds. I don't even know if you could compare it to the RPO of our old solution. It's 100x. If we were to recover using our old system, we would lose between a day and a week's worth of data. With this, we lose virtually none.

And in terms of our RTO, recovering and validating the system has gone from between hours and days, to now happening in a matter of 30 minutes to a few hours. It has helped reduce downtime by days. Similarly, our DR testing has gone from being a multi-day process to a multi-hour process, and we use almost all of that time we save for bolstering value in other projects.

As for the number of staff involved in our backup and DR management operations, Zerto has helped us decrease it.

It has also allowed us to locate our DR in the cloud. We currently use Azure, and this ability is incredibly important as it has enabled us to reposition our resources in an environment that is separate from our main environment.

The most valuable features for us are the analytics and reporting. Being able to see a snapshot of our environment, and knowing where we stand in our recovery atmosphere using Zerto, are really valuable aspects.

The near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10.

We also use Zerto for immutable data copies. We have two recovery locations and both of them are immutable, both for short-term and long-term recovery. Using this component has essentially enabled implementation of the 3-2-1 rule for us. Zerto has been pivotal in that process. Before that, the process hadn't changed in about a decade and a half. This enabled us to take a leap into the 21st century in that facet.

Zerto's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms. Zerto does have an API, but a lot of those automation platforms have prebuilt runbooks to enable that process, whereas Zerto does not.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's incredibly stable, to the point that we don't have to second-guess whether it is functioning properly.

Its scalability is infinite. We have yet to run into an issue of resource allocation or scalability.

Their support is very good. Debatably, it's the best support we have seen out of all of our vendors.

Positive

One of our previous solutions was VMware Site Recovery Manager. We switched because we have some servers that have a lot of transactions and we weren't able to afford to lose even an hour's worth of data. Zerto takes that potential data loss down to seconds.

And Zerto is much easier to use.

Our deployment is both on-prem and, for replication, in Azure. The initial setup was straightforward. There was a learning curve in transitioning from our old environment, but it didn't take very long to learn.

It took us about a month to fully deploy.

Outside of updates, it doesn't require any maintenance.

We did it in-house with support from Zerto when needed. On our side there were two or three people involved, but it was primarily done by me.

It's expensive, for sure, but for us, it comes down to the fact that we do not replicate our entire environment using Zerto. We replicate the mission-critical servers and services, so the yearly cost of Zerto is heavily outweighed by the potential cost of an outage. It's expensive but worth it.

We very briefly looked at solutions such as Veeam and the option of continuing to use VMware SRM. The biggest difference was the de-snapshotting of the environment into journals with extremely low RPOs, versus scheduling a snap at a certain time.

Overall, Zerto is pricey and it fulfills a very specific need, but it is incredibly worth the investment if uptime and recoverability are priorities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using Zerto for about three years.

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

Scalability has met our needs.

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the past, we were predominantly using Citrix Hypervisor in the Hyper-V shop. Now that we've moved to VMware, we utilize Zerto to move those VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor over to VMware.

We're also looking at utilizing it for our DR site to be able to push up those VMs to the remote site in the case of a DR situation.

Zerto improved our organization by giving us flexibility back with migrating VMs, and I look forward to the future when we utilize it more for DR situations.

The feature I've found most valuable so far has been the ability to migrate the VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. It's made our migration seamless. In the beginning, we were looking at freeware tools, and it was just a massive headache. Zerto solved a lot of the roadblocks that we'd run into in the past.

We've been able to set up a set schedule of moving certain VMs on certain dates, and we've been pretty confident that it's going to go smoothly without interruptions.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto with those of other solutions, Zerto is much easier to use. It's idiot-proof. You don't have to be super technical to be able to be successful with the product. This is nice because you can delegate some of the tasks to the service desk. For example, you could have them handle the migrations, which would free up your engineering team to be able to spend time on more important projects.

Zerto helped reduce downtime every week. We have VMs that run in Hyper-V every week, and at night, we shut them down and migrate them over to VMware. The whole process takes under an hour, so these VMs are only offline for maybe an hour at the absolute most, which has been really helpful.

I believe 15 minutes of downtime is equivalent to a million in cost. So, it would probably cost our organization four to five million per hour of downtime.

I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them.

The company as a whole has been using it for about six months now, and I've been using it for three months since I joined the company.

I've been pretty impressed with Zerto's stability. I haven't had any weird issues with the UI or with the migration aspect of it. It's been pretty rock solid.

Since I started, we've more than doubled our server capacity, and Zerto has been able to keep up just fine. So, it's definitely scalable, and we're looking to increase capacity by another 25% or 50%. I'm pretty confident that Zerto will be able to keep up with it.

I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them. The whole issue was resolved in less than three days, which means that the technical support is probably pretty good to be able to get the issue sorted out so quickly.

I've tried to use Veeam for migration, and it's not really built for that. There was also a freeware solution. It worked okay, but we tended to run into some weird issues, specifically with EFI and regular BIOS VMs; these VMs weren't really translating properly to VMware.

I've been told that when they originally got the quote, it was a little bit of a sticker shock. However, now that we've actually been using it for six months, I've been told that the investment was well worth it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Zerto a ten.

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).

Positive

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.

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.