HPE Zerto Software Reviews

Our use case is 100 percent disaster recovery between two different geographies. We have a very large private cloud offering. We've got about 1,200 customers and almost 10,000 VMs that are under Zerto protection. Every one of those virtual machines needs to be replicated from Waltham to Chicago, from the East Coast of the U.S. to the central U.S. Likewise, we have a European business with the exact same flow, although it's much smaller as far as number of VMs; it might be a couple of hundred. That implementation is going from Berlin to Amsterdam. We've got one-way protection in two different geographies and all of those machines are under Zerto protection.

The number-one benefit is that for the first time we could show, at a customer-level of granularity, how a customer was protected, and what their RPO was in, real time. Each one of our 1,200 or so customers has a portion of those 10,000 VMs. For the first time we were able to tell a product leader or product manager what the RPO was on Thursday at 2:00 PM for that customer. We could say, "Hey, it was 67 seconds." Our company is very customer-centric and customer-focused. There's less interest in what the overall health is, and a lot of times there's specific interest in, "Hey, how is that customer doing?" either for performance or for RPO time.

Zerto also allowed us to easily pick groups of virtual machines, group them as a whole, and have that be segregated from the storage layer. That is the storage-agnostic benefit from their product. That agnostic feature with respect to the storage layer allowed us to group VMs by customer and not only report on RPO by customer, but also to more easily sell different RPO plans. We were able to prioritize and say, "Okay, these 10 customers have platinum and these 500 have silver."

Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection. The other products we were looking at required work from two different teams. The storage team had to get involved. With this product, the whole thing could be done by just our virtualization team, and that was a big sell for us.

The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware. It was the storage-agnostic features of the product.

The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale. If you're a small company with 50 VMs, this doesn't really become a problem for you. You don't have 1,000 blades and 1,000 of their VRAs running that you need to keep healthy. But once you get over a certain scale, it becomes a full-time job for someone to keep their products humming. We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going. 

They desperately need to work self-healing into the core product. If a VRA has a problem, the product needs to be able to take some sort of measure to self-heal from that; to reassign protection. Right now it doesn't do anything in that self-healing area.

My company implemented Zerto in 2016, so we've been live with their product for a little over four years.

The stability comes back to size and scale. It depends. If you are not replicating heavy workloads—meaning you don't have a SQL server that's doing thousands and thousands of IOPS, and you don't have multiple SQL Servers on the same very large hardware blade—Zerto is incredibly stable, based on my experience with the product. 

However, we are doing that. There's a one-to-one relationship between the Zerto VRA, which is essentially their chunk of code that does the replication, and a physical server. The physical server is running anywhere from one to as many virtual servers as someone can fit onto it. And that one VRA has to manage and push all the change blocks for all the workloads running on it. So if you've got five or six really heavy workloads running, that one VRA that has to handle all of that and push it to your destination can, and does, crash. VRAs in that situation crash or become unstable. We've worked a lot with Zerto over the last two years on tweaking the VRAs with advanced settings. We've directly been involved with identifying a couple of bugs with the VRAs. When the VRAs are pushed, they can only be pushed so far and then they crash.

It does perform. However, we have VRAs that crash all the time. When we go back and we look at why they crashed it's because we're pushing them too hard. We're doing things that they would say we shouldn't be doing. They would say, "Don't set six SQL Servers on the same blade. That's too much. Don't do that."

Zerto has worked with us very effectively on identifying advanced settings that we can make to the VRAs to make them perform better, and to be more stable in the "abusive" environment that we throw at their code base.

It could be more stable for really heavy use cases like that. But Zerto would come back and say, "Well, our best practices would have you put some sort of anti-affinity rule in place so that you don't end up with that many heavy I/O machines on a single blade." They would say that doing so is not best practice; don't do it. You could say that we abused their product, in that sense. 

But it works. If you align with best practices, it's pretty stable.

We have no concerns about the scalability, although I should qualify that statement. Zerto can scale horizontally extremely well. They've got one VRA per blade and that one VRA is their data plane. You can scale out your environment horizontally with as many blades or servers as you want, which is how people do virtualization and Zerto will scale with you. We've never hit a limit as far as its ability to scale as horizontally.

The caveat would be, as I mentioned elsewhere, the size of the pipe in your infrastructure to handle all of that replication. But that doesn't tie to the Zerto product itself. 

In terms of the issue of VRAs crashing, you want to scale horizontally rather than scale vertically, because if you scale vertically you're packing more and more virtual machines into the same number of physical servers. You're stacking them up high rather than across. If you stack them up high you have concerns about the scalability of the single VRA. The VRAs do get overloaded. Don't pack them too high. Scale out, not up.

Zerto has spread out as a company. They've mushroomed out into other areas. They've started to develop a presence in backup and they've started to develop a larger presence in reporting. Their core product, however, is known as ZVR—Zerto Virtual Replication. We've implemented that core product 100 percent. There's no other way we could be consuming it differently or more effectively.

The newer stuff they've come out with—certainly the backup—we don't touch that at all. The backup product is not ready for prime time. It might be good for a small customer that may have 50 machines they want to back up. But for our use case, with SOC compliance, and having to report on the success of backups for recovery, and although we looked very closely at their backup and where they were going with it, it's not ready for us.

They're starting to go into Docker containers. None of our product right now is containerized.

A third area is analytics and reporting. The analytics and reporting would be the one new area that they've put focus on that we could be using more and getting more value out of. They've got a SaaS solution now for reporting called Zerto Analytics. We do use it. You turn on their core product and you tell it to send your reports to their SaaS offering. We've done that and we can consume the analytics product, but we just haven't really operationalized it yet. That, for us, has been a tool looking for a problem.

It took us about two months to deploy the solution, but that was because we're a very conservative company. We purposely went extremely slowly. If we had wanted to go faster, it could have been done probably in a week or two, to get all 6,000 VMs under protection.

When we deployed it, there were two dedicated people at our company who were involved, paired up with three people from a Professional Services team from Zerto. As a tertiary, we had a full-time person from our VAR, the reseller that sold us the licensing for Zerto. With that help from Zerto and the value added reseller, it only took two of us to install it to about 600 blades and probably 5,000 virtual machines.

Our experience was excellent. Both teams were great. It was a very painless rollout.

I'm less involved with the pricing and licensing area now. The last time I was involved was a couple of years ago. In my opinion, their model is somewhat inflexible, especially for their backup product.

One of the reasons why we didn't pursue looking further at their backup product was, simply, licensing. Today we have to buy a Zerto license for every virtual machine that we want protected by their product. We have a lot of virtual machines that aren't production and that don't need to be protected by their product. They don't need sub-second RPOs. They do, however, need to be backed up. But Zerto's licensing model two years ago was, "Well, we don't care that you just need to back up those VMs, and you don't really need to replicate them. It's the same price."

We would have had to double our licensing costs for Zerto to adopt it as a backup solution. It was just not even within the realm of possibility financially. It made no financial sense for us to move off our current backup vendor. Their inability to diverge in any way from that was rigid.

Their licensing could be less rigid and more open to specific companies' use cases.

The other two vendors we evaluated back were Site Recovery Manager by VMware, and whatever Veeam's product was at the time. We also looked at CommVault lightly, but they were never considered seriously.

Zerto can do what it says it can do. It can absolutely provide sub-second recovery point objectives, but with a couple of caveats. The caveats tend to apply to large companies like mine, and by "large" I mean if you have over 2,000 to 3,000 virtual machines, versus a small to medium-sized company that maybe has 50 to 500. Once you cross that barrier, you're getting into a larger environment that you're trying to replicate with Zerto.

A couple things can break down. Zerto's product doesn't control the path between your source production data and the destination you're trying to send it to. There can be tons of bottlenecks on that path; you can be going around the world. If the bottleneck doesn't exist there, their product can absolutely do what it says it does. It's up to the customer. The people using Zerto have to understand that they own the bottlenecks in their environment. If there is a bottleneck between production and the targeted DR, the RPOs are going to slip. You're going to go from sub-seconds to minutes or hours. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto's product. It's the fault of the design of the customer's environment and what they brought it into.

That doesn't just exist for the pipe between the two sites. On the destination side, the side that's receiving this data, the storage layer underneath needs to be more performant than the production side. That's somewhat of a strange concept for a lot of customers and people coming into the Zerto solution. They see the marketing side of, "10 seconds to RPO" and say, "Yeah, I want that." But what it means is that you've really got to look at your hardware and you've got to have class-A hardware the whole way through that Zerto pipeline, for their product to do what it says it does. Zerto makes that very clear. They don't recommend hardware; they're not in the business of supporting other vendors. But they have a published list of best practices. The best practices clearly say everything that I just said. They also have best practices around managing your workload I/O on the source side, so that you don't overwhelm their product.

But not everyone follows best practices. Certainly, when we implemented it we said, "Yeah, we get that. We understand what you're telling us. We understand that's a best practice, but we're not going to do it anyway, because it's too expensive," or we didn't have it in budget for that year. So we knew it  and we went in without following them. A couple of years later, when we got to a tipping point, we realized, "Okay, we need to go back and align with some of those best practices," things we didn't think that we had the time to align with back in 2016. We've made that journey painfully with their product, but they were very upfront with us on what the requirements for their product would be.

Overall, I would rate Zerto as a solid eight out of 10 for the core disaster recovery offering.

We use it for DR as well as migration. We have four data centers and migrate workloads between them.

We don't use it for backup.

We had some ransomware that got on and infected the corporate shared drives. It was just one system and one user type of thing. It didn't spread because we had it locked down pretty well. So, I just bumped the server back entirely so we did not have to worry about it.

We have only had one instance, and it wasn't widespread, where we had ransomware. The RPO was approximately 20 minutes. We had an active snapshot from when the incident happened, because we couldn't really iron it down. Therefore, Zerto saved us time in this data recovery situation because I didn't have to rebuild the thing or do a SnapMirror. 

If we had used a different solution, it might have taken a week for our data recovery situation instead of 20 minutes with four or five technical folks (not including management), instead of just me. This is because we didn't have anything documented and just counted on Zerto to do it. I don't know what the company had set up previously since I'm new, but at the previous place that I've experienced malware, you would have to stand everything up from scratch and scrape through all your backups and differentials. 

We use in the data center if there is a live event that could cost the company millions of dollars, which I haven't experienced, e.g., if our data center were to explode or get hit with a meteor, then ceases to exist. We have the option to go in and flip a switch. That has never happened. However, our tests using SRM went from a day to minutes when we switched to Zerto.

The most valuable feature is DR. In my opinion, there is nothing better at what it does.

The solution provides fantastic continuous data protection. We do a lot of spin up test environments depending on what happened, then make changes and rip it down. Or, if we got hit with malware, then we use that to do a point-in-time recovery. We custom create software in-house, so we will spin up a test environment to test code deployments or do a copy to do the same thing, if we want it to be around longer than a test recovery. For example, somebody got hit with something, then they infected the server. We were able to restore it back to a point in time before the infection. 

It is super easy to use. A non-technical user can get it up in a day. I can get it up in 15 minutes. I've brought it to help desk guys and network operations center guys, and it's easily grasped.

While I am open to transitioning over to using Zerto for long-term retention, the problem is the alerting function in Zerto is very poor. That makes it a difficult use case to transition over.

The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it.

Four years.

The stability is fantastic. It has gotten a lot better as far as the maintenance. Initially, it required a lot of prodding and poking. As it sits today, it is really stable, though you sometimes need to mirror the changes in the application to what you have changed in your own infrastructure.

The management once it is already deployed is easy to moderate. Things can get a little goofy with the DRS and if you're shuffling things around. If your infrastructure is pretty static, you're not going to have any problems with Zerto. But, if you move things around or do any updates, you have to come in and make sure everything is good to go. It is not difficult, but sometimes you are required to go in and maintain it. Because we turn off the alerting in most places, you don't know its status without going in and manually looking.

I am the primary Zerto administrator. Therefore, I own the product for my company and use it every day.

Scalability is great. It will scale essentially one-to-one with your virtual infrastructure. However, if you have more hosts and VMs, then you have to go in and manage that many more hosts and VMs.

Four people know it and use it to do things. I'm the primary, then there is another guy who is the direct backup on my team. Then I have trained a couple other people who know how to utilize it in the event of an emergency, e.g., "This is how you would failover X environment." Because it won't automatically do failovers, somebody has to pull the trigger. Therefore, we have documentation in order to do that. It is very simple.

We don't use it for everything, not in both instances where I implemented it or been in charge of running it over. However, it definitely has freed people up to do other things in that space. It only takes me to entirely administer Zerto, instead of a backup and recovery operations team with two or three people.

We are at about 60 percent of use. I would like to see more. We don't do persistent long-term backups or use any of the cloud functionality, though I think we will as we're in the midst of looking at AWS to potentially migrate workloads there. I also very interested in using it as cold storage.

Initially, years ago, the technical support was very poor. We were promised one thing that was physically impossible with the software. I spent a lot of time fighting everybody in support. Since then, the support has been really good. In my experience, they are all mostly stateside. They understand the product inside and out to help you with your needs or come up with some type of creative solution.

At my previous company, we were using SRM and our DR tests would take one to two days. For our primary customer, we switched to Zerto, then it took 15 to 20 minutes instead of days. It was a huge difference. That was from Boise to North Carolina, then back. It was approximately 30 terabytes of data with 19 virtual machines. It was a pretty large orchestration.

SRM was replaced by Zerto due to simplicity. SRM is very complicated. It is also not easy to use and set up. Zerto is better for implementation and ease of use. So, it was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward, though it could be more straightforward. Now, you just install the software on a Windows system. It would be nice if they had an appliance that autodeployed in VMware. That would make it simple. But if you can install Office or any kind of application on Windows, you can do this. It is super easy to set up with minimal front-end learning required. 

The deployment takes about an hour for an experienced person. If it is your first time, then it will take a couple hours.

You need to know your use case for an instance where you need something to be backed up. Once that need is identified, you need to know where it is and where you want it to go. Once you already have those questions answered, the implementation is simple. Through the installation progress, you just plug in those values of where is it, what is it, and where do you want it to go, then you're done.

At the company I'm with now and at my previous company, I was the architect and implementer. Zerto generally requires one person for the setup.

The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field.

It has helped decrease the number of people involved in data center moves. For the infrastructure pieces, which is my primary responsibility, I am the sole person. Whereas, we use to have an OS guy and a network person before to manually configure the pieces. We also had application teams, but they are still relevant. Previously, it took four people because we were touching each environment and machine. Since we wanted it done fast, we would stack a bunch of people on it. Now, it's just me and it's done faster.

When migrating data centers, we have saved a lot of time on my team. Something that takes an hour or two used to take a week or two.

There is big ROI for ease of use, management, and labor overhead versus other solutions.

Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it.

We currently use Veeam and Commvault.

In general, moving VMs through VMware using site-to-site is not as easy than with Zerto because the data has to go on flight, and Zerto just sends it over. I like that aspect of it. During our data center moves, we move from one location to another (San Jose) with a two-hour total downtime from start to finish: From powering the systems down, getting them over, getting a live feed changed, and back up and running to the world. This would be way slower with a different product.

For long-term retention, we do Veeam to spinning disk. While the LTR is something I am interested in, I think Veeam has the upper hand with alerting and job management. Both Veeam and Zerto are easy to use, but Zerto is easier to use.

I am not a big Commvault fan.

It could replace Veeam and Commvault, but not at its current price point.

Most people assume catastrophic failures have a long-term data impact. However, with Zerto, it doesn't have to be that way. If you spend the money to protect everything, you are going to get that low data recovery time. Whereas, if you are cheap and don't buy Zerto, it's going to be hours to days of data loss. With Zerto, it is in the minutes. Thus, how valuable is your data? That is where the cost justification comes in.

If you are thinking about implementing this type of solution:

• How important is your data? 
• Would your company go bankrupt if you were unable to do what your company does for a week? 
• Do you have contract requirements which say you need to have a DR plan up and running? 
• Do you want to spend a week doing it or 20 minutes doing it? 

It's that value of time, money, and data. I can implement Zerto and use it in an emergency situation anywhere. If you're talking to somebody like me who understands data protection and disaster recovery, the question is how much is your data worth to you and how fast do you need it back?

Currently, we are doing our own storage as the target for protection, but there is interest in enabling DR in the cloud, e.g., to do Glacier or something cheap in Azure.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We use it for disaster recovery and to migrate machines from one location to another.

The big thing for us was our disaster recovery. At that point, we were only able to do a disaster recovery test once a year. Now, we officially do a disaster recovery test once a quarter and we do a subsequent test once a month to verify that it's doing what it's doing and the IP address is changed. Instead of one mass disaster recovery exercise, we're easily able to perform up to 12 in the year.

It allows us to verify in a much more granular aspect whether our data is being migrated or not. Once a year, if we find some issues, we're at least 11, 12 months behind at that point. Every 30 days, if we do a test and we find an issue, we're able to correct that. The time between tests is shorter, which means that if there is a problem we're able to resolve it in a much shorter amount of time versus an entire year, and then waiting another year to see if everything is working again.

When we need to failback or move workloads Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved. We are able to put a machine into Zerto, let it do its magic in migrating the data from one side to the other. We've had instances where we've got machines that are four or five terabytes that we can move from one side to another after it's done synchronizing in 15 minutes or less. Sometimes it takes DNS longer to update than it does for us to move the machine.

Instead of me having a server person, a network person, and a storage person, I can put it into Zerto, let Zerto do its job, fail it over, and then just have the application owner verify that the server is up and running, and away we go. So on a weekend, I don't have to engage a team of people, it can just be myself and one other person to verify that the machine is up and running. It really cuts down on overhead for personnel.

In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy. As far as downtime from an application standpoint, with Zerto, we're from hours down to minutes, which is great when you have applications that are supposed to be the five nines of a time kind of thing.

We have not had any ransomware issues. But we have had an instance where somebody installed something that messed something up. It was a new version of Java and we were able to roll back. Thankfully they realized it fairly quickly because we only keep a 12-hour window. We were able to roll back to almost a per minute instance prior to that installation and recover the server in minutes. Our backup was as of midnight, but they did it at 8:00 in the morning. So we didn't lose eight hours' worth of processing.

If we were going to use our backup solution, it would have taken minutes to restore the actual server, but then from an SQL perspective, we would have had to roll the transaction logs from backups. I couldn't even tell how long that would have taken because we had to do all of the transaction logs, which are taken every five minutes from midnight, all the way to 8:00 AM in five-minute increments. It would have taken considerably longer using traditional methods versus Zerto.

Although it hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery, what it has allowed us to do is actually focus on other things. Since Zerto is doing what it's doing, we're able to not have to stare at it all day every day and make sure that it's working. We have the screen up to make sure there are no errors, but we're able to focus on learning how the APIs work, working on the other products that we own for backup and storage. That's mainly what my group does, we do disaster recovery and storage backups. We have six pieces of our enterprise and before it was just the main piece that we were working on. Now, we're able to actually work with the other five or six entities and start doing their backups and disaster recovery because we have a lot more time.

The failover capabilities are definitely the high spot for us. Previously, when we did disaster recovery it would take us easily a day or two to restore all of our servers. We can do the same thing with Zerto in about an hour and a half.

We're about six or seven seconds behind our production site and it does a really good job of keeping up, making sure that we're up to date. That's one of the other things that we think is just phenomenal about the product, we're able to get in there and put a server in and within usually a few minutes we're protected. Six or seven seconds behind is a pretty good RPO.

Currently, we are using another product for longterm retention, so I don't think we really have any plans on switching over at this point.

Zerto is very easy to use. We did a proof of concept and it took longer to build the Windows servers that had to be installed than it did to actually install it and roll off the product. Our proof of concept became production in minutes.

The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be.

I like the fact that Zerto does what it does and it does it very well. I have had Zerto since version four, so the longterm retention and things like that were never a part of it at that point. I just like the fact that I can install it, I can protect my virtual machines, and I'm comfortable and confident that it's doing things correctly because of the amount of testing that we've done with it.

We have been using Zerto for a little over three years. 

It's very stable. Once a month we verify that the internal mechanisms of Zerto are working. When I do a test failover we check if VMware tools come up, if the IP addresses change, and the things that Zerto is configured to do automatically. Usually, if there's an issue, it's either I did something wrong when I configured it, or I put in the wrong IP address or the VM itself has an issue, the tools aren't loading correctly or at all, or it was trying to do an upgrade and failed. We've actually been able to identify other issues inside the environment that we would not have realized were an issue by doing these tests.

Our next step is not so much increasing the capacity but protecting things to the cloud. We'd like to be able to take those same 350 machines or so do we have, and definitely, if not the important 50 that we have, but all of them, have them not only go to our disaster recovery site but also split to AWS. It's where we have both of the sites, one in one location and one in a vastly different location and if for some reason, one were to go offline, we would have those objects in AWS to be able to spin up and do what we need to do.

We ramped up from that 50 to 350 within a year and Zerto just took it and kept on running. We are still about the same RPO as we were before, we're protecting 60 plus terabytes of data at this point with those 350. It did what it had to do to create new virtual machines, depending on how many disks there are. I think that I was able to scale with our needs really easily. 73 terabytes are what we're protecting right now across 357 VMs, and we have a seven-second RPO. It went from a small number to a very large number. The issues that we've had around Zerto protection has either been that networking wasn't sufficient, or the storage itself had to be increased.

There are three of us who work with Zerto, that's it. We do contact other teams, often our networking team to get an IP address for something. But when it comes to doing the testing, when it comes to doing the implementation, and when it comes to doing verification processes, it's all my team of three people.

I am the data management supervisor and then I have a lead storage administrator and a senior storage administrator.

Prior to Zerto becoming our disaster recovery product, we were using Dell EMC's Avamar for backup recovery and for disaster recovery, which we quickly realized was not going to work out very well. We used it for about four or five years. When your disaster recovery test is five days and you take one and a half to two days to do restores only, that doesn't leave a lot of time for testing. Now, we're able to do the restore in an hour and a half. Then we actually can start testing the exact same day that we did the restores. In most instances, we're able to actually finish everything within 24 hours.

When we first purchased it, the backup portion did not exist. So having backup and DR in one platform really wasn't that important to us. We use Rubrik for backups and longterm retention at this point. We really don't have any intent on using Zerto for longterm retention, as we're extremely happy with Rubrik. But time will tell if we decide to switch over to the LTR portion of the product.

Compared to Avamar, Zerto is extremely easy to use. I can bring Zerto up and start recovering, failing over, or testing machines before I can even log into Avamar. Avamar was very clunky from its interface. It's very easy for Zerto to go in and recover a machine to a certain point in time. Where moving around in Avamar, since it was Java based, would take quite a long time to get from screen to screen. And the workflow was not user friendly at all.

We have different use cases for Zerto and Rubrik but I think that the interface and functionality, as far as what I get out of that particular product, what its purpose is, they're both about on par. Honestly, we've told both companies before, we would love for one to buy the other so that we can get the best of the disaster recovery with Zerto and the best of backup and recovery, longterm retention type things with Rubrik. Because they definitely are probably the two best products for their market segment.

Replacing Avamar has saved us on the cost needed to manage them. As far as management goes, we still use the same three people. But as far as renewal maintenance costs, definitely. Dell EMC is very proud of their products and their renewal maintenance costs were rather large compared to what we do with Zerto.

Initially, we saved about $1,000,000 three years ago by switching to Zerto. Zerto and Rubrik replaced Avamar. But buying both products together, versus what the renewal/upgrade costs would have cost us for Avamar, with all the hardware, was a savings of $1,000,000.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I built a couple of virtual machines to run the manager on, deployed some VRAs, and then attached it to VMware and checked what I wanted to protect. We probably had it up and running in about an hour total. Then we tested protecting some machines, and we had some test boxes that we tested back and forth. It was a very easy setup. People are definitely sold about how easy it is to install and configure.

Initially, our deployment strategy was to protect a small subset of very important machines for an enterprise. And then once we saw how easy it was to implement, how easy it was to put things in there, and how easy it was to protect them, it went from a handful of machines to 350 or so. The initial intent was to protect a very small number. That went from that to a very large number very quickly. Zerto was able to handle it no problem. We actually had to end up buying more storage on the target side because we had not planned on doing that many machines from the initial implementation.

We worked with our account team. We were able to get the proof of concept software, a link to download it. They gave us a key, they gave us a little Excel sheet stating how many machines and IP addresses we needed. Then they basically sat on the phone with us for the hour with WebEx. And we set it up just that moment. That's really the only implementation help that we've ever gotten from them. Everything else has just been pretty much us on our own.

Their support has been very, very good. We've had some technical issues that we've been able to work through with them. Nothing major, but if I have a question or if we run into an issue, we're able to either open up a support ticket and they respond fairly quickly, or we are able to do some searching in their knowledge base. We've had an instance where we did the upgrade to a new version and it caused some problems. But within, I'd say a few hours, we were able to correct it because they had already experienced that. And they had that logged in their internal database of issues. So, they were able to log in, and give us the fix that we needed and get us back on track.

It definitely is a very robust product. The feature set from 4.0, 4.5 to now has increased greatly. We do like the fact, even though we're not using it, that as long as I pay my maintenance when the new features come out like longterm retention, analytics, the monitoring, the reporting, the things that were not there when we first purchased it that are there now, is all part of maintenance. It's not a bolt-on price. They don't charge extra. It was one of the things with Dell EMC that was always a pain was. They had additional costs. With Zerto it's like, "You paid your maintenance, here's a new feature, enjoy!"

They have licensing breaks as far as 50 users, or 50 VMs, 100 VMs, 250 VMs. We ended up with a bunch of 50 at first, and all of our maintenance renewal dates were all different. It ended up costing us more because we didn't just make the investment up front to say that we wanted 250. We had to end up going back and resetting all of our maintenance dates to the same date. It was just a nightmare for our maintenance renewal person. If you did a proof of concept and you like it, definitely make the license investment upfront. That way, you're not trying to piecemeal it afterwards.

Licensing is all-inclusive, there are no hidden fees.

We looked at RecoverPoint for VMs. A long time ago, one of the companies inside this enterprise had used RecoverPoint and it worked really well when it was the physical RecoverPoint. But as things became more virtual, it no longer was as good as it had been, so they had discontinued it. RecoverPoint for VMs was definitely not as easy to set up. It was not as easy to use. It took a lot more resources. This is three-year-old information, but I feel like we would have had to have had more people on our team than we do now with just the three of us. We didn't feel like it was as stable. It certainly wasn't as easy to use, test, or get to work as Zerto was.

My advice would be to do the proof of concept. They're very willing to help you with the installation. Do a proof of concept. If you're not amazed by it, I would be surprised. Everybody that we've ever talked to about this and have done a test of it says, "I can't believe it's just that easy."

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. 

We do a semiannual disaster recovery test, usually one in January and another in September, where we fail our entire company over to our Arizona DR facility. We run the business out of the Arizona location for the day. In order to be able to do that, the Zerto application allows us to migrate 58 machines over to that location and allows us to run our business from that location for the course of the day.

We are able to have a successful disaster recovery solution through using Zerto for our Disaster Recovery drills. We are able to fail over anytime, day or night, to run our applications out of our Arizona facility. Within a 15 or 20 minute time frame, we can have those application servers up and running in Arizona. It is just a huge help to have a successful, reliable disaster recovery solution that we know at any point in time, within 15 or 20 minutes, can be running out of a different location.

Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill it would take two of us working for three or four hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I'm able to finish my work in about 30 mins and be available onsite to help and assist anybody else as needed during the disaster recovery drill. Its ease of use and the ability to have a reliable solution for disaster recovery has become invaluable to us.

There is built-in active logging if needed for a longer retention period. If we fail a machine over and are just doing tests for it, we can fail it right back at the end of the failover without much issue. We couldn't do that with SRM. The ability to keep track within the activity log of what is going on with the VM, then fail it back prior to the one-hour time frame that we have set up without having to worry about it losing data during our tests or production failover drills.

The product is very easy to use. On a scale of one to 10, I'd say it's a nine as far as ease of use goes. In order to do an update in our old product (SRM), we basically had to take down almost our entire vCenter to be able to do the updates. Whereas, I can do updates to our Zerto product within 30 minutes to both our ZVMs in Massachusetts and Arizona. We haven't had problems troubleshooting after doing upgrades. Within five minutes, we can configure a whole new cluster solution and work on getting it synced out to Arizona.

It transfers up-to-the-minute files. Therefore, if something was to happen and the business was to go down Massachusetts due to a server failure, we could simply fire up those VMs in Arizona within approximately five minutes. The data protection level is top-notch. We haven't lost any machines, data, or VMs during the course of utilizing this product.

The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't give you accurate information on the error message to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go actually login into Zerto to determine what's causing the issue.

Another issue with the alerting is that it will pause a job. E.g., if we have something running from Massachusetts to Arizona, but a VM has been removed, updated or moved to a new location in vCenter. It literally pauses the VPG the VM resides in but will never give us a notification that it's been paused. Therefore, if we had an issue during the course of the day such as a power event and we needed to gain access to those VMs in some sort of catastrophe, we wouldn't be able to get access to them because that job was paused and were never notified about it being paused for whatever reason. It would therefore be a big problem if the VM was needed to be recovered and we didn't have those resources available.

It would be great to get more precise alerting to be able to allow us to troubleshoot a bit better. Or have the application at least give us a heads up, "A VPG job has been paused." Right now, it's sort of a manual process that we have to monitor ourselves, which is not a great way to do things if you have a superior disaster recovery solution.

Almost two years.

The stability is rock-solid. Nothing has gone down since we installed it; there has been no downtime.

Typically, once a quarter, we have an update. Last year we were at version 7.5, then we recently went updates to 8.0. On top of that, they release security patches and other things to improve bugs they find in the program. Right now, there is a U4 version that's out, which we will be updating to this quarter.

In the U4 version, there are security enhancements because a lot of zero-day issues that are being found in a lot of the applications. Zerto is making more security modifications and enhancements to the encryption between one location and another, so somebody can't hack your data and access it while it's in transition.

Scalability is very easy. We are going through a POC right now because we want to branch out to the cloud. Just getting that set up and going through the process was about 60 minutes.

It's very scalable and extendable. We can do one to many solutions, as far as where our disaster recovery is going. This is what we wanted. We would never have been able to do that with our SRM product.

There are two engineers trained to use the product. I'm the primary contact for the application and do most of the work on the product. One of the storage guys handles a lot of the storage set up on the back-end with me. We have at least two people trained on each application that we have in-house. Both of us are in charge of making sure the application is up-to-date and doing what it's supposed to be doing. 

Zerto's technical support is very good. They are very reliable and always very pleasant to deal with. We've never an issue working with them. They usually come back with the precise solution to whatever we are troubleshooting.

Our issues are usually user self-inflicted. E.g., we remove a host out of the cluster to upgrade it or do something else with it and don't follow the correct procedure that's needed in order to be able to shut down the Zerto appliance correctly. If somebody doesn't follow that procedure, because they either don't know how, weren't aware of it, or just skip that step, then it causes problems inside of Zerto. This will pause jobs and the VPG will no longer be accessible on that host. Sometimes it's easy to get it back up and running again. Usually, when you put a new piece of hardware in the cluster that has a different set of parameters with its hardware, then the appliance will be missing because it was taken out with the old hardware. Usually, you need to get their technical support involved in order to be able to troubleshoot the issue with them to be able to get the VPG back online again on the new hardware. As I said its self-inflicted most of the time because steps are missed with our processes.

The documentation that we got from them was in depth and work well when needed, if you follow them correctly you will have success. If you don't follow the steps, that's when problems develop. Therefore, it's not a fault in their documentation, it's a fault of the user who's not following the proper steps for success. It doesn't happen often but I think we have contacted technical support only three times in the two years that we've had the product.

For eight years prior to using Zerto we used to use a product called SRM, which is part of VMware. We finally switched over to Zerto after having them come in and do a presentation for us. This was after trying for about a year to do that and convince our vice president to allow us to migrate over to a different platform.

The reason why we used SRM was because SRM was built into our VMware vCenter licensing. We never had a successful DR test during the previous couple of years with SRM. By switching over to the Zerto product a year and a half ago, we were able to run a successful disaster recovery test within three months of switching over. We had our first successful disaster recovery tests in two and a half years because Zerto made our life so much easier and helped getting servers over to a new location almost seamlessly. 

In order to be able to have a successful disaster recovery, we need to be able to successfully migrate 58 servers from our Massachusetts location to Arizona. On previous attempts, we got about half the stuff over there, then we'd fail. In other scenarios we would get everything over there but some of the machines wouldn't come up because of the way they were configured. One time, the business was down for about half the morning because it took us that long to get the stuff back up and running using SRM. This was a real pain point for us, getting this product in place and working successfully. It took Zerto to be able to finally get us to do that. It's been a lifesaver. All we had with SRM was nothing but headaches.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had everything running in half an hour. It got deployed with two virtual machines (ZVMs): One got deployed in Massachusetts and another in our Arizona location. From there, we deploy appliances to each one of the hosts that's inside of the clusters that we are managing for our disaster recovery solution.

Within 30 minutes, we had it deployed to our entire production cluster and the hosts in here. After that, we just started creating jobs, which took quite awhile to do because we have a lot of large servers. However, that's not the worry of the Zerto application, but the size of the VMs we have in production. 

For our implementation strategy, we just mimicked what we had in place for our SRM environment. Our 58 machines are spread across different clusters: some in our DMZ, some in our prod and some in our WebSphere clusters. After that, we ran two tests to ensure that we were able to fail over to our Arizona location then fail back without any changes or modifications to the VMs. Once we did that, we started rolling out to each of the clusters, one Virtual Protection Group (VPG) at a time. I think we now have 23 VPGs total.

We worked with an outside vendor (Daymark) who does a lot of our work through outside vendors. They work with Zerto directly. When we set it up originally, we had a Zerto technician on the call as well as a Daymark technician on-site working with us.

Our experience with Daymark has been very good. We love working with them and try to use them for our integration and infrastructure work. They are a very good company that are easy to deal with. We try to use them as much as we can. Thanks to Rick and Matt for a great working relationship.

We have seen huge ROI.

It used to be a three-person job, and now it only takes one person to manage and run the process. The fall back is the same thing. We've never had any issues with stuff coming back out of Arizona to our Massachusetts location. Within 15 to 20 minutes, we can have our servers successfully migrated back, then up and running just as they were originally without having too many conflicts or configuration issues. 

The solution has helped us reduce downtime in any situation that we have come across, thus far, for disaster recovery at a 4:1 ratio.

We are an insurance company therefore, if we're down for an hour, it's thousands of dollars being lost. E.g., people can't pay their insurance bills, open new policies or get the support they need for an accident.

These things have been invaluable to us:

• Not having to have so many bodies onsite during a disaster recovery drill.
• Not having to worry about multiple people dealing with the application.
• The product's reliability of always being up and running and not having any issues with it.
  

It's very equitable, otherwise we wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per host used. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we have configured and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all.

There is a one-time cost for maintenance and support. We have a three-year contract that we will have to renew when those three years come up. There is also licensing on top of that for whatever product you are using it depending on the host configurations.

Right now, we use Veritas. We will be evaluating Veeam and Rubrik as a new solution for our backups in the next quarter or so, on top of the fact that we may decide to use Zerto. The three of them are in the mix right now for when we decide to switch over vendors for a better backup solution. 

Zerto gives you the ability to utilize it as a backup solution, but it's not a true backup solution because it can't do file level backups. If you want a particular file off of a server, it can't do that for you. What it can do is give you the whole server, then you need to go back and pull that file off it. Mainly for that reason, we haven't chosen to use Zerto and may never use Zerto as our backup solution. The other solutions allow us to get a file level backup.

Don't hesitate. Go out and do it now. Don't wait two years like we did. Push harder in order to be able to get the solution in place, especially since we know it will work better for you. Don't just take, "No," for an answer from senior management.

The application is phenomenal. They continually add new things, more plugins, and modifications to the way things work. It just gets better as they go.

We don't plan to use the solution for long-term retention at this time, but we are looking at going into a hybrid cloud solution in the near future which we may be using long-term retention for to make a duplicate copy of everything we have in our Massachusetts data center into a cloud solution. Whether it be an Azure or Amazon location on the cloud.

While I can't really speak to whether it would allow us to do it, the application is set up to create a duplicate of the actual servers in Arizona. That's how it works so quickly. If we ever had a problem, I could always revert back from the duplicates that we have out in Arizona using the application, if necessary. Luckily, we haven't had a need for that, and hopefully never do.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We're backing up VMs with it. Our company has about 200 VMs and we're using Zerto on 30 of them in the main line of business applications. We're using it to replicate all that data over to our DR site so we can do our testing and reporting against that. 

Within those 30 servers we've broken out into three different SLAs on which ones get spun up first. We have it all scripted with monthly plans to fail over, spin it up, actually use it over there, spin it down, bring it back into production, etc.

The business that we're in means we have to run our network 365 days, 24/7, with no downtime. If there's any kind of interruption to business processes — power outage, tornado, fire, etc. — we need to be able to get certain systems up and going in almost real-time. That's how we're leveraging Zerto, to guarantee that uptime and for the ability to spin these things up near-instantaneously.

I know my networking team loves the tool and the interface and being able to roll back and do the failover stuff very easily. But for me, personally, it's how it has impacted our business. The reporting functionality showing that our DR plan is rock-solid and stable, and my ability to generate summaries for our customers, have really improved business processes for us. It gives peace of mind to our customers that our systems are stable and the services that we're providing are stable.

Also, when we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved. The failback feature, from a technical standpoint, is what sold us on Zerto. One of the challenges we had with Site Recovery Manager was spinning up and being in production at DR. If everything is equal, everything is patched and everything's working, both solutions offer a very similar experience: the ability to move a workload from production to disaster recovery works with both of them, no problem. Coming back the other way was just a bear of a move with Site Recovery Manager. With Zerto, it's almost seamless. With Zerto, it takes about four or five mouse clicks and stuff fails back over, and our end-users are none the wiser. And it's just one guy doing it. When failing back from Site Recovery Manager, we'd have to get one of our sys admins involved and we'd have to let our end-users know that they all had to log out.

While it hasn't reduced staff, we have become more efficient and it has allowed me to reprioritize some projects. It's freed up some capacity, for sure. We haven't reduced headcount, but it has definitely taken a big wedge out of the daily grind of our backup and recovery; the stuff they always had to check.

Personally, what I find valuable is the executive summary that says our DR plan is operational. I can then pass that out to our customers. 

Per Mar has about 75,000 customers and, more and more these days, especially given all this [COVID] pandemic, we're asked: Do you have a business continuity plan? Is it tested regularly? Do you have documentation for it? Two years ago, a simple email from me saying, "Yes, we have this," sufficed. We're finding now that people want true documentation from an independent system that generates a report. The reporting that comes out of Zerto is a lifesaver for me. I'm able to generate that up, send it out to the customers that need it, and say, "Yes. Here are our SLAs. Here is our monthly test routine. Here is where it shows us being successful," and so forth.

We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great.

It's easy to use and there isn't a huge learning curve. Even some of the advanced features are very intuitive to folks who have been in this space before. If you have any kind of skill sets around any kind of backup and recovery tool, the user interface for Zerto is very natural.

One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet.

I've been using Zerto for about a year.

It just works. We architected it pretty nicely. One of our licensed servers is a complete test solution for us to show that it is truly working. We're able to take a small test server, a Dev server is really what it is, and we can move from production, move it over to DR, have it run over there for a day, and then we move it back with no data loss. 

It's never not worked and when you come from the SRM world, that's just unheard of. Now we're a year into this product and have gone through an upgrade, and our June test went off without a hitch. It's very rock-solid.

Their tech support has been fantastic to work with. We ran into a glitch when we did our update in mid-May and our primary data center stopped talking to our secondary data center. We couldn't figure it out. We got their tech support involved right away. They identified a bug right away. They were able to roll us back and then stayed engaged with us as they figured out how to fix the bug. And once the bug was isolated and fixed, they got right back a hold of us to say, "We're ready to go," and then they walked us through upgrading both sides. There was a lot of hand-holding in that upgrade scenario. It was a fantastic experience.

It took them four or five days to fix the bug and they stayed engaged with us just about every single day, letting us know the status of it and when it went to QA. We didn't fall into a black hole. It was a very customer-centric experience.

We were using VMware Site Recovery Manager. We're still a VMware shop. Zerto replaced SRM. It was probably cost-agnostic, but what it really came down to was that SRM breaks all the time. You apply some patches or a Windows update. Uptime and reliability for us are super-critical. We don't have a ton of time to spend on making sure it's always working. We were really looking for a solution that we could architect, deploy, and just let it run, knowing that we're protected without our always having to go back and mess around with it.

What we kept finding with Site Recovery Manager was that every time we wanted to do a full-scale, failover DR test, we would have to spend a week ahead of time prepping for it, to make sure everything would work flawlessly during our test. It always worked, we knew how to patch it and get around it. But disaster doesn't give you a two-week notice. You don't know you're going to have a tornado in two weeks. You get about a 10-minute notice and then you've got cows flying through the air. We wanted a tool that we know would just run and work and be reliable. 

It was cost-neutral to the budget, the timing was right, and the solution was rock-solid so we made the change.

Ease of use and deployment are fantastic. This is a solution that we started with a proof of concept. We threw it in a lab and said, "Hey, let's just see what it looks like." Next thing you know, we never even had to tear down the proof of concept. Once we started seeing it working we said, "This is definitely something that we want." All we really ended up doing was negotiating licenses, applying the license key, and we were off to the races.

Soup to nuts, it took us five hours to spin the whole solution up and to create our protection groups. It was very fast. That includes downloading the software, spinning the VM up, and protecting and backing up data.

We worked with one of their engineers through the proof of concept. Once we said, "Hey, this is going to work," we tested it on a few servers and then we became a paying customer. They worked with us to help us define what made sense for the 30 licenses that we bought and what machines to deploy it to. But it's really not a complicated tool to deploy. There wasn't a ton of architecting and solution-building around it. There was some, but it was a very simple solution to install.

We have seen ROI. And even when you cost-compare against Site Recovery Manager, none of these solutions is cheap. But we are folks who need to have uptime and these things have to work. When you start comparing it against Site Recovery Manager, Zerto blows it out of the water, in my opinion.

If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company of our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense. I would really love to be able to just apply Zerto to every virtual machine that we spin up, drop it into the right SLA bucket, and just be done with it, knowing that it's protected, soup to nuts. Unfortunately, that's just cost prohibitive.

My advice would definitely be to leverage the number of VMs. It's not a cheap solution by any stretch, but it delivers on its promise. There's definitely value in the investment. With hindsight, I would have gotten a better cost per VM if I was able to buy, say, 100 licenses. It would have been easier for me to put other servers under the protection of Zerto. I wish I would have had that flexibility at the time. Eventually, budgets will open up and I'll be able to go get another 50 or so licenses, but I'll still be paying a higher price, more than if I would have negotiated a higher quantity to begin with.

We took a look at a couple of other solutions. The other ones fell off the table pretty quickly. We're based in Iowa. We have a good account team here in Iowa from Zerto that knew our account from previous relationships. They came around and said, "This is a tool that you guys really need to take a hard look at."

The sales process took about six months. They came in about six months before my renewal with VMware. We had a few conversations and, about two to three months before the renewal, designed a proof of concept to see if it was actually going to work. They came in and did that. My guys were raving about it and I saw some of the reporting out of it. At that point I said, "Okay, done deal." It was cost neutral. When Site Recovery Manager came up, we canceled that portion of the renewal. There wasn't really a need for us to go out to market. I just trusted the account guys. They knew who we were. The tool worked the way they called it. I don't get too picky. If it works, it's good enough for me.

Take a hard look at it. Don't pass it by, don't be scared off by the price. Definitely take them up on the proof of concept. Have the team come in and do that. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

They talk about technology that can just actually do what it promises. I've been doing this for over 20 years and sometimes you get jaded by the fact that people over-promise and under-deliver. Zerto was definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. The solution went in so easily that I had to do a double-take when my guys were telling me, "Hey, it's already up and running." I said, "It can't be done already." I'm used to complicated deployments. They promised and it does exactly what they said it would do. Don't be so skeptical. Keep an open mind to it and explore the possibilities.

I just sat through ZertoCON. They put a lot of emphasis on long-term retention. It really started putting a question out there as to whether you need a different backup and recovery solution. We use a different partner called Rubrik for backup and recovery. The challenge that we have with Zerto is that we're only protecting 30 VMs, whereas with Rubrik, we're protecting all 200. There's a little bit of a dance between value and return. So we're not using Zerto for long-term storage right now. We're evaluating it. I don't know if it makes economic sense to do so, but we are taking a look at it. And we're not protecting all 200 servers because of cost.

In terms of using the solution for a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes, knock on wood, we have not had to use it in that capacity just yet. We have a very mature cyber security posture and we haven't been popped by ransomware in the last year. But it does give me peace of mind that we also have that ability. That's just another layer of our cyber security posture and we know that we're protected against those threats. So there's definitely a peace of mind around that.

The only folks using it are on our IT team, about five or six of us. Five of my guys use it on a regular basis and know how to manage it. I'm the sixth guy. If I ever have to get in there, we're in trouble.

We use it mainly to move the server alarm between vCenter and the physical center.

I like that Zerto is easy to move and that there is no effect on the user. That is, the user doesn't even know it. We're in the healthcare industry and work for a hospital. We can set up a server in no time whatsoever. It's easy for us to schedule the time because it takes only about one minute.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is a lot easier to use in comparison to similar solutions.

We have had no downtime with Zerto.

The speed of our upgrade is a lot easier because, for example, when I put the move fail and there's a pullout from the destination, I can cover with something from the source and pick it up from the source in person. I can copy the tag from the server very fast.

Customer service and technical support need improvement.

I've been using it for about five years.

Customer service and technical support need improvement, and I would rate technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We switched to Zerto because it is easier to use, and the users did not complain.

The initial setup was straightforward. You open the firewall, install it, connect to vCenter, and then do all the steps to install the software.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto a seven because of the bad experience I had with technical support.

Our primary use case for Zerto is disaster recovery.

It's very simple to use and configure.

The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable.

This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We haven't experienced any issues.

We have a small environment so it may not be applicable to comment on scalability. What I can say is we took two of the largest virtual machines in our environment, created a VPG for them, set up the seeding and replication and Zerto easily supported this. If there was going to be any concern, we would've seen it with these two VMs. So far it looks good.

The customer support for this solution is okay. I have only opened up one support case. We were looking for someone to assist us right away. It was a Severity 2 case, with Severity 1 being the highest. They sent me an email but couldn't help me the same day. I was hoping that I could speak with them the same day to get some support.

I would rate them a six out of ten. 

Neutral

We previously tried Veeam's replication tool and it didn't work out too well. That's why we decided to go to Zerto. Zerto is much easier to set up and offers a faster speed of recovery.

The initial setup was straightforward. How the VPGs are configured and adding the VMs is simple and pretty intuitive. It took under an hour to set up. 

The setup was completed by myself and a colleague.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

I would advise others to take extra time before jumping into the setup, to consider the grouping of the VPGs and what makes the most sense for their business. It was important for our business to take that extra time to make sure that we got that right. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for replication from our primary data center to the secondary data center.

The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is provisioned. If the application team would like to use a replication process, DR process, or RPO, Zerto can facilitate this within 15 to 20 minutes.

This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It can be scalable depending on the licenses which can be quite expensive. 

We previously used SRM. SRM is as not as good at Zerto. That's the reason we bought the licensed product as opposed to the free product. I'm hoping that Zerto will be used in the future in our company for data replication purposes like SQL data.

The initial setup was very easy. I followed the documentation to set it up myself. The person completing the setup needs to understand the storage layer and the network layer for the backup. Without this understanding, It may be extremely confusing.

When you apply Zerto to your environment, you need to understand your networking settings, storage settings, and your capacity planning. Setting up Zerto took us 15 minutes. 

We recently bought more licenses and are exploiting the benefits of Zerto so I would say we are seeing a return on investment. 

Zerto helped to reduce downtime drastically by 80%. I would advise others to complete a full evaluation process to ensure they get the most out of it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.