HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We're using it for site plate replication and fail-over or disaster recovery. We're primarily using it to replicate between the data centers that we own and operate.

We've had a few disasters where we've had a site go out and we've had outages or hardware failures. However, with a single click, we can have all of the failover and when the other sites come back up, it can auto re-replicate in the reverse direction so there is no extra manpower required. Whereas, normally, we would be spending hours and hours cleaning up from the failover event.

We enjoy the simplicity of not only configuring replication but failing over with a single click and then having it automatically reverse replication. We've had other products such as Veeam, and their replication works, however, it's very cumbersome to configure. When you failover, there's a bunch of work you have to do after the fact to reverse the direction and to restore the VM and how it names it and which environment it shows up in.

In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window.

The solution is very easy to use. It's very straightforward. You don't really have to do a lot of reading through the documentation, or things like that. You can basically scroll through the menu and figure it out.

We have not had ransomware, so we haven't had to deal with that, however, we definitely had a disaster recovery issue we had where we had the fail-over site stop unexpectedly. It did save us a bit of data loss, whereas, normally, we would have lost six hours' worth of customer data. In this case, it was seamless. We lost seconds' worth.

The solution has reduced downtime. It has done so a couple of times. There could be some cost savings there. It's just not something we calculate.

The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product. Zerto can do backup, and yet it's really a disaster recovery product. It would be great if they could improve upon the backup functionality, or continually improve. We've seen some improvements, however, if they continue improving upon that it may eventually eliminate the need for the other product.

I've been using the solution for about three years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. The only issue we had was a DHCP issue where we didn't static a couple of the DVMs, which is the agent for each ESX host, and we were having a few gaps in replication when the IPs would change, however, we've stacked those and that has resolved that issue.

We find that it's very easily scalable. The resource overhead is very minimal so it's really easy to scale up the environment and the product kind of automates the process for you. You select where you want it, hit install, and it handles it for you.

About five people use the product in our company. We have some system administrators, we have a couple of programmers and we have a DBA.

We have around a quarter of our environment replicated with Zerto. It's mostly our critical infrastructure.

We may possibly increase usage over time.

Technical support is good. I'd give it an eight out of ten. They're pretty quick to respond. They are almost always able to resolve my issue. I have no complaints. I only had a couple of support tickets, however, the experience was pretty good.

That said, their web portal is a bit clunky to navigate. For example, putting in a request, knowing where to go, or pulling up documentation or upgrading information wasn't quite as intuitive as it could be.

We are still using Veeam mostly for backup tasks. We use Zerto for site recovery.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

The installation was simple. There are lots of guides and information. There are YouTube videos. They had training classes that were free that you can go to and they have a little lab environment. Even without the assistance offered, the way you install it is very straightforward and very simple. Really anybody can run the installer and have an idea of what they're doing right out of the gate without really any training.

Deployment took around a day.

We did have a specific deployment plan and we were able to execute that in about a day. Getting all the sites set up and then the VMs replicated was fast.

We have five people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance.

We didn't use an integrator or consultant. We just did it ourselves.

There's not a direct ROI as it's being used as an insurance policy. The only time it really benefits us is when something bad happens.

It's reasonably affordable. Obviously, cheaper would always be better, however, it's not out of the expected range. We are just paying by VM. It's my understanding there are no extra fees.

I can't remember the companies off the top of my head as it's been a few years since we've done it, however, we evaluated five or ten different options that were popular at the time. Some of them were integrated with hardware. Some of them were software only.

In the end, it came down to Zerto due to simplicity. It's very simple and straightforward. It removes all the overhead of management and knowing what is active or what's the standby copy. It handles all of those pieces for you.

We're probably on the latest version or one version behind.

We very lightly use the product for very specific things. We have a couple of things that are very high data rate, very high IO, for which we cannot use traditional snapshot-based technology and we are using that to do a long-term backup.

The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We have maintained exactly what we had. It's simplified it so it's possible to have a reduction, however, we haven't done any reduction from that.

The biggest piece of advice I could give is if you want the best-in-class for failover and replication, as well as ease of management, there is no better product that I've seen so far. Whether hardware or software combinations, this has been the simplest deployment and it just works.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

Database replication is our primary use case. We don't use Zerto for backups. We use Zerto as DR at our sites.

It is deployed on-premises at several sites.

It is a good DR solution for a number of databases that we use. It is just a DR solution that works. It does that continuously. I like it. Once it works, it is set and forget.

We have used it as a test in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use the actual recovery. We haven't actually had to use it in an actual DR scenario, but we do DR testing. The switchover is pretty good.

Recovery is the most valuable feature. It has a good DR solution.

Zerto's ability to provide continuous data protection is good. It works. It has continuous availability.

It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great. 

I like that it's low maintenance; it's set and forget.

As far as replication technology goes, it is a pretty good product.

It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor. It doesn't really affect the overall functionality.

I have been using it for a couple of years.

The stability is good. There have been no major issues.

I have 12 engineers on my team. We maintain/administer Zerto to our organization.

It scales pretty well.

We have a large environment, but this actual deployment is pretty limited. It has a targeted use. We are protecting some production databases.

The support is good. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

We had another version of Zerto that we decommissioned, then we built a new one.

Zerto was already present in the company when I came onboard. We just renewed the support and built several new instances.

I was involved in the initial setup from the start. It is very complex as far as requirements go and what needs to be set out for Zerto. Once you set it up, it is fine. It works.

Back and forth, our deployment took a couple of weeks. It was deployed on different sites. We needed to set up, provision, have networks open, firewalls, and allocate dedicated storage. We also needed to install it, build it, deploy the agent on the host, and configure it.

I deployed the solution myself.

I am pretty sure my company has seen ROI.

It is a good solution. It doesn't work for everything, but for certain use cases. You can't restore your entire site with it. However, if you need to restore or replicate a certain number of production and mission-critical applications, it is a good solution for that.

I like Zerto. We have big databases, so it does take a lot of storage to replicate it, but I think it is a good solution. I would recommend it.

I would rate it as eight or nine out of 10.

We have Zerto as an emergency backup if we were to lose electricity or compute.

I purchased Zerto because I wanted to get a return to operations and to minimize the downtime.

The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover. 

Zerto is the best of breed when it comes to providing continuous data protection.

It has a number of features rolled together. So when we need to failover, it does it successfully without a lot of stuff that we have to tune underneath the scenes. We use Zerto for the short-term retention of the data.

I would rate its ease of use as an eight out of ten. It has made it a lot easier for us to failover. Usually, in the past, we had to manually go and bring things up and this automates it.

The solution decreases the time it takes and the people we need when we need to fail back or move workloads. It saves around eight hours and one person. We had started off with two to three people.

It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes but we haven't used it for that.

We haven't had something where we had to recover data using this product, but I assume it would reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery situations.

It has helped to reduce downtime in testing but we haven't had a serious issue where we had to switch over and use it.

The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed.

I have been using Zerto for about a year. 

We found Zerto to be pretty stable.

We haven't had problems with scalability.

We don't really have users. We just have data that we move over which is basically the size of the campus.

We need at least one full-time employee to run it.

It's used for all of our failovers so it's in 100% usage.

I have had a little bit of experience with their technical support. I don't have any issues with them.

The ease of use, compared to other products, is much better. Zerto is all-encompassing. 

We had to work on it for about a week to get it running the way we wanted. It took so long because of the fine-tuning. We could have set it up within three hours or something just as a test to see at work, but not necessarily do everything we wanted to do.

The time it took to sync the data up took a little bit longer.

We'll probably see ROI in around three years. 

The pricing is more expensive, but the functionality is what we wanted.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing.

We also looked at Druva. We liked the flexibility that we get with Zerto. 

You'll be happy with Zerto.

The biggest lesson I have learned from Zerto is to be patient. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

Zerto is good in terms of providing continuous data protection. We have databases that require point in time recovery capability and Zerto is very flexible in this regard, compared with some other solutions we use, such as Sybase Replication and Oracle Replication.

We do not yet use Zerto's long-term retention feature but we are planning to do so. Currently, we are exploring AWS Glacier for long-term retention, and we will see how Zerto can help with the process.

Using Zerto has helped to simplify our process. The DBS steps are very deeply involved in the case of Sybase replication. This means that it takes a lot of technical skill, time, and effort to manage Sybase replication. Compared with that, Zerto is very user-friendly.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the number of highly skilled people involved and the time it takes to complete. For example, to do a command-line restore and recovery of Sybase involves pages of steps and it requires a talented DBA. However, with Zerto, we can take care of that with an intern. Only one person is involved in the process for either case, but with Zerto, fewer skills and experience in recovery are needed.

Fortunately, we have not yet been the victim of a ransomware attack. However, I am confident that Zerto can help, should that situation occur. Similarly, since implementing Zerto, we have not had any downtime. That said, we have simulated different scenarios and our results were good.

The most valuable feature is the point in time recovery. This allows us to recover at any point in time, up to a minute or so.

Zerto is pretty user-friendly. Normally, data recovery involves a lot of DBS skills but with Zerto, it is point-and-click.

It is very important to us that Zerto provides both backup and disaster recovery in a single platform. Because of problems that people are facing, we needed to have recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for the major cloud providers. This is the primary reason that we were looking for an up-to-date and current solution.

I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files. I have not tested it yet, so I can't say for sure whether it will choke or not.

The two large clouds that we use are AWS and Azure, and compatibility with these is always important for us.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years. We are using one version back from the current one.

In terms of stability, so far it looks okay but I am not sure how Zerto will react to volume loads. We haven't had a chance to test that because we don't have such a large environment.

Scalability has been good but I have yet to see how large a file it can handle.

We have two DBAs using the product, and then we have some interns to help out.

Currently, it is running in a small network where it is backing up a couple of replicated environments. We may increase our usage in the future, as we are now just beginning to back up everything to AWS.

Zerto's technical support team is pretty knowledgeable.

Prior to Zerto, we were using Sybase replication. When Sybase was acquired by SAP, we began having trouble when we needed technical support. The reason that we started looking for a replacement product is that we used to contact technical support in California when we needed help. However, we now have to call Germany first, only to have them redirect the call to California. SAP is a mess.

I was involved in setting up the proof of concept, and I found that the initial setup was okay.

Once the PoC was complete, we went into small volume testing and then started using it after that. The deployment only took us a couple of hours.

A couple of people from our organization handled the deployment, and we had some Zerto technical reps available to answer questions. The Zerto staff are pretty knowledgeable and they answered the questions well.

Compared to the licensing fees with Oracle and SAP, we see a return on investment.

Price-wise, Zerto is fairly reasonable and I can't complain about it when we compare it against Oracle and SAP licensing.

We have not tried using any features that are outside of the standard licensing fees.

We looked into Oracle GoldenGate but it is pretty expensive and cumbersome. Sybase is better than Oracle in terms of pricing, but Zerto is cheaper.

We have not yet enabled data recovery in the cloud, but we are planning to use it. As of now, we haven't tested it. We always back things up but in terms of restoring and testing, we are behind.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is pretty user-friendly compared to Oracle and SAP. This is a good solution to start with. Once it has been implemented, I suggest moving to volume testing to see how well it handles large volumes of data.

We have never had a real situation where we were under the gun for the purpose of RTO and RPO recovery times. As such, I can't say for sure how it will behave in a real situation but we are satisfied with our tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Zerto to facilitate cloud adoption in the organization. Our product teams are migrating their VMware workloads to the cloud, and Zerto is helping with that task.

Zerto provides us with continuous data protection and it is working well for us so far. It has matched our requirements, especially in terms of compliance and security considerations. The solutions in our environment are working together to make everything achievable in terms of different certifications.

We have only been using Zerto for less than a year, and have not had much time to consider long-term data retention. However, it is our intention to use this capability in the future.

Using this product has enabled our leaders to guide the business through our transition to the cloud. It has allowed us to implement a cloud-based disaster recovery solution.

Having a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, rather than a physical one, saves us in terms of resources. I don't have exact numbers in terms of money, but I can say that in the short time that we have been using Zerto, it has saved us between 10% and 20% resource-wise, including time.

We do not have any real use cases so far, but our model shows that we will need fewer people involved when we failback or move workloads. I expect that we will require 10% to 20% fewer resources in these situations.

So far, we have not had a use case where we had less downtime because of Zerto.

The most valuable feature for us is accelerating cloud adoption, as it helps provide greater speed for disaster recovery. Ultimately, this saves us time, as well as resources.

This product is easy to use. Initially, we had some issues and hiccups but we worked with the solution engineers and were able to rectify the problems and move forward.

When we initially set up the product, we didn't know about the exact features. Some of them were discussed in different wording. It took some time to get to know the solution in general, and exactly what functions each of the features is used for. They seemed more like hidden features to us.

I have been using Zerto for close to one year.

The availability of Zerto has been good for us, so far. We have not experienced any issues with it.

Being a cloud-based solution, it can be scaled as per our requirements. I don't see any issues with it. We have three people who work with it, although not on a daily basis. They are technical analysts and product engineers.

They were more hands-on during the PoC and deploying it, and they will be involved if we have any issues.

Technical support from Zerto is good and they help us all the time.

The turnaround time is good, as well as the help that they give us in understanding and resolving problems.

We are still using our previous solution for backups. We are switching away from it because we will be able to take advantage of automation and use fewer resources.

In terms of cost, using Zerto saves us approximately 15% over our previous solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was easy to set up the PoC and the results were good. Setting it up took a few hours and when it came time to move to production, it was in terms of days.

My team was responsible for deployment.

We have seen a return on our investment in terms of time and resources.

We evaluated several other solutions prior to selecting Zerto.

We chose Zero because it is more user-friendly, and better overall.

My advice for anybody who is considering Zerto is that it's user-friendly, easy to use, and easy to deploy. So far, Zerto has been working fine for us and my team has not had any complaints.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am a cloud provider and I use Zerto to provide disaster recovery solutions for my clients.

Recently, we had an issue where one of our customers using Oracle Server experienced corruption in a database. The customer doesn't know when the issue started, so we used Zerto. We started to do a real-live failover for the machine, and we were able to determine the timestamp for the start of the issue. Prior to this, Oracle engineers tried for four hours to fix the database but did not have any luck in doing so. Ultimately, we were able to save the customer's data by using Zerto.

A few of my customers are using file-level restore but the majority of them are using the replication features for disaster recovery.

Zerto offers features for long-term data retention; however, we don't use them. The longest time that we back up data for is 30 days. At this time, I don't have any request for this from my customs, although in the future, if we have a customer that asks for it then we can provide it.

Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center.

We have a customer with an on-premises data center that replicates the environment to our cloud. One day, this customer had a water pipe burst in his data center. The entire data center was flooded and everything stopped working. We did a live failover and from that point, he could continue working but it was running from the data center in our cloud, instead. Zerto definitely saved us time in this data recovery situation.

It took the customer between four and five days to return everything back to normal onsite. During that time, he spoke with us at 9:00 AM on the first day, and after an hour, his company resumed work with our help. This reduced his downtime to one hour from approximately five days.

Performing a failback using Zerto is pretty much the same in terms of how long it takes, and how many people we require. The customer decides when to do the fallback; for example, it can be done during the night. We replicate the data at their chosen time and it avoids issues for them because they don't operate during those hours.

In a situation like a burst water pipe or a database becoming corrupt, Zerto doesn't help to reduce the number of staff involved. The reason is that when something affects the company, management, including the CEO, has to be involved. They do not deal specifically with operating Zerto but rather, they wait for things to develop. The good part is that they know that with Zerto, they have a solution, and they don't need to figure out what to do.

In terms of the number of people it takes to recover data in cases like this, there is typically one person from our company involved, and one person from our customer's company.

My customers save money using Zerto and our facilities, rather than a physical data center because they do not have to do any maintenance on the backup equipment. It is also much easier to pay one company that will do everything for them.

Using Zerto makes it easier for my clients, giving them time to work on other things. The main reason is that they don't have to maintain or upgrade their environment. Not having to implement new recovery solutions as their needs change, saves them time.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do disaster recovery.

Zerto is very user-friendly and engineer-friendly, as well. When we need to create a new Virtual Protection Group (VPG) for replication, then it is done with just a few clicks of the mouse. We can see all of the environments and we don't need to install agents on the customer's VMs.

The live failover feature is very helpful.

With regards to providing continuous data protection, it's great. Most of the time, it's about five seconds for replication.

The monitoring and alerting functionality need to be improved. Ideally, the monitoring would include the option for more filters. For example, it would be helpful if we could filter by company name, as well as other attributes.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

Zerto is a pretty stable product. We have had issues from time to time over two years, but usually, it is stable. When we have trouble then we contact their excellent technical staff.

I have quite a lot of customers that are using Zerto for disaster recovery and it is simple to scale. Our intention is to increase our usage by bringing on more customers that will replicate from their on-premises environment to the cloud.

In my company, there are five or six people who work doing the backup and recovery operations. On the client's side, they normally have one or two people that are in charge of maintaining the data center.

The size of your environment will depend on how many VMs you need to replicate. For example, if you are replicating 100 VMS then you can use a small environment. However, if you are replicating 1,000 or more VMS then you will need a stronger and larger environment, with more storage and more memory.

The technical staff is excellent and we contact them whenever we need something.

We had a customer that replicated his VM and for some reason, when we tried to do a failover test, the VM came back with an error saying that the network card was disconnected. We spoke with the Zerto technical staff and they actually implemented an ad-hoc fix for our environment. In the next Zerto version update, they released it for all their customers.

The technical support is definitely responsive and they explain everything.

I began using Zerto version 6.5 and am now using version 8. We did not use a different solution for disaster recovery beforehand.

We use Veeam for backup tasks. We looked at Veeam CDP to compare with Zerto, and Zerto is definitely better. It is more user-friendly, agentless, and the technical support is better.

The initial setup is straightforward and pretty easy to complete. It takes about an hour to deploy. During the process, you set up the Zerto server to see the whole environment. You then install VRAs on all of the hosts. In general, the management server is pretty user-friendly.

The implementation strategy changes depending on the customer. We did have a few customers that required a more extensive setup because one had an IPsec connection, and a few of them were using point-to-point connections. That's the only strategy. But with Zerto, they need to decide which VMs they want to replicate, and then we create it based on that. First, we will want to replicate the DC, the domain controllers, and then we will want the infrastructure servers, and then the database servers, and the last one is the application.

During setup, one person from our company normally works with one person from our customer's side. Only a single person is required for maintenance.

My impression is that Zerto is more expensive than other solutions, although I don't have exact numbers.

We evaluated CloudEndure and we also had Double-Take, but neither of these solutions worked well. These solutions were based on agents, which affected the customers' server performance.

In terms of usage, Zerto is a different level of experience when compared to other products. It is easier to set up and use.

With other solutions, we need to install software on the customer's server and then reboot, whereas, with Zerto, we don't need to do these things. In fact, there is no downtime on the customer's side. Depending on the customer's environment, post-installation downtime may have been as little as one minute, or more than an hour.

In situations where downtime is expected, and there is an important application like a database running, these periods need to be scheduled. Normally, downtime will be scheduled at night, after business hours. Although there may not be a disruption in work, it is an extra effort that needs to be put into the other products.

Looking ahead, I have seen that the next version of Zerto will support Salesforce replication. This could be something that is useful for my customers.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from user Zerto is that every organization should have a disaster recovery plan. My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to calculate how much it will cost in the event of downtime or a disaster, and then compare it to the cost of Zerto. Once this is done, people will opt for a disaster recovery solution.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We utilize Zerto to backup our on-prem environment to our cloud provider. We've also used it for migrations from on-prem to our cloud provider.

Our deployment model is a hybrid. We're using on-prem and also replicating to Azure.

It is used in our production environment and also our lower environment, on-prem. It's like a DR, as we're backing it all up to our cloud provider. There are a handful of servers involved, replicating and backing up.

It saves us about eight to 10 hours a month in staff time.

Another benefit is just the peace of mind that everything is backed up. We rely on the backups, that they're good backups. It's not like we have to second-guess them.

It has also helped us with our migration to our cloud provider. It's made it easier, sped up the process, and taken a lot of the guesswork out of it.

The solution has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations for our backup and recovery side by at least two people.

The most valuable features are 

• the single pane of glass
• the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform.

In addition, the RPOs and RTOs are great on it. It keeps up with things. The protection has been perfect so far when we have done our tests of spinning things up every six months or so. All our backups have come up with no issues at all. They just make great replication copies.

Zerto is also easy to use. That single pane of glass makes it very easy to check on the status of replicated items, and if there are any issues, to dig into them to fix them.

So far, it's been pretty good. I haven't had any issues. If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that.

We have been using Zerto since 2018.

So far, it's been very stable. We don't have any issue with the services or the ZVAs. They just keep trucking. There have been no stability issues at.

It's very easy to scale with it. As our environment has grown over the years, we've been able to add ZVAs to it, configure them, and they just fall right into the mix. Scaling is very easy.

Technical support has been very helpful and quick to get back with responses. Ticket turnaround time has never taken more than an hour for me to receive a response back to a general question.

We used Avamar. The primary reason we switched to Zerto was the integration with cloud providers that it provides.

I was not involved in the implementation, but I do remember that it was a pretty short implementation time. It included setting up the ZVA agents in our on-prem environment and connecting to our provider's cloud storage. The longest part of the implementation was getting the data, the initial seed or the backups, up there. But that's nothing against Zerto. Every environment will be different on that and has to get its initial copy up there. Since then, keeping copies up to date has been good. It meets up with RPOs and RTOs.

The initial implementation and getting everything set up took us about two and a half weeks. After that, to get everything that we are protecting into the cloud took us close to a month. We had to do it in stages, due to our work environment and our connections at the time. We didn't have the biggest connections, but that's more on our side, not Zerto's.

There are three people involved in maintaining Zerto for us. They're systems engineers.

Zerto is a lot easier to use than Avamar: easier management, easier setup, and the single pane of glass to watch over everything makes it better. I wouldn't say there's really a cost savings. They're probably comparable in price, but there were a lot more features and options with Zerto than in Avamar.

If you want something that's easy to set up, with a single pane of glass, and that doesn't take a backup administrator to admin, Zerto is the way to go.

The only lesson we really learned, and this has been resolved now, is that when we initially started using Zerto there were some hiccups when it came to Linux servers, hiccups that we had to work through. Support was very helpful and resolved it for us, but it made it a little bit of a manual process. In the later releases of Zerto, they've resolved those issues. They just had to work out some kinks.

We use the solution for two different data center sites. Inside the data centers we use VMware virtualization, NSX stretched VLANs and Dell servers. There are many servers, storage, virtualization, and a myriad of operating systems such as Red Hat and Windows Servers. 

We use Zerto to replicate our VMs from one site to the other, where we don't want to have to pay for two licenses of the same thing. We also do this to have high availability or to have the disaster recovery version of a piece of software. It is a benefit to be able to use Zerto to replicate that VM at the second site, and not have to power it on or anything. We know that it's always replicated on the other site. We currently use the solution for disaster recovery only but we are looking at longterm backup retention in the future.

I think it's perfect for providing continuous data protection for us, it is excellent. 

The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks. You can run a failover test for your auditors or your management. Afterwards, you can get a report on how easy it was to failover a specific application and the VMs associated with that application.

In future releases, doing backups of the environment we need to be able to do hot backups of the database. Granular based backups of the OS, versus taking a backup of the entire VMDK. Currently, I don't think we are able to do all that right now. Having an agent-based backup is a benefit because you can back up the OS files, and If you have an agent for the database, you can do a hot backup of the database and restore it. You then would have the ability to do an entire VMDK backup. I don't think that they have the ability to do a hot backup of a database itself via an agent or something similar.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have a couple hundred people using the solution within the organization. The solution is very stable, you set it up and you can forget it. When we have had issues where we lost the connectivity to a data center, we were easily able to bring up the VMs of a data center that was available using Zerto.

It's very easy to add new hosts and the VRAs get to pull it out automatically. It's very easy to scale, at more sites. We are already increasing and adding more data centers that Zerto can protect for us. We are very pleased with it.

The customer service is stellar. They always answer and they are very helpful. I have had very good relationships with the sales executives and sales engineers. If the team at the technical support cannot get an issue solved, then our pre-sales engineers will get on calls with us and help us sort through problems. They have been great.

We were using SRM, VMware's Site Recovery Manager before we switched to Zerto. We did the switch because we were impressed with the demo that was given to us. Additionally, SRM was very complicated and cumbersome.

The setup was easy and demo replication was simple too. The initial process started by us building out the VMs of the virtual machines, as per their requirements. We deployed the manager, based on all the log information of the vCenter. You then select the data storage and it installs the VRA out on your environment. Once that is done, you put together the virtual protection groups and you build out your replication site, it is very easy.

Our deployment took about a month to go through everything with three different staff members and for the maintenance, we have one technician. Make sure that we grouped everything properly together, based on the network and its functions, and how it should be brought back up etc.

I have saved days and even weeks of working time from using the solution. We are in the process right now of designing a new cloud infrastructure for one of our environments to utilize Zerto to replicate our VMs to our cloud. It is going to be a huge time saver, probably saving us a couple hundred thousand dollars. We've definitely seen some good return on investment with it. Our auditors are impressed by it. 

This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup. After the standard licencing cost there is an annual support contract, nothing that we were shocked about.

We have also used NetBackup but Zerto was much easier to set up.

When trying to think of improvements I cannot think of anything to critiques at this time because it does behave so amazingly well. I've been involved with other SRM implementations and SRM is very complicated to put together and to configure, whereas Zerto is just so easy out of the box. Overall, the solution probably has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe millions.

Some of the important lessons we have learned are you need to plan your DR carefully. That is the most important. Also, make sure that your applications are grouped together, be cognizant of the different virtual networks they go into. For example, If you have a web frontend DMZ that goes into one component, where the application and the database are in another place. You need to be careful on what networks you are sending them to at the replication site, be aware of that.

I highly recommend Zerto. I speak about the product all the time. I think that it is priceless what it does for us. 

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.