HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use it for a hot DR site for our primary production environment, allowing us to fail over all of our production servers in case of an emergency.

We are in a much better position as far as our data protection scheme is concerned, with Zerto. Compared to where we were before, it's a night and day difference, because we didn't have the ability to immediately fail over our production environment. The difference is pretty extreme for our organization. We went from just having SAN snapshots to Veeam backups, and now we have replication.

It massively decreases the time needed for us to fail back because, before, we had no way to do so for our workload. It would have been a manual process to move our workload somewhere else. We would have had to get the VMs off of the existing infrastructure and we would have had to create a whole new infrastructure and get them running somewhere else. That could take two to three weeks, in an emergency situation, with our entire team working on it, versus just pushing a button and moving it right now. We're in a whole different realm now.

There would also be massive savings in manpower to do that. We would have to create a whole new infrastructure, whether in AWS, Azure, or even procuring physical equipment and deploying it. Now that we have Zerto in place, it's there waiting and being replicated too.

The fact that it just works is important to us. We don't have to do a whole lot to it. It does its thing in the background and it's ready to go. It enables us to execute our DR plan at any time that is required. It doesn't seem to require a lot of time or management or day-to-day maintenance. 

It doesn't "complain" a lot and it's ready to go at any time, so you could call it easy to use. It's just me responsible for maintaining it, and there is a network infrastructure person involved as well. But it mostly maintains itself, once it has been deployed.

It does what it's purported to do, which is to provide continuous data protection. We have a five-second RPO. It's definitely doing its job. It's there in the background, replicating constantly.

I would like to see them continuously improve Zerto's automated functions, such as putting hosts in maintenance mode within vSphere and not having to worry as much about how Zerto is going to react. Rather, Zerto should be able to handle putting various hosts, within either the source or destination side, into maintenance mode without having to worry about the vRA appliances. Sometimes, Zerto almost holds the vSphere environment hostage when it comes to taking certain actions. You really need to be cognizant about what you're about to do. They should further automate that and increase Zerto's ability to handle things like that in a very slick, automated way, without intervention.

Zerto could also build more canned automation tools within their product, tools that automatically work with DNS updates to AWS or Azure. Maybe they could provide an area for scripting help or canned scripts, a community or a place where people could grab some scripting. Maybe they could reach into Citrix or F5 load balancer APIs.

Also, if you have a host go wrong or you need to put one in maintenance in an emergency situation, especially on the source side, it can require you to fix Zerto and redeploy vRAs or redeploy the little appliances to the host that they're going to be on.

Also, depending on what resources it has available, storage or vSphere-wise, I'd like to see it able to balance itself out within the virtual environment, with its storage usage on the destination side.

I've only run into these things briefly, so I can't speak about them at the deepest technical level, but I have noticed that they're not as perfect as they could be.

I have been using Zerto for three months at my current company, but I have about two years' experience with it in total.

For the most part, it has been stable. There have been a few points where I have had to delete the VPG group, re-replicate data, and start over, to get things back to a good spot. But overall it has been pretty stable.

We are only protecting 45 VMs. We're not a large, multinational, so I can't really speak about its scalability.

I haven't used the technical support very much.

We didn't have a previous solution, other than SAN snapshots. That's why we looked to put something in place. Previously, we were in a tenuous situation that would make anyone nervous. We went in this direction so that we wouldn't have to be nervous.

It didn't seem that difficult to set up. 

It took a couple of days, but that didn't include setting up the SAN and the secondary sites and all of the infrastructure around having it work directly. But just the Zerto solution itself did not take very long at all to set up.

Everything that we needed to do to facilitate the use of the solution was more involved and took a month or so. At the time, we also deployed a Veeam solution to do the long-term storage, and that was wrapped up in the same project, so it's hard to give an exact amount of time for the deployment. 

Everyone knows Zerto is a little on the expensive side, but what else is there on the market that does the same thing? It is more expensive per client, for what it does, compared to a backup product like Veeam.

We didn't really go into a full evaluation of other solutions. We took the recommendation of our VAR. They're a company that provides us with help in implementing projects. They recommended going to Zerto, and I had already used Zerto before at another company, so I was comfortable with that recommendation.

Zerto serves a very specific purpose in our environment, which is to fail over the entire environment in an emergency, very quickly. Veeam claims to be able to do that, but I don't think it does it as quickly or efficiently as Zerto.

The main thing is to make sure your network infrastructure is designed properly. Zerto is only going to be as successful as the network infrastructure and the automation that is created around it to help with a failover situation.

In our particular situation, we have a stretch network situation, which means we don't really have to do a lot of the automated scripting that most people might have to do, surrounding re-IP-ing the environment and DNS updates. We're in a unique situation. Because we are a telco, we own our entire network and we have the ability to stretch our network to a location that's a state away. That scenario doesn't apply to a lot of other business situations. Other institutions may not have that luxury, in which case their scripted automation, and how well that is set up, would be critical.

Because we weren't doing backup and DR management before, Zerto has probably increased the amount of staff we need. You don't need staff in place for things that you aren't doing.

HPE bought Nimble and made Nimble not as good. Hopefully, the HPE acquisition won't have a negative effect on Zerto. That's a deep concern among all people who have had to deal with things that HPE bought. They need to keep to the original intention and vision without diluting it within some other HPE product or some other HPE offering. I have no interest in seeing Zerto losing its functionality or having it rebranded as some other problematic HPE solution. We bought this as a purpose-built solution to do exactly what we want and that's the way we would like it to stay.

We use it primarily for backup and recovery of individual servers and databases. We also use it for long-term retention.

It helps us

• achieve our RPOs
• conduct successful DR tests
• provide functionality for some of our key, critical customers.

Fortunately, we haven't gone through an unplanned DR situation, but if we were to go into one Zerto would be the top technology that we would use to recover. We would expect it to function as designed to get everything back to working as normal. Otherwise, obviously, it would be a big problem for our company. Zerto is a critical, core piece of infrastructure for the IT infrastructure team. I estimate it would save us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a DR situation.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time involved. It's hard to quantify how much time it would save us because we haven't compared it to other DR products. But if we were to use our in-house data protection backup solution or our storage solution, Zerto would save weeks of man-hours when it comes to setup, compared to those other solutions. And it could save minutes in terms of the recovery point objectives.

The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem.

Zerto is also pretty simple and straightforward when it comes to ease of use. There were no big surprises.

I would like the ability to monitor the performance of some specific components. Right now we're having an issue with local and remote replications with some of the VPGs. Being able to look at individual VPG performance would be helpful. 

Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, "Hey, you're not conforming to best practices." It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on.

Another area for improvement is alerts. We're getting so much noise right now in the 8.5 version. The problem is that we don't know which are the ones we need to act on. We don't know which ones are severe versus those that are informational or notice or debug. They have told us that when we upgrade to version 9 we'll be able to tune some of the alerts. That type of alert tuning, where we can get just the emergency and error alerts, would be helpful, while not necessarily tuning out the informational or notice or debug alerts. If alerts could be channeled to a syslog server where we could filter and see which alerts are the priority that would be an improvement.

We have a network operation center and for us to operationalize this tool with them, we have to be able to deliver each alert along with an action plan for it. That way they can take the appropriate action if Zerto has some type of error. It would help if the alerts didn't just fall on our storage and data protection team. If we could transfer some knowledge and have other level-one teams look at some of the more basic Zerto alerts and try to resolve them, that would help.

I've known about Zerto for several years but I've been actively using it for the last two months.

The stability is pretty good. I haven't seen the software itself break, or the services stop for unknown reasons. 

We did have an issue with a VPG the other day, where it went belly-up, and we had to rethink and do a bunch of baselines. So some type of health monitor that shows both the servers and the VPGs would be helpful.

I haven't worked with the scaling functionality because we only have it in our two major data centers. But I think it would be pretty straightforward and simple to set up scaling.

Currently we're protecting about one petabyte with Zerto. We have some room to grow still with Zerto.

Much like with any technical support—and this is true whether you're talking about IBM, Microsoft, Dell EMC, or any of the big tech players—their level-two guys are definitely good, if you can get one of them. But the level-one guys seem not to be as good. Zerto was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and it shows with their level-one guys. They're not as vested in the product. All the level-one people who were vested in the product probably left. So a lot of the level-one guys aren't very technical. 

We oftentimes have to work with our technical account manager to get cases moved up to level two. Once they're there, they seem to get some movement, which is good. And, obviously, their level-two support team in Israel is very good.

Positive

I was not part of the initial installation, but I've heard that some of the initial pieces are straightforward. Where it gets complex is that I don't know if it was set up according to their best practices.

The pricing follows normal industry standards.

In a previous company, I was involved in the evaluation process that ended with choosing to go with Zerto.

Zerto sits on top of a lot of other technologies. It's like a "Layer 3" for lack of a better term. Some of the other solutions that are "Layer 2" can be more attractive, solutions like Commvault, Rubrik, and Cohesity. They're able to do more native operations at the OS level, like replication. They have more hooks into the operating system to enable you to do that.

However, Zerto's user interface is good. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it gives you the RPOs and RTOs right then and there. It requires some administration from the VPG perspective, but it's able to bridge a lot of gaps.

My advice would be to work with your Zerto technical account manager for the setup and best practices.

Zerto is good when it comes to continuous data protection. We're currently in the middle of some technical support cases with them, cases that I'm watching, regarding some of our larger databases. But so far, there have been no issues with the smaller databases. It's doing its job.

We haven't yet enabled Zerto to do DR in the cloud, but that's something we are pursuing currently. We have had a demo of it but we haven't done a PoC.

We're replicating mainly some of our critical applications. One is our backup solution and then also some critical applications that we don't want to have to recover from tapes. That's been working very well for us. We actually just recently went through a DR rehearsal, where we ran a quick test and that ran for about a week and then completed that test. Then we were able to report that we were able to successfully recover our critical ERP system inside of the remote location successfully.

I don't have to worry about Zerto so much. It definitely continues working. We definitely have monitoring and everything like this to make sure things are working just fine, but I can't complain about it in any kind of way. I know we are a little behind on the version that we're using and we need to be on the latest and greatest. Right now we're on version 7.0.

It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery or in a data recovery situation. It's now only one person while it was four previously. 

Comparing it to VMware SRM, Zerto is by far the best that I've used before for providing continuous data protection. 

Different parts of the company use VMware, we use Zerto, and then we saw where they were taking us. Ours really takes less than an hour just to do a quick failover. So it didn't make any sense to go with VMware one, so we ended up going with Zerto.

An employee had actually introduced us to it and we looked at it and wanted to try it. He was working for a bank that does quite a bit as far as doing disaster recovery. So if a bank used it then I would definitely use it. 

It is fairly easy. It's not as technical to get around it or anything like that.

It's a fairly easy tool to use. 

I know that Zerto can definitely improve some functionalities. I know some of the cloud pieces probably enable that. At the moment, it's doing what we want for us, and what it's doing for us right now is plenty. I can't say there's any improvement that I can see that needs to be done at the moment.

I'm not sure if it has throttling, meaning, what's going over the wire and how we can throttle that to reduce the amount of data that's going across the bandwidth. I can't remember if that's something that's in this product. It might be in the more recent version. 

I have been using Zerto for three to four years. 

Their support has been very good. I can't complain about them. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for the admin that deployed it. It was not complicated. That person left and then another person came in who didn't know anything about this product and he picked it up fairly easily and he's able to manage it with ease.

He's a VMware administrator and he also maintains Zerto.

The deployment was done within a day.  

We don't have plans to increase usage because we are at the point where we're closing out. We're migrating some of our data centers and right now I know it's going to continue utilizing what we have. We haven't even hit the capacity of what we've got right now. Because I think the license we have is around 75 servers. We haven't even hit that. The only thing that's stopping us from right now is just that we need to increase the storage at the remote location to handle additional workloads. We have around 14 servers. 

We have seen ROI from Zerto. 

It has reduced downtime. It went from 24 hours to four minutes. It could even be seconds. It's fairly quick.

The dollar amount would equate to something in the millions. For an environment to be restored it means restoring our ERP systems. Then in that ERP in that system, it also has some manufacturing as well.

Pricing is fair. I don't see a big issue with the pricing for what we are trying to do. The things that we're replicating, if it were to go down it pays for it in itself there.

We don't have any plans for long-term retention. They talked to us about it. But at the moment it's not in our forecast to look at that.

We don't have to failback because we just fail to a bubble, in other words. We don't want to bring down production because we're going through migration of our ERP. So we fail it over into this bubble. And that's what we're using. It is the test failover that we're using in that environment. Then in that environment, everything is isolated. That's how we use it today. We have never had to failback back to our main site.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case is disaster recovery.

We have Zerto deployed on-premises at both our primary and DR locations.

In general, Zerto helps us with our DR plan because it makes things so easy.

Zerto does a very good job of providing continuous data protection. I've been very impressed and would rate it an eight out of ten. Especially when it comes to DR testing, it is very easy to work with and we are able to recover our infrastructure at our DR site within a matter of minutes.

When we have to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved in the process. I've used other solutions and I haven't seen anything that compares to what it can do. It is difficult to estimate the exact time saving because it depends on the workload.

Realistically, you could have a single admin responsible for the restores, whereas with other solutions, depending on how big your environment is, it would take more people. In our environment, it would take upwards of five people to restore our core infrastructure and by using Zerto, it reduces the number of people by about half.

With respect to DR management, Zerto has reduced the number of people involved in the process. I wasn't at the company when they used the previous product, so I'm not sure by exactly how much.

The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time.

It's very helpful for DR testing because we can recover VMs in an isolated bubble and prove our DR methodology.

Zerto is very easy to use, which is one of its big selling points. It takes just a few clicks to restore a VM, which means that it's easy to train somebody to help in a DR situation.

We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work. However, I cannot recall the specific details.

I have been using Zerto since I started with the company two years ago. In total, the company has been using it for approximately four years.

The stability has been very good. I can't think of a time that we've really had any issues that we didn't cause or something maybe with an update. We're running it 24/7 and I can't think of a time that we've had any major issues with it.

From my perspective, Zerto's scalability is very good. We have 60 VPGs and 122 virtual machines that we're using Zerto to replicate to our disaster recovery site. This will grow with any new infrastructure that we build. Any new servers, depending on their RTO or how soon we need to recover them, would be put into Zerto. Potentially, we will add some, although I'm not aware of any major growth at this time.

Our operations department monitors the dashboard just to confirm that our RTO and the VPG health look good. There are perhaps five people in that team, who are watching the dashboard.

In my team, there are three of us that use it, although we don't look at it daily. It would only be if we get reports of an issue or we need to adjust a setting or something like that.

Overall, on a day-to-day basis, there are probably about five people that use it.

I have not personally dealt with the technical support but I know about the experience that my coworker has had. They are typically very helpful and provide good responses compared to other companies in the industry.

Zerto was recently acquired by HP and there is some concern in our organization about what might happen to the technical support, seeing as they were bought out by a bigger company. We're hoping that it doesn't negatively impact the support that we receive.

I have used Veeam in the past and it's similar to Zerto in certain aspects. They both have their pros and cons, but I would say from what I've seen, I like Zerto. It just seems to be a little bit more user-friendly in the UI. Functionality-wise, they're similar. I think Veeam would be one of their main competitors.

I have also used the older product by VMware called Site Replication Manager. It really doesn't compare to Zerto.

I have been involved in some of the Zerto setups and from what I have seen, they go very well. It seems that it is pretty easy to perform the initial setup.

It takes about an hour per site, or per server to upgrade it. 

We deploy and upgrade the solution in-house.

It's usually two people that are responsible for maintenance but it could be four people on the team.

I believe that we have seen a return on our investment. The return comes from time saved in manpower, for example. From what I've seen, it's worth the cost.

I've also heard comments from my coworkers to say that it's an expensive product but it definitely makes you feel more comfortable in a DR situation.

I have not been directly involved in the pricing and licensing. My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price.

We don't use Zerto for long-term data retention and I'm not aware that there are any plans to do so. We use Zerto in tandem with our backup solution, just to be safe. That said, we have used Zerto for recovery in scenarios where we couldn't find the particular data that we were looking for in our other backup solution. 

We have not experienced any ransomware incidents or other situations where we needed disaster recovery. However, Zerto would definitely save us time for that. Depending on the situation, it could save the number of people involved as well.

Although we have not had to use it in an actual event, it helps us in terms of regulatory and audit compliance. If we had a real event, we would all feel more comfortable that we'd be able to restore or be in a better position to have our infrastructure restored in a small amount of time.

We have not yet looked into using Zerto for DR in the cloud but in the future, we're going to look at the option of doing so.

My advice for anybody who is considering Zerto is to do a proof of concept or a trial. I'm not sure what the vendor has available in this regard but I would advise trying it out with a small number of virtual machines.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Zerto runs on a Windows Virtual Server and we have it installed at two sites. There is the production site, as well as the failover DR site.

We use this product almost exclusively for disaster recovery. It is responsible for the automated recovery of what we deem to be our mission-critical servers.

In terms of its ability to provide continuous data protection, this is a product that I trust. We test it quarterly to make sure that what the dashboard is telling us is correct. But, I've used it long enough to know that when I see the dashboard telling me that the virtual protection groups (VPGs) health are all green, then things are working correctly. Our average RPO is usually somewhere between three and 10 seconds.

We used to perform a disaster recovery test once a year, and it was painful because everything was manual. Now that we do it quarterly, we're able to provide management with reports of the tests, which not only makes management happy but also makes various governing bodies happy. We're a financial advisory firm, so it's the SEC that oversees us. That said, I'm sure this holds true in many industries. It allows you to have the reports to prove that you've done the tests. We don't have to ask them to take our word for it.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto has absolutely decreased the time and number of people that are required to do so. For example, if I just want to test and prove that the network is up, it's something that I can do by myself. If I want to have people log in and test applications and stuff like that, I would need additional people. However, it has a built-in test function, so it will create a complete test network that you can run workloads on to show that the tests are successful. Afterward, you can delete the network and you're back just running, waiting for the next time you want to do that. In a situation like this, using Zerto saves eight hours or more and I can set it up and test it on my own unless I want people actually testing applications.

Thankfully, we have not had to use this product to recover from a ransomware attack or other disaster, but it would absolutely work in that case. By replicating the data, if ransomware were to hit the production side, it most likely would not also lock the disaster recovery side. This means that we would certainly be able to bring it up from there. Alternatively, it lets us pick points in time, so we can just go back to the moment in time before the ransomware happened. In a situation like this, I can't say that it would take fewer people but it would take fewer hours.

The most valuable feature is the automated failover, as it allows us to get the essential servers up at our DR site with little intervention.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. You set it and forget it.

It has a nice graphical interface.

The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did.

This would include details like what systems were up. Currently, that's not how the report reads. You would have to be an IT person to read the current reports that it produces. I would like for them to be the type of reports that I can put in front of an auditor or the president of our firm that would make sense to them, without me having to interpret and explain the results.

We are in our seventh year of using Zerto.

Stability-wise, this solution is rock-solid. If it fails, it's not going to be Zerto that fails. It's going to be either that your storage has failed or the bandwidth, or connectivity, is not there. I don't see a way where Zerto would be the culprit in a failure-type instance.

Our company is fairly small and the entire firm relies on it. That said, only one person actively uses it. We have three or four IT staff but Zerto has always been my responsibility.

In terms of scalability, I bet it would be no issue whatsoever. It's licensed according to the virtual machines that you want to protect. The only limitation of the scalability would be how deep your pockets are because it's going to be license costs.

We're a registered financial advisory firm, and we are growing. In the past year to 18 months, we have grown from approximately 52 employees to 70 employees. Everybody relies on it because if we have a disaster recovery type of situation, then everybody is going to expect to be able to work.

It is still a very small number of IT staff, so I can see that as we hire more IT staff to support a larger user base, we will certainly have more users.  At least, I hope not to be the only one responsible for this solution as we grow.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Prior to Zerto, we used VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We switched because it requires a lot of manual upkeep, and there is no automation involved unless you write the scripts. There are lots of freeware sites where you can download scripts, but aside from that, we were spending a lot of time manually writing scripts and maintaining everything. This was really counterproductive for the amount of time we had available in a day.

Essentially, SRM was replaced because of better interface automation and ease of use. 

The setup is very easily done because you tie it into your VMware vCenter. When you put in your credentials, it will recognize everything on your networks. It will recognize storage, whether it be cloud-based or as in our case, at another data center. Once you have those defined, it's just a matter of creating groups that you want to recover, server-wise.

The reason that you would want to do it in groups is that you can set it up in the automation such that it will bring up groups in a certain order. That way, you have a network where the domain controllers come up in the first group, and you can automate stuff from there.

Seven years ago, when I first started to use it, I found it more difficult. I wouldn't say that it was complex but they have certainly made improvements over the years. Where it stands now, if I had to set it up from scratch, I could probably do it in about an hour. Of course, that is because of the way I know the application but in terms of how they have changed the setup, it is certainly more user-friendly than it was compared to where it started.

I remember running into a couple of issues during the deployment, and I contacted their support. They were fantastic and helped me get through it. They made sure that all of my questions were answered, and that it was up and running how we intended it to be used. A lot of it probably had to do with me being a novice at that point, in terms of using the application.

It was a multi-site deployment, with a production site and a DR site, with dedicated storage for each. We have changed the storage that it uses over the years and if I had to do it again, I would use another vendor for storage. A lot of the issues that we ran into were related to the initial storage that we used, as opposed to Zerto issues, even though it was Zerto support that helped me fix them. 

Overall, the deployment was fairly easy. Not because everything went great, but because of the combination of the application being pretty well-written and the support. I would rate the deployment an eight out of ten.

I deployed Zerto with the help of a consultant, contacting support as we needed to. The consultant was NetGain Technologies and they're based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Their service was phenomenal and I would use them again in a heartbeat for this type of deployment. Ultimately, any issues that we ran into boiled down to some issues with the storage we chose to run it on.

I am responsible for the maintenance. 

We have absolutely seen a return on investment in terms of the manhours that have to be put into maintaining and testing this type of product. Thankfully, we have never had to use it in a true DR situation. However, I can guarantee that if something were to happen, even beyond the manhours and ease of automation, that it would pay for itself.

Our network infrastructure runs pretty smoothly most of the time. That said, Zerto has helped us to reduce downtime by approximately 20%. It is difficult to equate this with a monetary value because we have to consider what happens when a client misses a trade or cannot get a hold of their portfolio manager.

If it were an outage of a couple of hours then the person might pay a little more or a little less for a stock that they were trying to purchase. Overall, however, it is difficult to estimate. We aren't a day trading-type firm, so ultimately, I'm not sure that a short outage has any effect on our revenue stream whatsoever.

As a small company, we own the smallest license that Zerto offers, which is 15 VMs. I've not had to contact them or my reseller about purchasing additional licenses or to find out how much they cost.

We spoke with VMware to see what their pipeline was for upgrades or changes to Site Recovery Manager and we also looked at both Cohesity and Rubrik.

I like the separation of the software and the storage, whereas some of those other products are all-in-one. You're buying the software and storage together on the same platform. This means that the scalability would be different.

Sometimes, this is a case of adding shelves for storage. In that situation, for example, you have to start taking the data center rack space into account. Whereas with Zerto, it lets us build upon hardware we already had, even though we use dedicated storage.

Version 9 of this product is out. However, we have not yet upgraded. We're not leveraging the cloud the way a lot of companies do these days, and I know from the release notes that I've read that most of the new features are related to the cloud. There's not a lot of research and development being done on physical data centers anymore.

At this point, I'm very happy with where the product sits for my network. We are now just starting to move things to the cloud, which will take place over the next couple of years, so my assessment in this regard may change in perhaps a few years.

At the moment, we don't have plans to use it for long-term retention. We keep about three days' worth of data in Zerto and then it rolls off. We have other systems in place for long-term retention.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Zerto is to do your homework. In the end, this product checks all of the boxes and it's the one that I would go with.

In the way that we use this solution, which I know is not how everybody uses it, we have storage that is specifically used for Zerto and two data centers. The way it works in that scenario, as long the bandwidth is there, meaning some sort of dedicated circuit between the two sites, it's flawless in my opinion.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be a giant pain. I certainly used to look at it that way in the past.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using this solution for three years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

We are an electric utility and we have some pretty critical workloads. We have identified the most critical workloads in our environment and have implemented Zerto as a protective measure for them.

We try to keep our critical workloads protected, which are a subset of our systems. For example, we're not going to protect a print server with Zerto.

The fact that Zerto provides continuous data protection is key for us. We have tested on a regular basis, and in one case, we tested our entire ERP system. It is a pretty big workload that includes Linux servers, databases, and other components. It's about a 45-minute window to get it back up and running. For our test, we moved the entire system to our DR facility on a weekend, ran it for an entire week from the DR site, and then brought it back the following Sunday. It worked flawlessly.

I really like the 24-hour DVR-like rollback. For example, we had an issue a few years ago, when we still had an Exchange server on-premises. One of my staff came in for the morning to do vulnerability management, saw that some updates needed to be applied, applied the updates to the Exchange server, and it totally broke it. Everybody's email was down. To resolve things, we went to Zerto, rolled back to before the updates, and it was all done in less than five or 10 minutes. It was really quick. All of the email functionality was restored and it popped up and said, "Hey, you need an update." I said, "Please do not do that update." It was pretty good.

Zerto is easy to use and the interface is very intuitive. We have never had an issue with using it. We just have a one-man team to perform failbacks or workloads. It is very simple to do and during our test with the Exchange server, it was only a matter of a few clicks. It's always been an excellent product and they've only improved it over time. We're really pleased with it.

The integration with VMware is really good.

It would be nice if we were able to purchase single licenses for Zerto. As it is now, scaling requires that we purchase a multi-pack. It hasn't been a big deal for us but it would still be helpful to have a little bit more granularity on the license count.

The only timeline or limiting factor, in my opinion, is how long it takes to replicate. That all depends on your infrastructure, and we happen to be pretty fortunate that we have a nice pipe in between the two locations, between here and our DR site. If you don't have that limiting factor, it's just a matter of time. You just wait long enough for it to replicate over and then you're covered.

I have been using Zerto for approximately seven years.

We do the updates regularly and Zerto has never given us problems. We work with a lot of different technologies and we have a lot of problems, but Zerto has not been one of them.

We haven't had much opportunity to explore scalability at this point. We're responsible for another organization's IT, as well. They're a sister company of ours and they're smaller than us, so we do all of their IT and we have them on Zerto. They're using us as a DR point.

From an expansion perspective, we scaled up from our initial install to include theirs as well, which I think we got pretty close to doubling our license count.

We are 100% deployed at this point. If we were ever to add another sister company, which is possible because we have other sister companies where opportunities may arise. A lot of the time, they're so small that they can't afford IT, so it's easier to have us manage it. In cases like this, we may have an opportunity to deploy Zerto.

We have a very small team of three people, so Zerto does not affect our headcount. There is me, who is the manager of IT or manager of information services. Then, we have our desktop technician, and then we have our network administrator.

We have never had to use Zerto's technical support for anything major. Any time that we have had to contact them, it has been for minor stuff and it's worked out fine.

A long time ago, when we had an EMC SAN, there was a VMware plugin that served as a replication solution. However, it was terrible and it never worked.

Zerto is a major upgrade that is easier to use and switching was excellent.

Replacing our legacy solution with Zerto has definitely saved us time and improved the quality of our process. I never felt like I could trust our previous solution, which was a big deal because when you're talking about backups, trust is a major factor. You have to be able to trust your solution and feel like it's going to work in a bad situation.

Zerto is one of those things that you love to have but you hate to have to use because it means that something bad is going on. That said, if there are serious problems then you want to have something that's rock solid. For us, that's Zerto, and we feel strongly about that.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had some training with some Zerto engineers on how to set up the recovery groups and other things, but once that was set up, we made several changes later on as we played with it. Overall, it was very straightforward to configure and I think that we only had an hour of training.

The deployment took us a couple of weeks to get everything figured out, although it wasn't necessarily Zerto that was the hold-up. We only had a certain number of licenses, perhaps 15 in total. We spent time trying to determine which were our critical workloads, and there was some internal debate about it. From the Zerto perspective, there weren't a lot of issues.

It didn't take a lot of time, just a couple of weeks to get us up and going. We were actually up and technically running within that same day, but to truly boot it and get it where it needed to be, it took a couple of weeks. It was a new technology to us at the time, so it took a while to get up to speed with it.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we just tried to identify the critical workloads, find the ones that really needed to be protected and start to make those recovery groups. Then, we organized them in such a way that things worked properly. For example, the components of our ERP system do have to come up in a certain order. Finding all of that stuff out and fine-tuning the process was part of our strategy. Then, we slowly started moving those workloads across. We broke it down into groups and we did those groups one at a time until the implementation was complete.

Our in-house team was responsible for implementation.

Maintenance-wise, we just keep it updated. Our network administrator applies the updates and checks the health from time to time. We have a dashboard on our big screen if we feel the need to monitor it. If we walk by and it looks like a protection group is in the red or yellow, then we look at what needs to be done to get the problem straightened out.

Price-wise, it's right in line with what we would figure. For what you get for it, it's really a good value, and we've never had any problem renewing it or anything like that.

License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it.

Licensing requires purchasing packages that consist of several licenses, and they cannot be purchased one at a time.

We paid for an hour of training that we took but otherwise, there have been no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We began looking at Zerto for several reasons including the cost, ease of use, and really, the flexibility of it. When you want to switch it over and do a different workload, it's not that big of a deal.

When we first began to consider using Zerto, we had a discussion with a grocery chain that is close to us. It's a specialty grocery chain and they have exotic foods sold out of two different locations. Christmas is their busiest time of year and they have several cash registers at each location doing transactions constantly.

They had to use Zerto during the middle of that Christmastime rush and failover, from one site to the other, all of their point of sale systems. They never lost a penny in transactions. For us, that was a big testimonial. They have a similar size of environment to ours as far as server infrastructure goes, so we didn't even look at anything else.

At this time, we don't use Zerto for long-term data retention. Instead, we have some other technologies in place for that. We have Veem and we have some SAN replication and we have some network-attached storage, as well. We use Zerto as our first line of defense. For example, in response to a ransomware attack, we would use Zerto for sure to roll back before that event happened.

We have not had a ransomware attack, at least not yet. We fully expect that, if it ever does happen, we'll definitely utilize Zerto. It is essentially our insurance policy. If we ever have a ransomware incident, that would be our first line of defense to recover from it. In fact, we really haven't had many opportunities to use Zerto, thankfully. Zerto is one of those things that are great, and we're glad we have it, but you hope we never have to use it.

At this time, everything we do is on-premises but having DR in the cloud with Zerto is definitely something that we want to do in the future.

It is not important to us that Zerto offers both backup and DR functionality. For backup, we have it covered in other ways. Being in the utility business, we're very big on redundancy. In fact, we have backups to cover the backups and we have about five different levels of them that we utilize. Zerto covers the front line, and when something bad happens, we can roll back within a 24-hour period using it. Then, we have deeper levels handled by other products like Veeam. Funnily enough, Veeam kept telling us that they would add Zerto-like features, and at the same time, Zerto kept telling us that they would add Veeam-like features. We continue to use both of them.

I've recommended Zerto to several IT professionals that I've talked to because it's such a good product. I give them examples of what we have done.

Overall, it's a fantastic product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We mostly use it just for disaster recovery. We also utilize it for our quarterly and annual DR test.

It is on-prem. We have a primary location and a DR location.

Since we are at a bank, there are certain protocols in place where we need to have RPO and RTO times of two hours or less. Zerto does a great job of setting those times and alerting us if those can't be met. We have our help desk actively monitoring that. It is extremely helpful that Zerto lists what is falling out of compliance in regards to RPO and RTO. It has been great in that regard.

If we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the number of people involved by half versus companies of similar size who don't have Zerto.

We have had patches that have broken a server. We then needed to have it right back up and running. We have been able to do that, which has been a huge plus. 

The real-time data protection is the most valuable feature. We are able to quickly spin up VMs instantly. 

We have also utilized it, from time to time, if our backups didn't catch it at night. If something was deleted midday, this solution is nice because you can use Zerto for that. 

I would rate Zerto very high in terms of it providing continuous data protection. We have had multiple instances that took days with our old DR test (before I was at my current company) and DR tests from other companies where I worked that didn't have Zerto. Now, we can realistically do DR tests in less than 30 minutes.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. If 10 is absolutely dummy-proof, I would give the ease of use an eight.

It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default. However, we have done it with other things. It is pretty handy.

I would like it if they would really ramp up more on their PowerShell scripting and API calls, then I can heavily utilize PowerShell. I am big into scripting stuff and automating things. So, if they could do even more with PowerShell, API calls, and automation, that would be fantastic.

I have been using it at my company for almost four years. My company has been using it for six years.

I would rate stability as eight and a half out of 10.

I would rate scalability as eight out of 10.

We monitor and use it every day. Our current license count is 150 VMs. I could definitely see us increasing that license because we keep adding more VMs.

As big as our company is, we don't have a very large infrastructure sysadmin group. I wouldn't say that Zerto has reduced our staff in any kind of way, but it definitely has helped the small amount of people that we have.

We have around 20 people using it: 

• Our core admin group is four people, including me. To put that in perspective, we have a $10 billion bank and our core infrastructure team consists of just those four people. The core admin group does administration, creates VPGs, and executes the main day-to-day operations. 
• We have a few users who are just monitoring it only. This is a read-only role. 
• We have our help desk, which is basically read-only, but they actively monitor RTO and RPO every day, all day long. They leave up the dashboard on a huge TV and just keep an eye on things.

I would rate the technical support as nine and a half out of 10. I thoroughly enjoy the fact that they are located in Boston, and you feel like you are talking to someone just like you. They do an excellent job of following up and escalating anything that is needed. I rarely have to call Zerto support, but I am confident that anytime I need to, then it will be resolved.

We stay in close contact with our main local rep.

My company never used anything quite like Zerto. We still use things for backup and recovery, such as Dell EMC Avamar, which used to be NetWorker. We also use RecoverPoint for applications, but it is not at all the same. There is actual real-time recovery. It is kind of a different animal.

I have had to redeploy it a few times with data center changes and such. We went from your typical data center to Cisco UCS Blades to VxRack, a VMware Dell EMC product. With that, I had to deploy it from scratch.

It was pretty straightforward. There is plenty of very easy to follow documentation when it comes to implementing it. There is also a lot of training provided so you can understand it before you implement it. Those two things make it pretty easy.

Just to stand it up and get everything going, that took an hour or two. The overall implementation was over the course of three days, because our core is heavily utilized.

We had a ZVM Virtual Manager on our production side and another on our DR site. Most of our data is replicated from production to DR. We do have some that are in the DR replicating back, but not a lot. Our main concern was between both sites, because we don't have a very large pipe. Even though Zerto's compression is pretty good, we didn't want to send that data all back over. Our main priority, when we set it up again, was that we were able to retain a lot of the data at our DR location and remap it by using preseeded disks, which was huge.

At least two staff members are required for deployment and maintenance. Whenever an update is released, we try to do that fairly quickly. For quarterly updates or major releases, we try to stay on top of them. Then, whenever we deploy new systems, applications, or servers, depending on the RTO and RPO, we add Zerto to those. That is daily, depending on how much workload we have and how many servers we are deploying. Those two people add those groups and such configuration into Zerto.

From an implementation standpoint, just follow the guide and check their support page for things. Worst case, reach out to support if you have already paid for it. It is pretty straightforward.

Zerto has helped reduce downtime. We have had servers go down and could easily spin them back up at our DR location almost instantly. Instead of taking an hour, it took a minute.

On average, it saves us three to five hours a day.

We pay for 150 VMs per year. It is not cheap.

Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well.

Zerto did really well with presenting their solution to the management here, really getting people involved, and helping them understand what and how it could be used. At the time, their real-time recovery was pretty far above anybody else available, and even still somewhat.

Other solutions would take an entire workday to recover our core infrastructure. With Zerto, we are done within an hour for all our major systems.

As far as the GUI goes, Zerto is more user-friendly than a lot of other products, such as Avamar and Commvault. It is fairly easy to use, but I think the GUI interface of Zerto is pretty far above the rest.

We use Avamar, and I don't see Zerto replacing Avamar for the simple fact of retention and how expensive the storage is. Using an RPM storage is pretty pricey, especially to try to rely on that for a long retention of seven years, for instance. 

When it comes to purchasing, I highly recommend Zerto all the time to friends that I have at other companies. 

It is just for DR. We keep an average of three days of retention, e.g., journal history of three days. However, it is not always the same for all products. We don't really keep it for backups. That is more of a convenience thing.

Currently, we don't utilize the cloud. It may be an option in the future. The cloud was a bad word for our bank for a long time, and that is starting to change.

Biggest lesson learnt: DR tests don't have to be so painful.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.