HPE Zerto Software Reviews

I am a solution provider and Zerto is one of the products that I implement for my clients.

Most of my customers use this product for disaster recovery purposes. Some of them use it in a local, on-premises environment, whereas other customers use it in the cloud.

We have assisted some of our clients with on-premises to cloud migration. These were customers that had an established local environment but wanted to explore the cloud. For these clients, it is a cloud-based DR implementation.

There are four or five customers that did not want a cloud deployment, so we have implemented the DR site on-premises for them.

If the client is given the choice, typically they prefer a cloud-based deployment. CDP technology is becoming the new norm, even for the backup industry. However, there are some instances where it is not an option. For example, in some situations, they cannot use cloud-based storage due to legal and compliance requirements.

Some of our customers that are making a digital transformation cannot afford to lose hours or even minutes of data. As such, I think that cloud-based disaster recovery is the future and the customers understand why it is much more important for them. Together with our reputation, I see this as a game-changing situation.

Most of my customers are interested in DR and do not know much about the long-term retention capability. Our last three deployments already had a backup implemented from the integrator and didn't need an overnight one to avoid the loss of data. We discussed this with them and explained that this product offers much more than what they are using it for. We pointed out that it was a two-in-one solution but they continue to use it primarily for DR.

Our customers find that the interface is really easy to use. It gives you a great deal of flexibility for the administrators, as well as for the end-users to a certain extent. Overall, with respect to ease of use, this product scores the highest points in this area.

The functionality available in the console is not complicated and is easy to use, especially for DR failover. It just works.

It offers a high level of compression, which is very good. My customers and I are interested in this feature primarily because it saves bandwidth.

The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. This is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum.

I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version.

We have been using Zerto for between three and four years.

Based on the number of support calls that I get from my customers, where we have done the deployment, issues arise very rarely. From time to time, we get calls because the allocated space is running out. Otherwise, it is pretty much stable.

Even the situation where the allocated space runs low is rare and I haven't had this type of call in a long time. The reason for this is that I take precautions during deployment. For example, I check to see whether they have too many workflows. I know what it is that we need to do including how many VRAs we need to deploy and what the configuration should be. Over the past three to four years, I have only had to deal with four or five support tickets. Apart from that, I haven't experienced any problems.

I do not have a great deal of experience with scaling this product because all of my customers have only a few hundred VMs. I know that Zerto has the capability to go beyond 5,000 or 10,000, but that is something that I've never experienced. My understanding is that it is very capable at the data center management level.

In the initial phase, I leveraged technical support, but then I completed the deployment.

During the PoC, there were one or two times where I had to contact them to deal with issues. I am pretty happy with how they respond and how they follow up compared with the other vendors that I work with.

I don't have much of a complaint with respect to support.

I have been working with Zerto since version 6 and the most recent one that we deployed was version 8.5. Approximately six months ago, our customer that was using version 6 was upgraded to version 8, because version 8.5 was not yet released.

I also have experience with Veeam but Zerto uses a very different technology to perform the backup and change tracking. Veeam leverages the VSS technology for the volume set up, which will do the job but it is not ideal. Zerto has taken one step ahead by utilizing the Journal technology, which is the main difference that I can think of between these two products.

Prior to working with Zerto, many of my clients were using the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) feature, which comes built into the product, based on their licensing. I have also had a customer who was using Commvault and others that were using NetBackup. These are typically the enterprise-caliber products that I expect to find.

One of my customers is using Veeam and because of the difference in price, with Zerto being more expensive, they did not switch. My customer felt that Veeam was convenient and the price was more tolerable. This is the only instance where my customer did not transition to Zerto.

The customers who switched have done so because Zerto provides the lowest RPO and RTO. It is one of the main points that I emphasize about this product because it is very important to them. There is also a saving in bandwidth, which is something that my customers are concerned with because they typically don't have fancy high-speed connections. The compression is superb and really helps in this regard. These are the two primary selling points.

For us, this solution is not difficult to deploy. For a complicated environment then you have to do careful planning but otherwise, it is not hard to deploy.

Typically, if everything is well in place, the deployment will take between one and three hours. In cases where the customer's environment is very complex then I might need a little bit more time. I would estimate that it would take six-plus hours, after careful planning and ensuring that all of the resources are in place.

The installation takes less than 30 minutes; however, the customer environment increases the time because we have to do things like open ports on the firewall. We tell them about these preparations in advance but we always end up doing some of the work ourselves. In situations where the firewall has already been properly configured, I can normally complete the installation and configuration in one hour.

I have two customers that use the cloud-based deployment on Azure but the majority of them use it in a local, on-premises environment.

The main challenge that I face with this solution is the price. All of my customers are happy with how this product works and they like it, but unfortunately, in the market that I represent, Zerto is expensive when compared with the competition.

Another issue is that Zerto has expectations with respect to the minimum number of devices that they are protecting at a given price range. I understand that this is an enterprise product, but unfortunately, price-wise, it is really tough when it comes to the TCO for the customers in the one or two countries that I represent. Apart from that, everyone understands the value, but at the end of the day it comes down to the price being slightly higher.

Pricing is something that I have discussed with the regional head of sales in this area. I have explained that you can't have a price of 25 million per year in this region, and in turn, have requested a lower price with different models for corporations. Unfortunately, I have not received a positive response so far.

With the separate backup product expected to be available in the next release, in a way, they have already done what I was expecting to offer to our customers. They have also announced some features that are really interesting. Right now, I'm waiting to get the new products in my hands.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is that if the system administrator has basic knowledge about networking and storage, then setting it up and deploying it will be easy, and not an issue at all. They just have to be careful and take the appropriate time to plan properly, especially in a complex environment.

In summary, this is a stable, enterprise-grade product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for on-premises to Azure, and also from Azure to Azure between different regions.

At this time, we are only using it for DR. However, we will also be using it for data center migration.

I would rate Zerto's ability to provide continuous data protection a ten out of ten. The tool is very easy to use. It's also a very simple and very quick setup. The outcome from our setup showed that we had very low RPO and RTO. The interface is intuitive and as such, anyone can log in and figure out how to use the management utility.

Being able to achieve such a low RPO and RTO has significantly reduced our lengthy recovery times. For example, a recovery that previously took four hours is now completed in 40 minutes. Furthermore, it allowed us to complete the data center migration very quickly, with very little downtime.

Using Zerto has allowed us to reduce the number of people involved from a failover standpoint. There are only a few of us who can perform the failover and it is done with the click of a button. From an overall verification standpoint, the application owners are still required to verify.

We have saved money by performing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center for a couple of reasons. First, we saved money by not having to upgrade our hardware and pay for additional facility costs. Second, in Azure, we saved between 10% and 20% compared to Azure site recovery.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capability.

The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration. Importantly, we were able to do this without affecting the DR setup.

When you're configuring the VPGs, they can improve the process by looking at the hardware configuration of the existing VMs and then recommending what they should be, rather than us having to go back and forth. For example, on the VM configuration portion of creating the VPGs, it should already figure out what sort of CPU, memory, and capacity you need, rather than us trying to write that down and then going in afterward to change it.

The logging could be a lot better from a troubleshooting standpoint. If the log was more detailed and more user-friendly, we wouldn't have to make the calls to the support to try and figure out where the problem lies.

They could improve on how many machines the management server can handle for replication.

We have been using Zerto for approximately two years.

Stability-wise, it's pretty good and we've been happy so far. We've had a couple of issues here and there, but nothing that wasn't easily resolved.

The scalability is pretty good. If you need to scale then you can always add more appliances on the Azure side, which is very easy to set up. For the on-premises side, you only need one management server.

We are not a very large environment; we have approximately 400 servers, and then we are protecting about 125 VMs. In terms of users, we have close to 3,000 full-time employees and then about 25,000 contractors. Being a recruiting company, we have a large base of contractors.

The site reliability engineers are the ones that use Zerto more often, and there are three or four of them.

The technical support is pretty good. The level-one has a lot of knowledge and because we've been using the product for a while now, if we get to the point of calling support, usually we have everything ready to go. We explain the situation to level-one support and we can always escalate easily to the next engineer.

Prior to using Zerto, for our on-premises environment, we did a typical database replication from our production site to a secondary site in another city across the country on the West Coast. We also replicated the storage and application code, and it was a very lengthy process. One of the environments took as long as four hours.

We switched primarily for the time savings, although there was also the cost factor. In order to meet the growing demand of our business in IT, we would have had to upgrade all of our hardware, as well as pay extra for facility costs. As such, it did help out on both sides of things.

Also, just the process itself was a lot simpler. It would have required coming up with five or six different teams to do the individual parts, whereas this automates everything for you from a server level.

We use a different product as our backup solutions. Zerto is strictly for DR and data center migration.

To set up the initial environment, it took about an hour. This included setting up the appliance, making sure it's added to the domain, and things like that. But then, creating all of the VPGs will probably be another couple of hours.

The strategy was that we already had everything ready to go, which included our server list and all of the VPG names. If you have that, you could probably have everything completed in half a day, or a day, from a setup standpoint. Of course, this is depending on how large of an environment it is, but for us, we set up five or six environments and it took us approximately half a day.

We had assistance from the sales engineer. 

When we did the PoC, they showed us everything. Once we purchased the product, we used Zerto analytics to determine how many appliances we would need on the Azure side. Then, using that, we were able to break up the VPGs between the different sites.

We have an enterprise agreement that combines all of the features, and we have approximately 250 licenses. There are two different licensing models. The one we purchased allows us to support Azure, as well as the on-premises jobs. This was a key thing for us and, I think, that is the enterprise license. They have a license for just their backup utility, and there's the migration option as well, but we went with the enterprise because we wanted to be able to do everything going forward.

Zerto needs to improve significantly on the cost factor. I know friends of mine in other businesses would not look at this when it's a smaller shop. At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop.

We're very lucky here that finances weren't an issue, but it definitely plays a factor. If you look at other companies who are considering this product, it would be very expensive for somebody who has more than 500 servers to protect.

The bottom line is that they definitely have to do better in terms of cost and I understand the capabilities, but it's still quite pricey for what it does. It would make a huge difference if they reduced it because as it is now, it deters a lot of people. If you've got somebody who's already using VMware or another product, the cost would have to be dropped significantly to get them on board.

We did evaluate other vendors, but this was the only tool that was able to fully automate the conversion from on-premises VMware to Azure. This was important because our goal, or our DR objective, was to set up DR in Azure. Every other tool required having some sort of intervention from us to convert them to Azure format.

I don't recall all of the tools that we looked at, but I think we looked at VMware SRM and also a product from EMC, from a replication standpoint. Ultimately, from a strategy standpoint, this was the only thing that was really capable of doing what we wanted.

My advice for anybody who is interested in Zerto is definitely to do a PoC. Run it against your environment to do a thorough comparison. This is the best scenario; instead of just picking the product, let it go through the different options. For example, whether you are doing on-premises to on-premises, or on-premises to the cloud, this product can do it, but you'll only see the results that you want to see if you grind it against your own environment.

Overall, we are very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We primarily use Zerto for backing up our databases.

We are heavily invested in database technology. We use SQL databases such as PostgreSQL and MS SQL, and we are also functional with NoSQL databases. Our use cases are majorly relying on databases for financial vendors and most of the time, we have to perform day-to-day operations with respect to finance and accounting.

We have been using the data retention functionality for a long time and whenever there is a failure and the system goes down, we recover the data from that particular snapshot in time.

We also require security, as it is one of the major concerns. Ultimately, we align these two things together.

We are deployed in AWS, although we are also deploying in GCP and plan to do so with Azure as well.

Zerto provides us with continuous data protection that is reliable. It is convenient to use because the API allows for seamless integration when performing our day-to-day operations.

Currently, we do not have any long-term data retention activities, and it is not one of our core operations. However, in the past, we did have several such use cases.

Using this solution saves us time because we have been capturing the volumes and snapshots, are we able to perform operations on the Delta. This is an important benefit to us because we are able to deploy everything into production, then continue to get the backups and snapshots from there. 

Another time-effective benefit is that once we are fully backed up, we are able to perform Lambda functions on our use cases. This saves us a lot of time.

In some instances, Zerto has saved us time and on the number of people involved during failback. The number of people that are involved depends upon how critical the failure is. Any time there is a failure, we have to work from the most recent backups. For example, if the incident happens at 9:00 PM and there is a snapshot that was taken at 8:00 PM, there is one hour of work to make up for. This is much easier and quicker than having to look back at the logs for the entire day.

On a day-to-day basis, using Zerto saves us approximately 20% to 30% in terms of time. Overall, considering both our test and production environments, using Zerto benefits us with an approximate time savings of 60%.

We are using Zerto for DR in the cloud, and it has saved us money over using a physical data center. In a cloud-based deployment, the cost is quite a bit less compared to a physical environment. Also, because the cloud is a pay-as-you-go model, and you don't need the service all of the time, the paid resources are not wasted. I estimate that we save thousands of dollars per year in operations costs.

With our backups fully in place, in the cloud, Zerto has helped us reduce downtime. 

The most valuable features for me are the fast performance and seamless integration. The performance is one of the main features and the integration has helped me a lot.

When we have a system that is being fully replicated, we also get snapshots. Then, we perform our activities on the snapshots only, which reside on the cloud-based volumes. This means that our production environment is not affected.

We have low latency in production because most of the things we do are on the cloud.  When we have the backup, we just start to perform the data operations and with the help of Zerto, we can do this quite efficiently.

Zerto is quite easy to use. With the click of a button, I have been able to use it to do what I need. Furthermore, any end-user that I have worked with has easily been able to make use of its functionality.

Some of the integrations with our internal tools, in particular, company-specific ones, do not work. In cases like this, we have to ask for additional support. This is an area that has room for improvement.

If the API integration worked more efficiently then that would be an improvement.

We have been using Zerto for between two and three years.

Zerto is a stable and reliable product. We have not experienced any anomalies in the tool. For all our use cases and workloads, we rely on it and have found that everything can be done easily.

We have not had problems when we want to redeploy a number of things, so scalability has not been an issue.

We have between 30 and 40 users, including engineers, architects, and management. We are a growing and expanding company, and our workload increased from day to day. I expect that our usage of Zerto and other solutions will increase.

We often reach out to contact technical support and it is good. We have a lot of use cases that we need support for because we don't always have a sufficient solution.

The initial setup was straightforward, although we did have some problems. For example, there were instances where we could not integrate with our internal tools and we were not able to solve the problem. We looked at the FAQ and reached out to customer support to ask what the ideal solution would be.

Overall, it took between six and nine months to deploy.

We deployed Zerto using our in-house team.

We have seen ROI in terms of time savings, as well as other points.

We subscribe to their annual license package and we have tier one support with them. There are no costs in addition to this.

We have evaluated other tools including Veeam and Veritas. There were several factors, including cost, that led us to proceed with Zerto.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to have things properly architected in advance. Otherwise, the implementation will be a hassle. Once the design is complete, if they need to change it then it will be time-consuming.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are protecting 91 terabytes worth of data that consist of 200 virtual machines over the span of 96 tracking groups. We currently have 300 licenses and Zerto provides protection for our critical production systems with a 24-hour journal. We do utilize another platform to backup our entire enterprise as well as handling retention for a longer period of time.

We limit Zerto access to our platform engineers so either our Linux administrators or our Windows administrators use the solution. When a virtual machine is tagged as the article, in other words something that should be replicated to a target data center, they have the authority to create a VM and make sure it is protected via Zerto.

We have an annual DR test requirement. Initially, we used Zerto for testing a subset of our production systems and generated reports that would validate that the tests were successful. We leveraged Zerto to test failover for over 200 VMs by running it in the test scenario. We ran it for a couple of days and tested connectivity to verify that all the virtual machines were up and running and that disk integrity was fine.

Over the years, we have moved from an offline test scenario to an actual real-life failover for subsets of applications. For a couple of years now, we have failed over applications into another data center and have run production from there on a small subset. Our vision going forward is to avoid these offline once a year tests and to periodically move applications from one data center to another in a real-time testing scenario.

We currently have a production data center and then we have a co-location, which we are leasing. So we actually have two locations where we can failover. We do have a small cloud presence in Azure, and we have started a small cloud presence in AWS as well, but we are not running any IaaS virtual machines in those clouds. There's really been no cost-savings at all in the cloud so we've brought those work machines back on-premises.

Prior to Zerto, we used a third-party offsite facility and a team of 25 individuals, where we would restore over 300 VMs in our network, to prove annually that we can recover our data. Since adopting Zerto, we've pretty much reduced all of that VR testing to about four team members. We've significantly reduced our costs by staying on-premises and time from only four individuals instead of a whole team of 25.

The first benefit, right out of the gate, was to duplicate a subset of our production environment and test it in an offline network scenario. That initial test was fantastic as was all of the reporting to prove that we have done those tests. Another big attraction is the near zero RPO. A lot of other products have minutes, half-hour, or an hour RPO. We have proof indicating that Zerto is near zero, or a matter of minutes, as far as the RTO is concerned. So again, that's another attractive offering where you can actually fail something over and bring it back up in a target location in a matter of minutes. Meaning very little data loss as far as recovery time. It's fantastic.

The main reason why we love Zerto is because we have a VMware environment. What we're doing now with VMware is we leverage NSX-T which gives us the ability to have a shared address space across two physical data centers. By using Zerto with an NSX-T, we can failover applications without re-IPing or anything like that. So it's a matter of literally shutting down the forced side and powering up the other side in minutes. It works fantastic and that is definitely our future DR strategy as well as our future failover testing.

I haven't seen any significant features or improvements in the past few major version releases. The only challenge I have with Zerto today, and over the past few years, is that it seems like a lot of development and effort is going toward the cloud. Since we're utilizing the solution with an on-premises hypervisor, it seems like development for our needs is kind of stuck.

The other thing I wish they would do is to develop their PowerShell module to be more robust. So instead of having to rely on the API to actually include a PowerShell command, it would let you create VPGs, delete VPGs, modify VPGs, etc. This would ease the automation effort of deployment and decommissioning and I'd really appreciate that.

I implemented the solution back in the fall of 2016.

Zerto is very stable and requires little maintenance. We probably update Zerto twice a year. There's been no real outage issues that we've encountered. There have been a few times where we've had issues with VMware which in turn provided a hiccup towards Zerto. Though Zerto was a symptom and not the root cause.

Zerto provides continuous data protection and we've had very little disruption. We've gone through mobile versions starting with version six something and we have gone through the various upgrade cycles without any major issues.

Zerto seems very scalable. I can't really comment further on that because we've only had two license upgrades from 200 to 300 virtual machines. I haven't really tested this on a very large scale like for over a thousand VMs or anything close to that. From what we've utilized it has scaled, but I'm really not a good example because we manage a smaller subset of virtual machines.

As far as our key-protected systems, we're at the 280 marker so we don't see ourselves growing any more. License increments are 25 or 100 and if we did grow, obviously, we would increase our license count. Although we've had 300 licenses for a few years now so we've kind of found our sweet spot.

There's been a couple of support calls along the way, but support has been very helpful and very responsive in correcting our issues.

Back in 2016, we conducted a 30-day POC with Zerto and that was enough time to fully implement the solution and even utilize it. We were really impressed that we could actually use Zerto from start to test within a 30-day timeframe.

We found the setup and deployment process to be very simple and not complex at all. We installed Zerto on-premises with just regular employees. It was a team of two engineers and a database administrator and that was it. After a little bit of research on the prerequisites we literally ran the installation setup. It was a breeze and there were really no custom tweaks or anything that had to be done post-setup.

The solution is very user intuitive, from the initial setup of the application and installation all the way to actually getting data in there by creating virtual protection groups and populating VMs.

As far as our IT budget is concerned, Zerto is a little bit expensive. But as far as the value that it provides, it is completely justified by all of the savings. Reducing the labor of DR failover exercises or its reporting functionality for our audit teams has saved a lot of soft dollars. Also, failing over our workloads to another data center and proving that it does work is priceless. On the other hand, the price consideration is why we're only protecting a subset of our virtual machines, those that are deemed DR critical, versus protecting everything.

We did evaluate a few different products before selecting Zerto. We looked into Commvault and Veeam. We also looked into VMware's Site Recovery Manager. Having a near zero RPO and a very short RTO was the main difference between Zerto and the products we evaluated.

The biggest advice would be to compare Zerto to another product side-by-side and actually do a demo of both products. And then at that point, post-demo, the decision will be very easy.

On a scale of one to 10, where 10 is best, I would rate Zerto a nine plus. Unfortunately, no product walks on water, so they're never going to get a 10. There's room for improvement everywhere for sure, but I'm extremely happy with the product.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery and migrations. We have two primary sites that we replicate to. If there are on-prem clients we replicate back and forth between those two and then we replicate our off-prems to them as well. We use on and off-prem as well as Azure. 

We actually have rescued a couple of clients that have had disasters on-prem due to weather or data center outages. One of our clients had left us for a cheaper provider and before our disks and retention points expired out, the cheaper provider had a flood in their data center. We were able to restore the client using the old restore points back into our data center, which was a huge win for us because it was a fairly large client. That client has worked with us ever since then. 

Zerto saves us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We've had a couple of ransomware incidents with clients in the last year and a half. I've worked on ransomware issues before when Zerto wasn't involved and it was much more complicated. Now, with Zerto, it's at least 50 to 75% faster. We're able to get a client up and running in a matter of an hour, as opposed to it taking an entire day to build or locate the ransomware and rebuild from shadow copies or some other archaic method.

It decreases the time it takes when we need to failback or move workloads because we use disaster recovery runbooks that we work with our clients to maintain. Anybody at our company, at any given time, can pick up this runbook and go with it so we can assign one or two techs to the incidents. They work with the client and get them back up and running quickly. We're 50 to 75% faster. It's now a matter of hours as opposed to days. In an old disaster recovery situation, it would be all hands on deck. With Zerto, we can assign out a technician or two, so it's one or two techs as opposed to five to 10.

There has been a reduction in the number of people involved in the overall backup. We have the management fairly minimized. There are only two primary subject matter experts in the company, one handles the back-end infrastructure and one handles the front-end, that's pretty much it. We're a fairly large company, with 500+ clients, so it's been stripped down, so to speak. 

From what I've seen, we do save money with Zerto, especially for long-term retention like the Azure Blob Storage. We had a recent incident where a client had to go back to a 2017 version of a server that was around three to four years old, just to find a specific file, and it only took us an hour to locate the proper retention point and mount it for him and get him back what he needed.

The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage.

We also use it for migrations into our data center. We bring in new clients all the time by setting up Zerto in their on-prem and then replicating to wherever their destination will be in our environment.

We've also used Zerto to migrate to the cloud.

Zerto provides continuous data protection. I'd give it a 10 out of 10 as far as that goes. The recovery points are very recent, generally five to 15 seconds of actual production. It's very convenient.

It's also fairly simple to use. Zerto does have some quirks but they have worked those out with recent releases. They're really good about listening to feature requests. We're actually a Zerto partner at our company, so they take our feature requests pretty seriously. Zerto is one of the easiest disaster recovery products I've used. We use Veeam as well which is much more complicated to set up in the back-end.

Zerto seems to keep up with what I think needs to be improved pretty well.

One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table.

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

Stability is pretty good. It's gotten better over the years. It's kind of 50/50 between features that have been added and our understanding and usage of the product over the last three years. But it's definitely gotten better.

It's highly scalable. That's one of the things we like about it. We can empower clients. I have one client that's migrating from his on-premise into one of our private clouds, and we have enabled him to do so. We set up the environment and we're enabling him to build VPGs and migrate them as needed without our interaction at all. This is bringing in tons of revenue. It's super scalable and it seems to be not just easy for us to use, but easy for us to enable a client to use it as well.

Technical support is astounding. I've said that to Zerto technicians and I've said that to clients as well. Being in my role, I work with a lot of vendors, a lot of different support, and Zerto is off the charts as far as skill and ease to work with. It's been wonderful as far as that goes. Zerto was some of the best support I've had across vendors.

Before Zerto, there really wasn't anything that was as good as Zerto, so it was a game-changer.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

For an off-prem client, I would send them a welcome letter that details what they need to do on their end with the server. I would send the download package, everything like that. If the client is immediately responsive, that could be done within an hour, but then some clients take a little longer. Once they have the infrastructure set up on their end and the VPN is set up, I can have a Zerto off-prem implementation replicating into one of our private clouds within an hour or two hours maximum, even for a large environment.

A client was migrating into one of our usage-based clouds, so it automatically bills by the resource pool. The more that they put in there, the more we gain. We've probably increased the input to that environment 10-fold. It's a 10-time multiple of what we invested into it, just particularly for that one use case because he's growing so rapidly. Every time he brings over a new client, it adds to the billing which is hands-free for us. We've enabled him to do it.

Pricing is fair. For the license that we have and the way that it's priced, it is pretty simple and it's not over-complicated like some other platforms. It would be very beneficial to have some sort of training or even just documentation around every component of Zerto and how it should be built or there should be suggestions about how it should be built. It would help newer companies that are adopting the platform to have a better opportunity to grab all the revenue upfront.

Journal history was one of the things that we didn't take into consideration when we implemented Zerto initially and we lost a lot of money there. We talked to one of the reps after that and found out that some clients do roll in the cost of this journal and some clients actually charged separately for it. Zerto has made it easier to plan for that lately with Zerto Analytics, but it's still a gray area.

There aren't any additional costs in addition to standard licensing that I'm aware of. 

We still use Veeam in the environment but the recovery points aren't as robust. They're a lot thinner. You can get maybe an hour or the same, but you can't get five-second production. We used Veeam and the old active-passive standard of building a server in each environment and replicating to it.

I've actually pushed us to use Zerto for our backups with the solutions team for quite a while, since version 6.5. I don't think they plan on doing it just because we already have two other backup offerings and they don't want to complicate our Zerto infrastructure. From my understanding, we're not planning on doing it. But with every release, it gets so much better and it's just a matter of time before we revisit it.

My advice would be to follow best practices when it comes to back-end infrastructure. We have made some changes specifically to track certain things like swap files and journal history. Previously, we had everything going to production data stores and now we have dedicated journal data and restore data stores for swap files, which helps us to thin out the noise when it comes to storage. Storage implementation is very important. 

Make sure to go through all the training. The training on MyZerto is free, very straightforward and it's very informative. That's one of the things we didn't do initially but it wasn't really as available as it is now.

I would rate Zerto ten out of ten. 

We use this solution for disaster recovery and business continuance.

We are protecting: SQL, our file servers, and some other applications that are specific to the healthcare domain.

In terms of providing continuous data protection, Zerto has been great. We've had no real issues and it's pretty easy to work with.

At this time, we do not use Zerto for long-term retention. It's something that we may look into, although we don't protect all of our VMs. We only have 60 licenses, but we have more than 300 VMs. We use Veeam for the actual backups at the moment, and it didn't seem practical to have two separate solutions, where we use Zerto for a few and Veeam for the rest. Licensing-wise, it was too expensive to put replication functionality on every VM, just to get a backup of it. I know that Zerto is changing its licensing so that you can get a backup only. However, when we purchased Veeam, it was for three years and we still have part of a year left. After that expires, we will revisit it.

Prior to implementing Zerto, we didn't really have any way at all if there was a disaster at one site to be able to spin things up at the other site. It would have been restored from backups, but we didn't have a backup environment at the other site that they would restore there. This meant that depending on how bad the outage was, it was going to be weeks or months to be able to get back up and running. Now we're in a situation, at least with our key applications, that we could get those back up in a matter of minutes versus weeks. There is now a much better comfort level there.

If we had to failback or move workloads, Zerto would decrease the time it takes to do so. Fortunately, we've never had an event where we've actually had to use Zerto for a live failover. We test the VPGs and get the actual individual teams that run the software involved to test everything out, to make sure it's good. Other than that, fortunately, we haven't really had a need to actually fail anything over at this point.

We have leveraged it at times to move a workload. An example of this is that we've had servers that we were initially told were going to be built at one site, but then a couple of weeks later, it's "Well, no, we want this at the other site." So, instead of having to create a new VM at the other site, decommission the old one, and all that work that's involved with that, we just used Zerto to move it. This is something that saved us a lot of time and it worked perfectly. Between building another one and decommissioning, it is probably a savings of three days' work between all of the people involved.

Fortunately, we haven't had to use Zerto to recover due to a ransomware attack. We haven't been hit with anything like that yet. That's one of the things that also made it attractive for us, was that we're able to potentially get to a point in time just before that happened.

We have also used it in a scenario where we've had a vendor doing an upgrade. We replicated it to the same site instead of the alternate site, just so that if something went wrong we'd have a more instant restore point that we could pick from versus our backups. Since our backups only run once a night, we could have potentially lost a decent amount of data. Again, the upgrade went smoothly, so we didn't have to leverage it, but if there was going to be a problem with that then it would have saved us time and potentially data.

The most valuable feature is the ease of upgrades. We've updated it numerous times since we started, and we can perform upgrades, including with VMware, without impacting anything in conjunction with it.

The reporting on failovers, including the step-by-step and the times, is useful because we can run through a failover and provide reports on it.

I find Zerto extremely easy to use. Setting up VPGs, the upgrade process, failover, and testing are all super easy to do. It is all very straightforward, including the initial setup.

I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between. For example, at least in our testing scenario, we have our domain controllers. We have to fail that over first, get those up and running before we bring up the application side so that people can log in. If there was an actual failover, there would be certain things that would have to failover first, and get them running. Then, the application would be second, like SQL for example. For our dialysis application, one would have to have SQL up and running first before that. It would be nice to be able to select both and then say, start up this VPG and then wait 10 minutes and then fire up this one.

I have been using Zerto for between three and four years, since 2018

I find this product super stable and I've had basically zero problems with it. A couple of minor things came up, and support resolved them pretty much instantly. We've never actually been down with it, but one problem was where it didn't recognize our version of the VMware. It was an entry in some INI file but that was quickly resolved.

I would think it scales great and it's just a matter of licensing. Right now, we have just the basic license that enables us to go one-to-one. We do want to go to the one-to-many and then out to the cloud, which is an option that would be better for us. We're just waiting to get the cloud connectivity before we upgrade the license. In this aspect, it should scale well.

At this point, myself and perhaps one other person use the product. We're licensed for 60 VMs and we have just slightly less than that, in the upper 50s. I would think that our usage in the future will increase.

Every time that we have a project come along, as part of that, they're supposed to verify what the DR business continuity needs are in terms of RTO and RPO. The only option for us other than this is backups, which are up to 24 hours. If that doesn't meet the needs of a new project, we are supposed to get a Zerto license for it. It's something that should be increasing over time.

The technical support from Zerto has been great. Anytime that we put a ticket in, they've called back very quickly, and the issues have always been resolved in less than a day. Really, it happens within hours.

It is also nice that you can open a case directly from the management console, instead of having to place a call and wait in a queue. When you open a ticket, it's created, and then they call you back. It seems to be a great process.

We are currently using Veeam for backups only, whereas Zerto is used for our business continuity disaster recovery. We have never used Veeam in terms of DR. When we purchased Zerto, you had to buy a license for replication. You could also leverage it for backup, but it didn't make sense because it was more pricey than using Veeam for that.

For backups, Veeam is pretty easy to use. Backups seem slightly more complex than the DR part, at least in terms of the way Zerto is doing them. Ultimately, it's easier for me to work with than Veeam's backup, per se. But backups historically have always been a little bit more tricky.

We used to have IBM Spectrum Protect, which was a total beast. So, Veeam is much easier to use than our previous backup solution. I know Veeam does have a DR product and we've never really looked at it. So, I can't really compare Zerto to that. I know Zerto does seem to be a better solution.

Prior to working with Zerto, we didn't have a DR business continuity plan. Essentially, we had no staff working on it.

The initial setup is straightforward. We had it up and running in no time at all, and it wasn't something that took us weeks or months to implement. The install was done in less than a day and we were already starting to create VPGs immediately.

We started off as a trial running a PoC. We had a trial license mainly because, being in the healthcare industry, we have some unique applications. The other options for disaster recovery on those were going to be pretty pricey, and then, that would be a solution just for that one particular application. At that point, we were more interested in having the backups.

We don't like having five different backup utilities and we were hoping to have just one product that would handle all of our DR business continuance needs. That seemed to be Zerto when we looked at it, so we wanted to do a proof of concept on one main application, Meditech. It is our primary healthcare information system that everybody uses. It wasn't officially a supported DR business continuity methodology for it, but we did put it through the wringer a bit during the PoC phase to make sure it worked before we were really committed.

A lot of the other applications are straightforward, so we weren't as concerned with what we were going to do after the fact. But Medtech was one of the big driving ones that needed to be tested out before we committed to purchasing it. We did make calls to other hospitals who were Meditech customers as well, that were also using Zerto, to get a better comfort level based on their experiences.

Two of us from the company, including a technical analyst and an enterprise architect, were involved in the initial setup. One of the vendor's reps came down to assist us with the first one, and he was great to deal with. Any questions that we had, he was able to answer them right away. He didn't say things like "I'll get back to you on that". He definitely knew what he was doing.

The install was pretty basic and we probably could have done it ourselves regardless, but just to fill in some of the knowledge gaps of how it actually works under the covers, he was able to provide that and some other pointers on things.

In terms of ROI, it is hard to say. Fortunately, we haven't had any issues. Obviously, if we had an issue we would have seen ROI, but it's kind of like insurance. You pay for it and then if nothing ever happens, that's it. But, if something were to happen, then you're pretty glad that you had it in place. 

Similarly, if you have an accident with your car, it's good that you had insurance because it's saving you money. But if you never have an accident, then you're spending money. In that way, I look at any disaster recovery business continuity as insurance.

Although we've never had to use it, if we do then we will see ROI the first time.

The pricing doesn't seem too bad for what it does. I know that the license that we have is being deprecated and I think you can only get their enterprise one moving forward. I know that we're supposed to change to that regardless, which is the one that gives us the ability to move out to the cloud and do multiple hypervisors, et cetera.

Overall, it seems fair to me. Plus, that you can do backups and everything with it means that it is even of greater value if you're doing your entire environment. It could cover everything you need to cover, plus the backups, all for one price.

We were looking at VMware Site Recovery Manager at that time as the other option, and Zerto seemed a lot easier to use and easier upgrade paths. Even within the path to update your VMware environment with two products, it seems like the easier of the two products.

Now that a backup-only license will be available for Zero, switching away from Veeam is something that we'll look at when the time comes for Veeam renewals. One of the things that we'll do is a cost analysis, to see what it costs comparatively.

We are not using DR in the cloud, although we are looking at using it in the future.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Zerto is to do like we did, which was to implement a proof of concept, just to feel good about the solution, that it's going to meet your needs. Feel free to reach out to other people that are in your industry, as we did with other healthcare people. There should be a decent number of people out there that are doing what you're trying to do.

Zerto seems pretty good at hooking people up with other customers that are doing the same thing they're doing, so you have a chance to talk to them directly. I've been on those calls and Zerto basically just hooks you up with that person and they don't stay on the call themselves. It's just you and them talking, so they're pretty unbiased answers from most people. I definitely suggest reaching out to Zerto to get feedback from customers. Basically, just do your due diligence and research.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use it for disaster recovery. We use it for some testing. And we use it for hot backups on databases.

This past summer we had multiple hurricanes down south. We host for our clients, and what we did was proactively move them from their location down south up to our Boise data center in Idaho. We were able to do that with Zerto.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. I was actually part of a project to move a data center, and we used Zerto to move it. We moved 20,000 virtual machines and the downtime was just a reboot of each machine. Before, it probably would have taken at least six people in multiple teams to do it, whereas in this move it was just two engineers from the same team who did it.

In addition, we recently had a corrupt database that we recovered using Zerto. If we didn't have Zerto, we would have had to do a restore and we would have had a loss of data of up to 24 hours, because the backups were done every 24 hours. In this case, we were able to roll the database back to a point in time that the DBAs deemed had good data. There was very little data loss as a result. Using Zerto in that situation saved us at least eight hours and from having to use multiple teams.

In that situation, for the recovery we would have done a restore from backup. The problem is we would have had X amount of hours of data loss. I don't know how long it would have taken the DBAs or our developers or app owners to reproduce the information that would have been lost. That could have ended up taking days. I've seen it take days in the past to recreate data that was lost as part of the recovery process.

Another point is that the solution has reduced the staff involved in overall backup and DR management. The big thing is that it reduces the teams involved. So rather than having the SAN team involved, the backup team involved, and the virtualization engineers, it ends up being just the virtualization engineers who do all the work. It has reduced the number of people involved from six to eight people down to a single engineer.

The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution.

Having been in disaster situations myself, one of the things that a lot of companies miss is the fact that, during a test, it's all hands on deck, but during a disaster not all those hands are there. I don't know what the statistics are, but it's quite infrequent that you have the ability to get the technical people necessary to do technical stuff. I was also part of the post-9/11 disaster recovery review, and one of the key conversations was about situations where an organization had the solution in place but they didn't have the people. Their solutions were quite complex, whereas with Zerto you can do it with a mouse. You can do it with non-technical staff, as long as you have your documentation in proper order.

I've been doing disaster recovery for 20 years and, in my opinion, the solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features. The back-end technology, the split-write and the appliances, they've got that down very well.

There's room for improvement with the GUI. The interface ends up coming down to a personal preference thing and where you like to see things. It's like getting into a new car. You have to relearn where the gauges are.

I'd also like to see them go to an appliance-based solution, rather than our standing up a VM. While the GUI ends up depending on personal preference, the actual platform that the GUI is created on needs to go to an appliance base.

Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it.

I've been using Zerto for five years.

We had a rough start, but in defense of that, we were doing a lot of going long-distance with what we had.

The thing that I liked most about the problems that we had was that Zerto wasn't afraid to admit it. They also weren't afraid to put us in touch with the right staff on their side. It wasn't a big deal for me to talk to their developer. Normally, when you're at that level, the developers are shielded from customers, whereas with Zerto it was a more personal type of service that I got. We had a problem and they put me in touch with the developer who developed that piece of the solution and we brought it to resolution.

It's very scalable. We grew from just a few hundred to a few thousand pretty quickly, and there were very few hiccups during that process.

Out of the gate, when you call their number, they could do better. 

The thing is that I've developed such a good relationship with all of them, at all levels at Zerto, that I know who to call. If you're off the street and you call in, you're going to get that level-one support who's going to move you through it. When I call in, they put me right through to the level-two support and I move from there. It's like any support, if you know the right people, you can skip the helpdesk level and go right into the engineering.

The disaster recovery solution for the company I'm currently with was the typical restore from backups. They were using SAN replication as part of it. 

Personally, I've used many solutions over the years, starting with spinning tape, boot-from-disk, and then as we virtualized the data center, we started doing SAN-based replication. I've deployed and supported VMware Site Recovery Manager under different replication solutions, and then moved into Zerto. Prior to Zerto I used several different vendors' products.

Having been in disasters, living in Florida and experiencing them, I understand what it takes to recover a data center. I worked for my city in Florida and volunteered in the emergency operation center. Not only did I sit in technical meetings on how to recover computers, but I also sat in meetings on how to recover the city. So I have a different perspective when it comes to disaster recovery. I have a full view of how and what it takes to recover a city, as well as how and what it takes to recover a data center. Using that background, I pull them together.

As a result, I first look for a solution that works. That's key. If it doesn't work, it's out the door. The second factor is its ease of use. It has to be very easy to use, just a few clicks of the mouse and you're able to do a recovery. Zerto meets my requirements.

Not only was the initial setup simple, but upgrades actually work and backward compatibility during the upgrades work. I've been doing IT for 25 years and it's one of the few solutions that I have come across where backups work, not only doing the actual backup, but they're compatible with what you have in place. Upgrades are very impressive and very seamless.

I started with working with Zerto during the 4.5 version. Right after we deployed that we went to 5.0. The length of time really varies depending upon your engineering platform process. I did the PoC and all the documentation, and then I did the deployment into production. I spent a few days on the PoC because I needed to know what its performance impact was going to be on the host, on the VMs. Then I had to see what the replication impact was going to be as well. 

And documentation took me a couple of weeks. Because I've been in disasters, when I do documentation I do it so that I can hand it to anybody, literally, including—and I've done it—to the janitor. I've handed the documentation to the janitor and I've had them sit down and do a recovery. I'm picky on documentation. 

The actual sit-down at the keyboard to do the deployment, after everything was in place, including getting a service account, getting the VM deployed, etc., was quick. In one day we had it up and running.

I tend to do it myself because I'm old-school. I want to know how it works right from the ground up so that if I have to do any trouble shooting, I know where not to go to look at things. If you understand how something works, you can troubleshoot a lot faster.

I'm the lead architect, engineer, and troubleshooter. We have about four other people who are involved with it. We have several people because of our locations. We have more here, in the Idaho area, than we do in our other data center. We have one down in the southeast, hurricane area, of the United States. They're not expected to do a whole lot of disaster recovery, whereas we are.

I don't dive too much into the pricing side of things, but I'd like to see better tiering for Zerto's pricing. We do multi-tier VMs. I don't think I should be paying a penalty and price for a tier-three VM where I don't need a really tight SLA like I do for a tier-one.

Also, if we're looking to replace the data center backup solution, I have VMs that I may not need for a week in the event of a disaster. I'd like to see a backup price per VM, rather than the tier-one licensing that I currently pay for, per VM. I'd like to see better tiering in regards to the licensing.

We have Commvault, Cohesity, and Veeam. Veeam is probably the closest to Zerto for ease of use. The problem is that Veeam doesn't have the technical background of the split-write that Zerto has. Veeam can be very painful. It can't protect any VM in your infrastructure. Its process of doing snapshots is very painful. Whereas with Zerto, it doesn't matter how busy the VM is, it can protect it. Veeam does not do it that way, but its GUI is pretty easy to use. But again, if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how easy it is.

Commvault and Cohesity are both complicated solutions. Cohesity is like Veem, it is snapshot technology. Its GUI is okay but it's a little cryptic and that's the thing that I don't like about it. With 25 years of doing IT, I can tell that the interface that Cohesity designed was done by Linux engineers. It's very kludgy with multiple clicks. You've got to know where to go. With Zerto, it's plain and it's simple to use.

Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use.

What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication for many years. If you're doing long distance, you have very high latency and you need to compensate for that. I worked with Zerto developers and we were able to tune replication to meet our site-to-site requirements. That was a key thing, and that's missed a lot of times. When people deploy the solution, they're not always keeping up with the SLA, and it has nothing to do with how it was deployed. It has to do with the pipe and the latency between site-to-site. That tends to be missed when deploying replication.

It is on our drawing board to look at Zerto for backups and long-term retention. I would say we're going to end up using it. It makes sense, at least from my standpoint, to keep things simple. It already has the data, so why not use it to move it wherever?

When it comes to the fact that it provides both backup and disaster recovery in one platform, I had never thought about the backup piece. When they announced it, it just made sense to me as an engineer with a logical mind. "Hey, I'm already holding the data, shoveling it across states. Instead of putting it here, why not put it over here at the same time?" So I was very excited about a two-for-one product. My company has backup solutions and they're struggling with them. I'm looking to replace their backup solutions with Zerto, probably in 2021.

We're also still looking at doing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We've done some testing with it. In my previous company we were using it and deployed it around the globe. Due to border restrictions, we had to go to the cloud with it. It was big because we were able to go to the cloud and we didn't have to stand up another data center. I'll be conservative and say that it saved us a few million dollars.

I give Zerto a nine out of 10. The only reason that I'm not giving it a 10 is that I'd like to see the GUI made into an appliance.

It's on-prem only, and we're replicating part of production data centers to the DR location. We use it 100 percent for DR. Zerto, as a product, has a lot of capabilities, but we're only using it to replicate servers for disaster recovery, on-prem.

Providing DR for the entire organization is a big improvement, compared to the previous way we did DR. With the old DR tool we identified the systems that we wanted to protect and we installed agents and installed a server in the remote location and pretty much treated every physical and virtual server the same way. That tool was agent-based and required installation and maintenance of a server on the remote site. Now, the effort involved is a fraction of what it was before. We just click the VMs that we want to protect and they are protected.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in DR.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. With our old solution, something that took 10 to 15 minutes of outage, required one reboot, which took less than a minute, with Zerto. That amount of downtime would have cost our company a couple of thousand dollars.

Zerto's support for different hypervisors is a valuable feature because we have a mixed bag. We have VMware and we have Hyper-V. For us, that was extremely critical when we made the decision. We wanted a single tool that is able to replicate all our virtual servers. At this point, I think the only tool on the market that can do that on-premise is Zerto.

It does a great job of continuous data protection. That's why we're using it for DR. It has the journal, the recovery points. It's doing its job. It's a good tool.

It's extremely easy to use with a very intuitive interface. You can set up a VPG (virtual protected group) and add VMs to it in a couple of clicks. Everything is in a single dashboard and you can do everything from there. If you need some granular information, you click the Analytics and get your RPO or RTO and how much data you would lose if you do a DR at this point in time. 

They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement.

Another area of improvement is support for clusters. They have very limited support for Microsoft clustering.

Also, integration with VMware could be improved. For example, when a VM is created in vCenter, it would be helpful to be able to identify the VM, by tags or any other means, as needing DR protection. And then Zerto should be able to automatically add the VM to a VPG. 

There is definitely room for improvement. But what they have implemented so far, works pretty well.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's pretty stable. 

We're always one version behind. The current version is 8.5 and we're running 8. We always wait until at least Update 1 before we upgrade. So when v9 is out, we'll probably upgrade to 8.5, Update 1, or whatever the current update is. Because we are a little bit behind and we're running on a very stable, mature version, we rarely experience issues.

We're running thousands of hosts. Scalability is not a problem.

We plan to keep the product. It's doing a good job.

Our experience with their technical support has been good. But keep in mind that we have a pretty high-level, Premium Support agreement with Zerto. We have a dedicated technical account manager from Zerto, and he has direct access to the developers.

We used Double-Take DR which treated all the physical and virtual servers exactly the same way with agents. Zerto replaced it.

We switched because it is a little bit inefficient to treat all the virtual machines as separate physical servers, because on the DR site you need to install them, you need to configure them. You need to put the agents on both sites and configure the replication relationship. It's very complex. And whenever you need to patch or do some maintenance on the target site, it's double the work because you patch the source and you patch the target—you have a live server at the remote site. With Zerto, as soon as I patch the VM at the source, the updates are replicated to the target immediately.

Zerto's ease of use is very good compared with other similar solutions for replication.

The initial setup of Zerto is quite simple. You build a SQL instance. You build a Windows VM and install the ZVM on it. You integrate it with vCenter and then, from the ZVM, you make sure your firewall ports are open and you push the VRAs down.

Deployment takes a couple of hours, for a relatively big environment. It would typically require 30 minutes of DBA time, an hour or two of Windows engineering time, and another person from VMware for another hour.

It doesn't require any staff for day-to-day maintenance. It's used by our operations team, which is close to 100 people; those are people who have access to it.

It's quite easy and straightforward. We do it with internal labor.

The way we use it there is no return on investment. You can think of Zerto as an insurance policy. We use it to protect our business, but we actually hope that we'll never put it into action.

It's not the cheapest tool, it's expensive. But it's doing a good job.

We pay the standard license, maintenance every year, and we pay for our technical account manager, which is pretty much Professional Services, with our Premium Support.

We looked at other solutions. We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides. 

We also compared Zerto with our previous disaster recovery solution, which was called Double-Take DR.

Zerto is much better. It is not a cheap solution. The fact that we decided to buy it when we already had all the licenses for VMware, bundled in our ELA with VMware, should tell you how big of a difference there was.

My advice would be that when you need a tool to bet your business on, as a last resort, make sure you evaluate all the options, test them, and don't be cheap.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that a third-party company can do a better job of protecting the workloads than the vendor. It does a better job than VMware and Microsoft together.

In terms of using the solution for long-term retention, we're evaluating Zerto's offering. It's a new feature. We already have an established backup system, using Symantec. In a couple of years, when we need to refresh Symantec, we might consider it. But at this point we don't use it and we aren't considering it.

We use the Veritas NetBackup solution. They split from Symantec so Veritas is separate, but it was a Symantec solution for backup. We don't use Veeam, we don't use Cohesity, we don't use Rubrik. The only potential is to replace our Veritas/Symantec backup product, in the future, with Zerto Long Term Retention.

If we have a DR situation, we are not planning to fail back. It's not part of our DR strategy. If we need to fail-over a production data center, it means that this data center has been destroyed, it's a smoking hole in the grass. We will be running continuously from the DR data center, which is a full-scale data center.

I would rate Zerto at nine out of 10. There are new features that they're working on, which will be nice to have. That's why I won't rate it a 10, but overall it's a really good, stable, easy-to-use product.