HPE Zerto Software Reviews

Our main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are disaster recovery and replication to the cloud.

Zerto features benefit our organization by protecting us in times of need. I work in Louisiana, so in case of any natural disasters, we have the protection that we can fail over to the cloud quickly if needed.

The feature I appreciate the most in HPE Zerto Software is the move or the failover buttons. It protects the data without requiring a hard cutover or failover. It shuts down the server and ensures all data is protected before moving it from on-premises to the cloud or back from the cloud to on-premises. 

It's easy to use. It's simple. You just put the server you want in a VPG and make sure it's replicating and moving to the cloud and you hit protect.

The solution helped reduce downtime for DR testing. It would have cost my organization significant downtime as we would have had to find alternative methods to fail servers from one data center to another data center, and we would have needed more help. We probably would have had to bring in consultants if needed.

HPE Zerto Software has impacted my RTOs and RPOs with amazing results; they're in seconds. Compared to the other DR solutions I've used, the others seemed slow, manual, and clunky. HPE Zerto Software is fast, simple, and fits in our hybrid cloud model.

The solution has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing time. DR used to take hours to fail over servers. We fail over 800 servers for our DR test, which would take hours with older or legacy DR solutions. Now, it takes minutes. We can leave it up there, get our test smoke test in the isolated environment and it just works.

I have a really good impression of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication. It works very efficiently. Sometimes it gets choppy, but once implemented, it's fast. Replication is fast and the journal copy allows picking minutes and seconds for failover timing.

Near-synchronous replication is very important to our organization. In the healthcare industry, there are three main things: care, claims, and trust. If you can't process claims or do transactions, the company is in a bad state. The solution has saved us time in data recovery situations due to moving from on-prem to Azure.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues over the last three months. However, over my eight years working with HPE Zerto Software, I have experienced some downtime and crashes during upgrades.

HPE Zerto Software can be improved for automation. I would appreciate more integration with vCenter in the next release and how we can protect our production servers and automatically get them put into a VPG. That's what I'm working with right now to try to build automation for it. If HPE Zerto Software has it built-in where we're going to vCenter and you click on it, it will build the VPG and indicate configuration requirements, that would be amazing.

We've been using HPE Zerto Software for about eight years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as very stable. We had a rough patch during the migration from Windows to Linux. Now it's great. It's very stable and easy to use, and it helps me whenever I'm in a bind.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization very efficiently. If you need to add anything, either memory or CPU, you can shut down servers while everything continues replicating in the background. As long as you have your VRA set up correctly on the host, you're good. We have expanded our usage significantly. We have about seven servers on-prem, and we have about 15 servers in Azure. Before that, we had four. We just had to add three more recently to keep up with what the firm wanted.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as having had a rough patch. Since the beginning of this year, it's been amazing. I would prefer more customer service focused in the Azure realm. I've found there aren't many cloud, Azure, HPE Zerto support techs. Other than that, it's been great. I always get help. Someone always knows what to do, and if I have any issues, I bring the issues to them.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using VMware to address similar needs. It came down to performance, cost, support, and scalability. HPE Zerto Software handled all of these factors.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Zerto Software as easy. Going over to the OVA, setting the IP address, and going straight to the webpage to start building your VPGs is straightforward. If you have a server on Windows, you can install the OVA on Windows as also. The OVA setup process involves putting in your IP, setting it up, getting your IP address, putting your subnet mask, and proceeding from there.

I can't speak of return on investment with HPE Zerto Software. My understanding is it has provided value through helping with our disaster recovery testing.

My experience with pricing and setup cost for HPE Zerto Software is great. I've had help with Sean, Avishai, and Ashton Meyers. They have been tremendous with helping with the licensing and pricing.

I've looked at many different DR solutions before selecting HPE Zerto Software. I've used solutions from Microsoft and VMware, and HPE Zerto Software has been the best so far. What stood out to me in my evaluation process were the speed of recovery, cloud flexibility, and the way that it can keep up with the changing pace of my company.

Any company looking for a disaster recovery solution should give HPE Zerto Software a try. The ease of use and multi-cloud capabilities with AWS, Azure, Google, and private cloud integration are valuable features. Now that they're with HPE, they remain hypervisor agnostic. Companies should conduct a POC to see how it works and how easy it is to use.

I rate HPE Zerto Software nine out of ten.

Primarily, my main use case for HPE Zerto Software is disaster recovery for a specific set of VMs to another site that have no ability to run active-active.

Zerto features have benefited my organization by providing peace of mind for our disaster recovery team to know they have a way to ensure that if something were to happen in a data center, they would be able to run and bring that load back up in the other data center.

The features I have found most valuable in HPE Zerto Software are the replication using the virtual VPGs. 

My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication are that it can stay real-time, which is how we want to run it. We don't usually worry about data points in time for multiples. 

The real-time capability is what we're looking for. The near-synchronous replication is important to our organization for disaster recovery; since we're a medical center, we want to have the most up-to-date data possible before a disaster occurs. 

The solution has not saved us time in a data recovery situation or ransomware cases since, luckily, we haven't experienced one. However, this is something we must build for to ensure preparedness. 

The solution has impacted our RTOs and RPOs positively; most of our others were replication of LUNs themselves, which would have required the storage team to bring those LUNs up active. 

It has allowed us to handle it ourselves at our administrative level. The solution has helped reduce our organization's DR testing thanks to how easy it is to do a failover test or failover move to the other site and run it there briefly. We set up reverse replication and then fail back. It makes the process easy and seamless, with short downtimes that help teams have confidence they could get systems running fairly quickly if needed.

I would assess the solution's ease of use as fairly easy to use and administer. The interface is intuitive, and for unknown aspects, research makes everything clear.

Outside of disaster recovery, we are looking to leverage HPE Zerto Software for converting from VMware loads to Hyper-V. We have been doing testing and have concerns that support for Hyper-V ending with 9.7. Now that Broadcom has created an opportunity in the market, we're looking at Hyper-V. We also have a Microsoft ELA. Continuing support on Hyper-V is something we would want to explore.

The system has been stable and reliable.

The software has scaled with the growing needs of my organization. We initially started with less than 100 different VMs, and now we're up to around 300, so we've tripled our usage.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support or customer support that I received between seven and eight based on our previous experiences.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, we were not using another application; we were using array-based replication.

The deployment was fairly easy. The upgrades are okay. We've run into minor things before. If we can't figure it out, usually, support has been very, helpful about getting us enough and running. I've heard no complaints. It's easy to work with, and if we need to exceed the license and true up quickly, we're not inhibited. 

On the technical side, I have seen a return on investment. The amount of time for doing the DR test helps with the administrators when they're working with the application support. It saves us time since it's easy enough to do, and with our documentation, our admins can typically complete the process.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of HPE Zerto Software has been indirect. The feedback I receive indicates it is simple and easy. We don't purchase many licenses as we do a specific set of workloads.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, we were primarily using array-based replication for DR, and our team wanted to move away from that approach.

The challenges my organization was trying to solve by implementing HPE Zerto Software include handling failover from one data center to another and having resiliency if there was a failure since they could only run it in one location. While we haven't had a disaster, we do conduct failovers and they work effectively.

Everything we put online goes through a test process to ensure functionality. 

The solution has not helped reduce downtime as we haven't needed it for that purpose. It has served as an insurance policy. 

We are currently working on a Cyber Vault solution. The most important capabilities when choosing a Cyber Vault solution include ease of use, resilience, and a proven track record. HPE Zerto Software met these requirements for us. For a Cyber Vault solution, we're exploring different options based on specific requirements. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the product overall as an eight, mainly due to considerations regarding Hyper-V support if we were using it to move workloads, not just for DR. Additional capabilities in these areas would be helpful and potentially generate more business.

I use Zerto for backup and restore.

With both Veeam and vCenter, the restoration process took a considerable amount of time. Zerto bragged about how their restoration was much faster, and it was true. It seemed unrealistically faster when they described and said that they could restore a VM within minutes. With vCenter and Veeam, when we restore a VM, depending on the size of the VM, it can take hours. Zerto proved true, and we have tested it numerous times now. We have done restorations via Zerto, and it truly does a full restoration of a VM within minutes. That was the problem we needed to solve, and they provided the solution. We are very pleased.

We are able to do a restoration so quickly because it backs up in near real-time. Of course, nothing is going to be in real-time, but it is as near real-time as possible. Instead of copying a larger amount of data, it is able to copy just delta data which is in a compressed form so that replication is more frequent. If we need to do a restoration, we will be missing less data.

Its interface is like any enterprise-grade utility. It is complex and not easy to use, but it is learnable.

We were able to see its benefits after some time. That was mostly because we did not have a good opportunity to test it in production. The initial onboarding came with an opportunity for us to do a test backup and restoration, but that was test data. You find the true value of this platform when you use it in a production environment where a stakeholder is involved and there is data that if you do not restore will lead to problems.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. The restoration time is in minutes versus hours. That goes a long way towards our RPO. With our previous platform, it took two hours, and with this platform, it takes five minutes. It has also had a positive effect on our RTOs.

Zerto has helped us to reduce downtime with a restoration time of five minutes versus two hours.

We have not had to use it for restoration because of ransomware. We were using a couple of VMs to test migration to a new database. While testing that migration, we caused damage to the VMs. We then used Zerto to restore them prior to that damage, and it was fantastic. The restoration was quick and effective, and we were back in production in minutes versus hours.

Zerto has reduced the time spent on DR testing but we still do the same number of DR tests throughout the year to make sure. It just takes a lot less time.

Zerto has improved our confidence tremendously, and it has reduced the RPO of any potential restoration needs.

I find Zerto's ability to restore a virtual VM much more quickly than Veeam or vCenter's restoration capabilities to be incredibly valuable. 

I cannot think of any features that Zerto does not have. They probably have a lot of features that I do not even use. I am primarily interested in Zerto as a backup and recovery mechanism, and it does a phenomenal job of that. It is an enterprise-grade tool, and enterprise-grade tools tend to be complex. They can be a little difficult to use at first until you learn them. It is not reasonable to suggest making it easier to use because it is an enterprise-grade tool, and it is very robust. Therefore, it is not going to be easy to use. I just have to spend the time to learn it and become good at it. I am very pleased with it as is, but the ease of use of the restoration utility could be challenging initially.

I have used Zerto for just over a year.

It is 100% stable. We have had no downtime with it, and we are pleased with its uptime and stability. We have great confidence that it will be available and usable when needed.

I have not personally contacted Zerto customer service, but Todd, my sysadmin, is the primary point of contact for Zerto. He has contacted them for issues or day-to-day troubleshooting. When there is an upgrade to be done, he always reaches out to them to get guidance and ensure that he is doing the upgrades correctly. They are very good to work with.

Positive

We were using Veeam. There were no security concerns. It was more about performance. The restoration took approximately two hours with Veeam compared to five minutes with Zerto. The benefit was obvious, but there were no concerns about data security in the backups, protection mechanisms, or air gaps on either platform. It was just about the performance.

Neither one is easy to use. They are both very similar. Veeam is probably a little bit more complex than Zerto. Zerto is already doing a slightly better job than Veeam in ease of use, but they are both very complex and difficult to learn at first until you learn them.

Anything new is always going to have a level of difficulty. It was difficult, but Zerto's onboarding development team helped us every step of the way. As we crossed bridges and had problems, that team jumped right in the middle of it and helped us resolve each and every problem until we were a hundred percent satisfied.

To fully set it up, from the kickoff call until I was satisfied that it was fully functional, it took about two weeks. There was probably a month's worth of preparatory work done in advance of the actual kickoff call and deployment, including some information gathering. You could include those 30 days prior as part of that work. Technically, it was about two weeks from the kickoff call to fully deployed and fully functional.

It is a one-person job. One person primarily takes care of it, but we have three of us who are kept abreast and familiar with the process so that we do not have a single point of failure. It is definitely something that one person can handle.

In terms of maintenance, it requires periodic patching and upgrades.

It is an enterprise-grade product. When you buy enterprise-grade tools, you have to expect to pay a higher price. It goes back to the idea of you get what you pay for. If you want an old cheap tool, you pay cheap prices to get it. If you want a good-quality tool that is robust and does a good job for you, you have to pay a higher price to get that, and Zerto is no different. We pay a little bit higher than the cheap tool price, but we get our money's worth. I am not dissatisfied with the price.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is nothing that is absolutely perfect, but Zerto does a pretty good job of getting as close to perfect as they can.

We primarily use Zerto as a disaster recovery tool to handle data transfer between virtual machines. Currently, Zerto is implemented on-premises, as 90 percent of our services reside there. However, we plan to migrate some services to the cloud and utilize Zerto's migration capabilities to move VMs directly from our on-premises environment to the cloud. This is a crucial feature for us, as our virtualization technique relies heavily on VMware, and Zerto allows for straightforward migration of critical VMs to the cloud.

Our multi-campus university faced challenges delivering services hosted in a single location to geographically dispersed users. The extensive data volume and risk of outages due to disasters led us to implement a Disaster Recovery and Continuity setup. This involves hosting primary services in one data center and maintaining a disaster recovery site in another. Zerto's replication technology allows us to continuously update data at the DR site, ensuring data currency and the ability to roll back to a stable version quickly.

Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss.

One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization.

Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment.

Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime.

Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently.

Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems.

Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages.

Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time.

Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management.

Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.

One of the most valuable features of Zerto is its straightforward cost model. It's essentially a one-time purchase, meaning you pay once and can use the software indefinitely despite the three-year license. This non-licensing-based approach allows for long-term use with a single purchase. Additionally, Zerto offers excellent technical support with responsive and helpful experts.

Zerto's pricing model is cost-prohibitive for small—to medium-sized businesses. Its structure limits affordability to approximately five to ten virtual machines. To increase accessibility for small and medium businesses, Zerto should consider a competitive pricing strategy, possibly including subscription-based licensing options. This would enable more organizations to utilize Zerto's services.

I want Zerto to add support for Proxmox.

I have been working with Zerto for one year.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable; however, the primary concern remains the cost, especially if needing to scale to 300 virtual machines. It is more cost-effective to use fewer virtual machines.

Zerto's technical support is superb. Following HP's acquisition of the product, significant improvements have been made.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We implemented it in two geographically separated campuses, setting up one server and adding another for disaster recovery. Zerto's demo provided a solid understanding and clear strategy for the implementation.

We did not use third parties for deployment; our on-premises engineers handled it. Only two to three staff members were needed.

The return on investment is evident, as Zerto saves more than 60 percent of time in various operations compared to the previous manual processes. The savings extend to hardware and resource allocation, which were reduced by Zerto’s efficient backup solutions.

I rate Zerto ten out of ten.

Our on-premises firewall provides a basic level of security, but it cannot guarantee complete application security. Therefore, the application, including Zerto, must have robust security measures to mitigate any vulnerabilities. Even with a firewall, loopholes can exist, potentially compromising Zerto and other services. To ensure comprehensive security, we can integrate Zerto with our security firewall, enhancing protection and minimizing the risk of software compromise. Ultimately, Zerto remains our primary solution for software recovery in case of a security breach.

Zerto requires minimal maintenance due to its operation on virtual machines. Three people are required for the maintenance.

We have Zerto on 300 virtual machines in our environment.

Zerto's capabilities would greatly benefit organizations with on-premises and on-cloud setups, as it facilitates seamless migrations. It is highly recommended for anyone prioritizing data security and disaster recovery assurance.

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is ransomware protection, so basically, the entire environment is replicated.

It's helped protect us and give us recovery from ransomware. We're only allowed about an hour of downtime before we need to start making calls. 

Zerto features of HPE Zerto Software benefit my organization by allowing it to be set and forget. Once it's operational, I just check it every once in a while to make sure it's still working. If I make a new machine, I add it to the group to get replicated and that's it. It requires very little maintenance.

What I appreciate the most about HPE Zerto Software is that it works.

I'd rate the ease of use four out of five. It's fairly easy to use. 

The near-sychronous replication is good, even though we don't need that fast of a replication. If I have an application crash, I can step back a week and get back what I need.

Zerto positively impacted our RTOs and RPOS. Before Zerto, it would take us four days to recover. Now, we're looking at a couple of hours. Compared to other solutions, like Veeam, the biggest difference is that, though it is very simple, it doesn't have in-built security.

We haven't DR tested it yet. I'll bring up machines, however, this is a completely different solution than what we had. We build a complete Vault around Zerto. We made our own Cyber Vault. The most important capability for that is the air gap.

HPE Zerto Software can be improved by allowing a system inside my makeshift vault to reach out to the other system and pull backups inside, which would let me punch fewer holes. 

Currently, my understanding is you have to have two systems that are interconnected. Based on how I've built it, if I could have a system inside my makeshift vault reach out to the other system, that would be more secure.

Right now, both systems have to talk to work. We've completely rebuilt our infrastructure inside, including firewalls and everything, inside a basic vault. It has the same concept. For that system to replicate, we have to have holes in the firewall for the outside system to reach in to connect to the HPE Zerto Software inside.

A lot of the wording isn't very clear. If you don't know what you're looking at, it just oesn't make sense when you are setting it up.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for three months.

My assessment of the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software is that I haven't had any issues yet.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization in that it's all about the licenses. I have not yet expanded usage of HPE Zerto Software, however, that is actually in my budget for next year.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as awesome. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as nine. The reason for my rating is that they've been very responsive. I think sometimes there's a little bit of a gap in communications, but usually, it's not too significant a deal.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using another solution to address similar needs, which was StoreEver.

The deployment model for HPE Zerto Software is that we have two data centers that are basically stacked as one in diverse locations. When we rebuilt and built the HPE Zerto Software system, we built it the same way. We have it stretched across two data centers, so we have high availability across two data centers times two, essentially.

My experience with deploying HPE Zerto Software is that we paid for deployment. We paid for the full service and initial setup. Honestly, that was worth it. It cost as much as the licenses, however, having somebody to be there, walk you through it, find all the loopholes and the menus that aren't quite clear was valuable. There are a few of those products. Morpheus was the same way.

I have seen an ROI on HPE Zerto Software based on estimates of what it would cost us to recover from ransomware. That was the whole use case for getting it - determining what it would take if we had to recover, how much it would cost us, and what our man-hours would be. That's what justified this whole project. This project is just to see how it works. If we it, then we'll expand on it.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software is that for what you get, it's pretty cheap. We did 50 VMs as a trial case, and it was a small portion of our overall budget.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, I considered Commvault. We are a Commvault customer and use it for backups. We also have the HP StoreEver tape system, a very large tape system. That was the chosen ransomware protection. When you're going for tape, you're in a difficult situation. Tapes work, but if you're having to rebuild from that, it's going to take literal weeks. We needed something faster.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is to think about your use case. For us, it didn't make sense until we had the hardware and the desire in place. We had a solution that was workable, but the cost was justified when the business decided they needed a more guaranteed recovery time.

A little bit better communication stood out in my evaluation process of HPE Zerto Software. We tried to get more information from the sales team and we had to do a lot of research on our own. The implementation has been very good though.

I rate HPE Zerto Software ten out of ten.

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software include multiple applications. Fortunately, I haven't needed to use it for disaster recovery yet. 

We use it to recover from badly developed software that we implement in production. We use it to clone machines to other hypervisors. Additionally, we have it replicated in case we need disaster recovery.

HPE Zerto Software's features have benefited my organization significantly. I can sleep peacefully now. If I encounter a problem in the future, I have a solution since I have two data centers connected to a WAN connection, and all my business-critical machines are replicated on that side. We are also making a plan to include this in a cloud vault to be more secure.

For instance, we had to use it once when a developer put some problematic code into production over a weekend. This broke the entire database and the sales software we had in production. It took us only 1.5 minutes to restore everything.

The feature of HPE Zerto Software that I find most impressive is its ability to work with one connection. This is remarkable. Normally, you need a full fiber connection, such as a dark fiber, to go point-to-point to have low RPO. Currently, we are achieving an eight-second RPO with just a 100 megabit connection.

It's easy to use. We don't need formal training. 

It performs its intended functions effectively. In my country, we often have discussions with people who believe it's a backup system. It isn't. 

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's amazing. It's important for us in the manufacturing industry, and we cannot lose our systems for more than a few minutes. Every minute means a lot of money wasted.

It's helped reduce downtime in certain situations. We now have a 1.5-minute recovery time. It's saving us tons of money. For every ten minutes down, we can lose thousands of dollars in production. 

It's positively affected our RTOs and RPOs. I've never seen anything like this. It's almost like magic. It's very good. In the worst case, we might have 11 seconds of RPOs.

HPE Zerto Software could be improved by including everything in the same package. If I had to suggest an improvement, I would want everything in the same package, such as HPE Zerto Software and Veeam together. Currently, I have to administer them separately, which can be more complicated for the infrastructure team. That would be beneficial. 

Regarding critical features, I don't see anything more than what HPE Zerto Software is already providing.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for approximately one year.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as good. I haven't experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues. Though it's not perfect, when HPE Zerto Software encounters problems, they provide a notice or email, and the system recovers automatically.

It's easy to scale simply by buying more licenses.

I evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as very good. The service in my country has been excellent. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as ten because the HP team addresses all our problems and questions. They visit our plant and assist with installation and everything else.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, we are planning to implement Alletra. We need full flash for the next step in our infrastructure planning to make it more resilient and faster. 

I would describe my experience deploying HPE Zerto Software as very easy and efficient. We implemented it into production in just two hours.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software, though it's difficult to quantify as our business is not IT-based. The company will certainly see the value if we encounter issues with ransomware or similar problems.

My experience with HPE Zerto Software regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been positive. The pricing is favorable, especially when compared to a metro cluster.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, I didn't see another comparable solution. It currently stands unique in the market.

My advice for other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is to try it and prepare to be surprised. You will lower your costs. That's the ultimate goal. 

On a scale of one to ten, this solution deserves a rating of ten.

We use the solution for replication.

By implementing the HPE Zerto Software, we're trying to minimize the RTO and the RPO.

This has benefited our organization as we had a catastrophic system failure where we had to bring up a copy of the production environment. We were able to bring up our application in minutes, whereas previously we had to get a six-second transaction. We didn't need to be storing backups or do any rollback. We just brought it up, turning what could potentially be hours of downtime into maybe 10 minutes.

One of the features I appreciate the most about the HPE Zerto Software is the simplicity of the replication, which allows the RPO to be in seconds rather than hours, which is what we were used to. The data loss is never substantial, not reaching minutes or hours.

The way HPE Zerto Software improves our RTOs and RPOs is by being by far the simplest we've used. Prior to HPE Zerto Software, our RTOs were in the hours. We've brought that down to an average of about ten seconds. The RTOs, since we're talking about having to bring a standby site, are in the minutes. We just make the DNS change here and there and we're back online, whereas previously it would require restoring backups to get the data. It's a big difference, going from hours down to minutes and seconds.

It's very easy to use. I have had to oversee rollbacks of infrastructure. We're training all of our IT organization, and I found it very easy. I would say it's getting easier.

This solution has helped to reduce downtime in situations, and we've definitely avoided or minimized downtime. I couldn't put a dollar value to describe that. In our internal operations, there's no financial impact if our entire operation goes offline for a day. However, there's internal staffing that we're paying to do nothing. We have contractors we're paying by the hour to sit idle. It reduces a lot of wasted man-hours.

My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's Near-Sync Replication are that it minimizes the loss of data. This solution has saved time and data for recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes, allowing us to go back from hours of data loss to just ten minutes. About five minutes of that was deciding whether to proceed.

With another solution that we used, it would have taken hours to recover. The previous solutions we used were all backup and recovery, requiring us to build new infrastructure, then restore the backups to that infrastructure. This solution has helped reduce our organization's DR testing significantly, making a lot of our testing now just business testing.

We perform a full DR test at the end of the year. It's made the DR testing a shorter exercise. We can test the entire environment in a weekend, failing it all over to the DR site, testing it, and failing it all back again. Prior to HPE Zerto Software, we could never successfully execute a full DR test in a weekend.

As for improvements to the HPE Zerto Software, I can't really think of anything as we have a very specific use case for it and don't use all the functionality. 

Potentially integration into some of our other solutions would be beneficial, as we're using ServiceNow as a platform. If we could integrate our AIOps solutions and incident management capabilities within HPE Zerto Software, that would be beneficial, as it would enable us to automatically bring the DR site online when a major incident is detected, eliminating human involvement and making the process quicker than manual decision-making.

I am familiar with the HPE Zerto Software for a couple of years now.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues, which speaks to the stability and reliability of the HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of our organization as it just sat there quietly in the background and did its job.

I have not had to use customer service or technical support from the provider, so I cannot evaluate that.

Positive

Prior to using the HPE Zerto Software, we were using a Veeam-based disaster recovery solution with cloud, and it was a clunky process.

I have not seen a significant return on investment with HPE Zerto Software. That said, the reduction in man-hours of work is probably the ROI we have. The reduction in downtime and standby equipment in our cloud data center means we don't need to keep the equipment running, so there's a cost savings there.

Before selecting the HPE Zerto Software, the other solution we considered was Veeam.

I am currently using a Cyber Vault solution. We were using Wasabi for immutable storage, however, that changed in the last couple of months. My experience with the pricing, setup, and licensing for the HPE Zerto Software is positive.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a nine.

Our systems are primarily Windows-based, but a big portion of the organization also runs on AS/400. About 40% of our systems are AS/400.

We use Zerto to replicate data from a primary data center to a secondary data center. In the previous incarnation, we used Zerto to replicate our secondary data center and also Azure because we were looking to start moving more and more things to Azure. We were considering Azure to have someplace where we could run some of our critical systems in the event we did not have much capacity in the secondary data center or it just made sense to leverage Azure for a particular application.

Zerto’s near-synchronous replication works very well. Most of the time, our systems are running about three seconds behind the primary, which is something most people are not going to complain about. It also has the ability to take you back to a point in time where everything is in sync. You can start from that point and maybe lose a couple of transactions as opposed to a typical backup environment where you could lose hundreds of transactions as a result of an outage. It can help revert systems to a specific point in time, providing continuity where data loss is minimal compared to traditional backup solutions. 

We saw the benefits of Zerto right away. It gave us the confidence that if something happened, we would be able to restore our data. A notable benefit is the ability to conduct failover testing in a virtual environment. We can confirm operations without affecting external users. The software audits its processes, offering detailed reports.

Zerto has also continued to upgrade features, including Secure Vault and tools for immutability, enhancing ransomware protection, but a hardware change is required to fully benefit from Zerto's ransomware solutions. We have to go with their hardware versus what we are running. We can take advantage of some of the things that they do to help with ransomware, but we cannot get all the way there without switching the hardware.

We use Zerto to protect virtual machines. Our RPOs have moved. Prior to Zerto, and at different places, we have used other solutions such as Pure Storage or IBM replication solutions. Most of these solutions tend to have an RPO of minutes or more, whereas, with Zerto, we are looking at an RPO of less than ten seconds or something like that. That was one of the big differences we saw. It is also an integrated solution. You move the entire environment as opposed to some of the other environments where you connect to the storage, and then the storage is doing the replication. At the point at which something fails, you have to reconnect servers back up to the right hardware before you can get started in recovery. With Zerto, your recovery time goes down, and your RPO becomes much better.

The recovery time or RTO is much better with Zerto if you have the right bandwidth and other things. If you have an issue with latency or bandwidth, you may see those RTO numbers go up a little bit. Generally, RTOs are much better.

We have not seen Zerto reducing downtime in any situation. We have not necessarily seen an improvement there.

In terms of time savings in a data recovery situation, we went through a ransomware event at the last company. I have seen Zerto help from a ransomware perspective because one of the things that Zerto does is it maintains a whole bunch of snapshots as it goes along. In a ransomware situation, you can go back to the time before you were hit by the ransomware. You can go back in time and recover those servers. You can scan them to make sure they do not have whatever malware was installed for the ransomware, and then you can recover.

Zerto has had a huge impact on our resiliency strategy. It allows us to be able to leverage our secondary data center for a major event. It also frees us up to do more things in the local environment such as leveraging SQL Always On.

Zerto has not helped us to reduce overall DR testing. We would like to do more testing with Zerto, but some folks are very comfortable with just Zerto saying everything is okay. On the other hand, Zerto has been able to help us increase our testing where we could not do it before. That does not mean that we are satisfied with where it is. We would like to do more with it.

I appreciate the real-time nature of Zerto. It continuously copies data, maintains synchronization, and allows rapid recovery of key systems. In most situations, the recovery delay is approximately six seconds, minimizing data loss. It gives us the ability to recover without losing a bunch of data.

Additionally, it facilitates migration between environments. We are in a business that does a lot of acquisitions and divestitures. That can be tiring, but Zerto makes our path smooth because we can use it to replicate something to another location and then bring it up there.

When it comes to failover tests, we would like to be able to take that extra step to shut things down and see what it looks like at the other site versus just doing it in a virtual environment. That is one thing I would push back on them. I would like the ability to perform actual failovers more easily compared to our current process. In the event of an issue, we can switch and bring back servers smoothly, but when we do the tests, currently, Zerto's test failovers are virtual. We cannot get end users to come access those systems. I would like to be able to do a test where we failover and rebuild the network connections so that end-users can hit that center or server and test. Improving testing capabilities would be advantageous.

When it comes to deployment, one improvement could be being able to visually see virtual private groups and server names. Although the reporting is comprehensive, occasionally, people use long names that do not display fully on the monitoring page. Despite this minor issue, deployment has been easy, and we rarely need support.

I initially explored Zerto around 2018. That was when I first became aware of it and initiated a pilot project. It was not until around 2023 that I began working in an organization actively using it.

I have not observed any instability. Occasionally, systems might run out of space, which is a common issue in any setup. However, the software alerts us effectively, allowing prompt resolution. Overall, I have not seen any stability issues with the system.

I believe Zerto scales quite well. In our current environment, we manage around 200 servers, with licensing that supports up to 500. Scaling is largely about expanding compute and storage capacity. There are no significant barriers to scalability with Zerto.

They have support, but we do not tend to need support from them. They have a lot of good material online to learn about the product. For the most part, it just runs and does not complain about anything.

I have not personally contacted technical support. In my previous organization, other team members, one of the four or five colleagues, reached out to tech support.

I have used and explored several solutions, including Commvault and NetWorker. We have also used Rubrik, which effectively manages storage across data centers.

We constantly monitor available technologies to create strategies for using Zerto alongside others like Rubrik and NetWorker. We use Rubrik for certain things and NetWorker for other things, but without Zerto or any of the others, it would not work. Zerto's development aims to substitute some tools by enhancing functionality. They continue to work to add functionality that could then help us eliminate some of the other tools that we are using because we can get the same functionality out of Zerto.

It is extremely easy to deploy. The deployment is straightforward. Once the virtual replication appliances are connected to the environment, the system is ready to start. After licensing, replication begins.

In this particular organization, it was deployed before I got here. At the previous organization, it took a few weeks or a month. We had to set things up and wait for some storage. We then rolled it out. The actual rollout was something that was done overnight, and it was relatively easy to do.

The maintenance that it requires includes upgrades to the latest version of the software. There might be features that you want that are not available in the current version. Overall, the system just runs itself, but you may get an alert that says that this particular system has gone out of bounds of its RPO. You can go in to find out the problem. You might need to add space to the journaling system so that it can get back up again.

We had a team of probably four or five individuals handling the implementation.

We have always been able to get the pricing worked out. At this new company I am right now, we are doing well. We sometimes go through a third party to help us with pricing, but Zerto is fairly decently priced, especially when you consider some of the other solutions that are out there which could be very expensive.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

It is part of a new deployment. We have a large deployment for the public sector in the UK, and we are using Zerto to enable disaster recovery by replicating data. This allows us to have a very low recovery point objective for that data.

Zerto is easy to use and fairly straightforward to set up. It reliably keeps the data in sync which is all that we can ask of it. It does what it says on the tin, and that takes away any worries. We know that we will be able to recover as we are contracted to do.

Having Zerto in place takes a headache off my plate. I do not have to worry about it. I check it, or I have my team check that it is up to date and synchronizing. All they have to do is log on, have a look, and confirm that we are okay and have green lights across the board. It is very easy to understand the interface.

Unfortunately it does introduce another headache. Trying to add licenses to the deployment, in order to expand our DR facility has proved to be a nightmare. Over a month of back and forth with HP. The licenses are purchased and good but adding them to a current deployment seems impossible and the process just falls into a black hole.

Zerto has given us confidence in our IT resilience strategy. We had similar strategies in place with the previous infrastructure. We completely renewed our entire infrastructure and replaced it with HPE backend and SAN. Zerto is the recovery solution. We have a lot of confidence that it will work if called upon with the licenses we have.

Zerto is quite straightforward to use. It is quite easy to set up. Getting it right is a bit more complex, but setting it up is quite straightforward. 

It seems to be very reliable, and it consistently keeps our data synchronized within ten seconds or so, which gives our customers confidence that the data synchronization and replication will allow for a very low recovery point objective.

The onboarding was not very good. It felt like, "Now you have Zerto, good luck. Figure out how to use it." It was not terrible. Their support since having the product has been good when I have had an issue, but there was not much of an onboarding process. The setup of the system, although simple to get working, is a little more tricky to get right. This aspect could have benefitted from a bit more explanation. As noted the addition of licenses is apparently very difficult and takes a lot of work with HP support (over a month so far and not resolved).

I have been using Zerto for about a year an a half.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

So far, and just my experience, very poor. I purchased a license count I needed at the time (with some overhead) and now wish to expand the count. Having bought the licenses HP seem unable to get them applied. This causes us issues which we have no control over.

Our environment has about 400 virtual machines. It is not massive. We are an application provider. We provide a purchasing and inventory management application set to our customers mainly in the UK public sector. Our clients are large organisations. They are health care and local government organisations.

I have a team of eight people. They are not daily involved with Zerto. Only four people are daily involved with Zerto.

Poor. for the reasons stated.

We used another replication system prior to this, which was the old EMC RecoverPoint. It was very good as well, but we had a change in technology. We shifted our technology to HPE for various reasons, and Zerto was the offering that came with their data synchronization.

Overall, it was straightforward. I did it myself in the afternoon by figuring it out myself. It took us a few days to get it right and then another couple of days fiddling with it, but it was under a week.

It requires very little maintenance on a day-to-day basis. It requires monitoring to ensure that you are not running out of space. Once you have got those space parameters right, it pretty much looks after itself unless there are significant changes.

We update Zerto when a new version is available. At that point, we schedule an update.

I managed the deployment initially, but it has now been handed off to a team.

It is too early to say. I think it will eventually prove beneficial by saving us time and eliminating the constant worry of checking these things.

Having seen the product and how it works and its reliability, it seems it will pay for itself.

Nothing is cheap, but Zerto represents decent value. Licensing I have covered - seems there are a lot of issues (even recognised on the HP support page)

I would recommend Zerto. It seems to be a very good product. It appears to be stable, and it is a simple product to manage that gives us peace of mind. 

I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten. The product works but I have spent too much time on it trying to resolve licensing issues to give it a higher score.

My current use cases for HPE Zerto Software include site-to-site and site-to-cloud.

HPE Zerto Software has saved me time in data recovery situations due to something like ransomware because we have protection against it. Due to the logging functions, we can go back in time and bring systems up a day before or a day after. We have been able to avoid ransomware issues with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I have found most valuable are the copy capabilities, specifically being able to copy a VM over to another site and bring it back up if I have an outage. I used HPE Zerto Software recently to go from cluster to cluster, and I was able to move VMs seamlessly. 

I find HPE Zerto Software very easy to use. Going in and being able to copy the VM makes it very efficient.

Near-synchronous replication makes it pretty easy for me to move things on the fly, so I can be up within about 10 minutes. Being up in 10 minutes is important for me because if we're not up in that timeframe, we have users complaining and calling.

HPE Zerto Software could evolve to where, instead of me having to push a button, it can detect disasters on the fly and automate disaster detection.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for about a year.

HPE Zerto Software is really stable. I haven't had an experience where I've had downtime.

HPE Zerto Software scales just fine with the growing needs of my organization; it's gone from a small test group to a larger test group with no problems.

I'd give their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The support team was really great. Everything was configured, and out-of-the-box configurations were seamless.

I have seen a return on investment from HPE Zerto Software, already just moving from data center to data center. Just moving the things over from one spot to another with no outage time, or very little outage, reflects how I've gotten the return on investment.

The licensing and setup costs have been reasonable.

I didn't consider any other solutions before selecting HPE Zerto Software. It was given to me.

I would rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.