HPE Zerto Software Reviews

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.

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

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

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in DR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's pretty stable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We needed Zerto in order to provide a disaster recovery solution for the entire organization. We use it to replicate some resources on-prem and for quick recovery. We also use Azure to replicate for disaster. If we ever have a catastrophic failure or attack at our main headquarters, we could failover and run our resources in Azure. 

We don't use Zerto for backup, we use Veeam. Once the new long-term retention features are added to Zerto, then we will investigate using it for that and possibly dropping Veeam.

There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before.

We use Veeam Backup for data and not for replication so this is purely just for disaster recovery and replication. We don't use it for data backup, we're still using Veeam for that.

Zerto definitely decreases the time and people it takes when we need to failback or move workloads. The benefit of using it with the Cloud is that we don't have to maintain extra hard work or an extra infrastructure for disaster recovery. With Zerto and Azure, it can all be done essentially by one person. If we're restoring data and systems from the cloud, it can all be controlled from the Zerto interface, whether it's on-premise or in the Cloud. To move the data back, depending on the size of the disaster, if we were to have to rebuild our hardware on-premise, that would obviously require more people. But if it's just a matter of restoring data from the Cloud, it would only need one person. Whereas before, you could probably still do it with one person, but the amount of time that would take would be a lot longer. We would have had to rebuild servers to restore the data. With Zerto, we can restore entire servers from our Cloud repository and have them up and running, it would just be dependent on the speed of the internet. Zerto could easily save us days of time.

It saves us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. If we had a ransomware attack, we could have our systems available for investigation and run our environment entirely in Azure, separate from our on-prem network. With Zerto as well, we could also recover our systems to the point in time before the ransomware attack happened, ensuring that it doesn't happen again. With our resources in the Cloud, we can scan it for infections and pull it out if it's been lying dormant. The big benefit against ransomware is that we can easily just go back in time to the point before the attack.

The ability to do DR in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center has enabled us to save money. It has saved us quite a bit of money by utilizing Cloud resources, instead of buying a whole new recovery site on-premise. We did an analysis of the buy and one of the reasons why we went with Zerto on Azure is because of the amount of money that we would save over a five-year period. Based on our analysis, it saved us roughly $25,000 a year.

The one-click failover feature is very valuable because of the ease of use as well as the little to no data loss with the constant replication in journaling technologies that it has.

The one-click failover feature is really valuable to us because we need a solution that's easy to use. There's the potential that myself or other staff may not be available at the point of the disaster and it would be possible to have somebody who may not know the technology be able to initiate a failover on our behalf by simply just asking them to click a button.

The important features of having little to no loss of data are extra valuable because if we do have a failover event or an event where we need to initiate a failover for disaster, having no data loss is really important because if we were to have a disaster where we needed to initiate the failover for recovery, and if there was data loss, that's lost time from staff. It's also really hard to tell what data is lost and what has to be made up. We have certain resources here that can't afford any sort of downtime or loss of data.

Its journaling technologies are always sending replicated data up so that we can view what the recovery point objectives would be in real-time. We can see it could be a matter of six seconds to a couple of minutes, and that gives us peace of mind that things are moving constantly so that when we do have a failure, we can go back to pretty much any point in time that we want and have our systems available again.

Zerto is very easy to use, the interface makes it really easy. The wizards that are available, the how-to guides, and the support from Zerto has made it really easy to use. With little to no training, we were able to get it up and running in the test environment in under a day. The interface makes it really easy to use from using it from day to day, setting up new jobs for replications, or even restoring data.

Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement.

We have been using Zerto for around nine months. 

Zerto is very stable, we have not had any issues with it so far.

Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a very small number of machines up to a very large number of machines without any issue. We started small and they included more and more to it and I haven't had any issues. We have not had any problems scaling across sites to other sites within the organization and integrating it all together. It's as advertised that it can be in any environment of any size. It scales very well.

Only one or two people are required for the maintenance of this solution. As the manager of technology and infrastructure, I and the system administrators do the maintenance. I mostly work with it. One of my other staff works with it from time to time, but for the most part, it just does its thing and we don't really need to do a whole lot with it.

Zerto is used extensively in my company in the sense that it is our primary disaster recovery solution. It is used for servers throughout the County for all departments. Every system that we have in place relies on Zerto for DR. As servers increase, we will add those servers to Zerto, for disaster recovery purposes. It's completely integrated into our system.

Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management only because we have a small team to begin with. Our infrastructure team that I'm in charge of is only six staff. So DR and backup is one job amongst many, for all the staff here. The amount of time dedicated hasn't changed a whole lot for us.

Their support is fantastic. Anytime we've had an issue, which has been not too many, they've been very good to resolve any issues.

We also use Veeam and it is really easy to use too. They're both easy programs to use. If anyone can use Veeam, they can use Zerto. I wouldn't say Zerto's any easier or Veeam's any harder. They do different things; Veeam does back up really well. If you need a backup solution, Veeam is far cheaper. Whereas Zerto is fantastic at disaster recovery and replication, but when it comes to backup, that's not really what it's made for. Moving forward that may change. But Zerto is definitely a much costlier program compared to Veeam but it does a lot more.

Zerto itself was straightforward to set up. There was good documentation available and we utilized some of their engineering services to help set up as well. For the size of the products and the complexity that it can do, the actual setup and operations over this are quite easy. It took a couple of days, which included getting everything in Azure set up properly.

The implementation strategy that we did was to create the on-premise environment for a dedicated network, virtual machines, and the installation. Then Azure would become our disaster recovery site in the event that we needed it if we had a disaster on-premise, we could failover all of our services and servers that we needed to in Azure. Then our client computers would connect to them while in the Cloud while be prepared for recovery on-premise.

We utilized a third-party consultant to assist with setting up our Azure environments and Zerto technicians helped us set up Zerto on Azure. Our experience was really good. There were some challenges and there was lots of learning to do, but overall, the experience was good. The staff from Zerto were exceptionally good. They really know the product well, helped quite a bit, and provided instructions and training on how to use it outside of that.

I think that return on investment will come in the event that we do have a disaster that we need to recover from. We have seen some ROI from Zerto by moving virtual machines between data centers, where that has saved us a lot of time. The technology not only is useful for disaster recovery, but also for server maintenance and moving resources between posts and impairments. Before, it could take hours to copy virtual machines, even days. We use Zerto to move resources around with little to no downtime in a lot quicker time. So we were able to save staff time and resources by using Zerto.

It wouldn't have cost us too much with the government. It's hard to equate a lot of downtime to dollars and cents for us because it's more so around staff time and convenience. We have long-term care homes that we need that are up all the time. And any of those maintenance windows we usually schedule after hours. So it's more of an inconvenience for IT staff to work overnight instead of during regular business hours.

Zerto is not cheap; however, it is worth the cost. The licensing model is easy. You buy based on the amount of virtual machines you want to protect and go from there. Even though it is not a cheap program, you do get what you pay for, but overall it became cheaper than maintaining a separate data center.

We looked at Cohesity, Rubrik, and Commvault. Veeam does replication as well, but it doesn't do it nearly as well. We looked at a few other solutions from Dell. We went with Zerto because it had all the disaster recovery functions that we needed, the ability to recover within minutes with minimal to no data loss, and is integrated well with Azure.

I would recommend doing the free proof of concept exercise with Zerto pre-sales engineers and work with them to discuss your environment and then review their recommendations on implementation. From time to time do the free training. I highly recommend doing that. Get your hands on this software and try it out first before doing the production implementation.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be hard.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. I don't rate many things ten, but Zerto offered me exactly what they're upfront with, what it will do, and it's doing exactly what they said it would do.

We use Zerto for DR purposes, we replicate what's critical to continue business. We replicate it from our headquarters to another state, a DR site. If something happens to the headquarters where we are located we could run the continued business from the DR site with Zerto.

It improved the way we function because we know that in the event of a disaster, we can easily recover our state of being in a rather quick amount of time. If there's malware, for example, we can go back to a point in time, up to five seconds before the malware started, and start production from that point on, undoing all the damage that the malware did. The ability to do that is a very good feature. It has replication and DR, but at the same time, if something happens with malware and it compromised your backups and compromised your offsite remote copies, you have that third option of saying, "We'll go to Zerto and see if we can reverse back from that point." That's pretty comforting.

If we need to fail back on work we would absolutely use Zerto for that. We'd probably do that first before we tried the backups. It's easier to do that than to try to look for the backups. 

Zerto decreases the amount of time spent trying to get everything back online. That's the most important part. If something happened, I could just go back. It would take me around 15 minutes to locate something and launch it fairly quickly. If you're doing it from a backup, you're probably going to look for a good backup, launch it, then it's got to set up. So you're looking at an hour, maybe, if you're lucky. It's a big difference.

We once had a server and there was some software and one of the controllers in the software wouldn't boot up and we did not have a copy. It was a brand new server, so we didn't have a backup copy of it just yet. We used Zerto to go back. It was in Zerto, but it wasn't on backups yet. We were replicating it just in case and we used that to restore the server back. I called support who walked me through it fairly quickly. The whole thing took around 15 to 20 minutes. It was easy. If we had used a different solution, it would have taken us an hour or maybe two. We would have needed to find the backup and then mount it. We would then launch code or a bunch of series of Wizards. Zerto is always running so if we need to get something, we just highlight, and then we go to more, and whatever we want to do, it's right there. We don't have to turn it on. We don't have to get it going. It's always running. Backups are in a stopped state, so we would have to get it going first, then look for something, then mount it, and then do whatever we're going to do. There are four steps there, versus with Zerto where it's, "Oh, it's in this VPG," go to more, it gives you all the actions you could do, clone, delete, copy and you just do it.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery because it's only two people who manage the Zerto platform. It's mostly me. I do about 80% to 90% and then 10% is my supervisor. He's more into the meetings anyway. We require two people.

The replication is the most valuable feature. It's almost like a tape recorder. You can rewind if you need to, if something bad happens. You can rewind the tape and your production begins where your tape left off. Where you want it can be replayed for such a purpose.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. For replication purposes, it's definitely better than Veeam. Veeam doesn't do as good a job as Zerto does when it comes to replication. The other alternative would be to just have backups somewhere. But even with backups, you lose a lot of time because you have to set it all up. With Zerto, you failover, you just click a couple of buttons and you run from the other location.

It's very easy to use. Every morning I go into the dashboard and I can tell the health of the VPG groups. If there's a problem or anything, I'll see it in the active alerts. So the dashboard is pretty simple. There's a status that tells you if the RPOs are falling behind, or from what you set it to, there's a reminder that tells you when to do the failover test. I like that. If I'm going to add a server to a VPG, I just go to the VPG section of the menu, find our group, select it, and then edit it, go to VMs, and there it is. It gives it to me side by side. It tells me what is unprotected on the left, and then this is protected on the right. I can move from unprotected state to protected state or I can remove something that's in a protected state to an unprotected state. It always tells me at the dashboard from the bottom, how many licenses I have, and how many I'm using. I don't go over my license count where I might not be protected. It's pretty easy.

We've never had a situation where we had to go to Zerto for downtime. It's just protection, but we haven't had the situation where we've had to failover. Hopefully, we never do. It's like car insurance. You want car insurance, but you don't want to get into an accident.

The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere. It's prolific. So with Zerto, you have to find it within the Zerto application. Hopefully, as they grow, it'll be more out there on the net. Same thing with Microsoft. If you look for a problem with Microsoft, you're going to find millions of articles on it, maybe it's just because they've just been around for so long. I'm hoping that one day Zerto is just as prolific and can be found everywhere.

I have been using Zerto for two years. 

Zerto is very stable. There are very few errors. I just don't see any errors. The only one time we had an issue with it was with journals. We were filling up too much and we called support and they walked us through it. We found out that we were replicating a temporary drive and it's not good practice to back up temporary drives because they constantly change when it's not even necessary. So we removed the temporary drives and we never had that problem again.

I'm a system administrator.

If you were doing recovery from a backup, you'd probably want at least two people looking through backups quickly to speed up locating them. You might need somebody to set up a mount server to mount the backups on. You can get away with three people but you might need three depending on how urgently you want to get going. It depends.

For DR management, if I was with another solution I would require more people. If you have a Dell EMC, they have storage administrators that that's all they do. And so that's a dedicated position. I'm a system administrator, which means that I do the storage, I deal with the servers. It allows me to do a lot of things, not just one thing.

Scalability is excellent. We have one here, we have the one there. I know we could add another ZVM, another location, or another DR site if we wanted to. That's been in the talks for a long time. It's on pause now because of COVID-19. But if at some point we decide that we want to add a secondary DR site that is geographically opposed to where we are now, then we could replicate one, two, and three at the same time. It's got good potential to be increased.

We have about 20 to 50 servers in Maryland and we replicate all the critical, essential ones that would be required to continue to run business to North Carolina. Everything is virtual, which helps us out. We have one Zerto virtual manager here, we have a Zerto virtual manager in North Carolina, and we do failover every six months just to make sure that it works. As a matter of fact, we have a failover test coming up that we have a test of failover to make sure that it's continuing to work.

The support is very good. I've used them before. When we had the journal issues, it was easy to resolve the issue.  We've done upgrades on the versions and they've always been very responsive. If I do a P1, which is critical or they do a P4, which is just information, they respond fairly quickly. 

We've used Veeam for backup. Before Veeam, we used Unitrends, which is even worse. It didn't work. 

Zerto's good for DR replication. I don't think anybody does it better. Veeam is good for short-term backups. It doesn't do well with the replication part at all - even they say it. I've spoken to reps who agree and say that Zerto's better at it than they are.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You set up a ZVM here and there and tell it the direction you want it to replicate in to. You can create an EPG to the journal that goes attached.

Because we were setting it up in the middle of things, it took around one month. 

We did have a strategy of how to put those servers here, build servers there, and IP addresses we were going to assign to it. We did have some sense of where we were going to put things.

We used the reseller who helped us with the deployment. They were great. It was easy. No problems with it.

We bought it through CTI.

I think we do see ROI. We need a defensive posture to protect ourselves.

Pricing is okay. You don't use Zerto to put all of your servers in Zerto. The purpose of it is you take what is absolutely critical to continue running your business, whatever servers are in your business continuity plan. Those are the ones that you put in Zerto. Then you'll be fine in the licensing because if you just buy 200 licenses or 300 licenses and you're backing up a utility server or any server that's not essential, then your bosses are going to think you're spending too much money. But if you just zero in on what's critical and back that up with licensing, you'll be fine.

There are no additional costs that I'm aware of. We have the licensing fees that come up and then that's it, as far as I know.

We had a couple of proposals. We had the one from Veeam but we realized really quickly that it doesn't work for replication. The other alternative would have been to save the backups to the offsite location, have servers there, and load backups at the server location. That takes a lot of manual labor so we decided Zerto would the best option.

We don't know what we're going to do for long-term retention. We use it for DR purposes only. But we are still looking at the long-term retention and what to do with it.

I would say if you're looking for true DR protection with minimal recovery time, then Zerto is probably going to be the one. If the objective is minimum time to recover, then this is the product you need to buy. If you want to spend time trying to set up again in a disaster, then there are a lot of things out there and for ransomware too. We have about a five-minute window where once data is compromised beyond five minutes, it's useless. So we need to keep the window to about five minutes. Because of that, Zerto is really going to have to do that at this point in a cost-effective way to recover. 

I like Zerto. You learn different things as you use it more and more, so you become more competent with it as you use it. I know that if you do have an issue, as with most other vendors, the easiest solution is to provide the logs as soon as you can, and then they're better prepared to respond if you do it that way.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. 

We use Zerto for data migrations. We use it to move our virtual machines from one location or data center to another and eventually, we then switch that over to DR from our facility in one state to another. It's for the migration of existing VMs.

Zerto has improved my organization by allowing us to do several VM moves. It simply allows us to bring a server back up on the new side, which looks like a reboot of a server. It's a virtual move to the new stage, so it goes from existing VM host to new VM host on the other side.

It has reduced downtime for the servers that we migrate over. By how much is a hard number to put because we do a big group of them together, so we're able to group the move as opposed to doing more one-offs.

The amount the downtime would cost my company would strictly depend upon which servers we were moving because some don't really cost the business. There are others that would cost the business for having to be up as much as possible, 24/7.

The Move feature is the most valuable feature because it allows us to move the VM from our old environment to our new environment with minimal disruption.

It's extremely easy to use. It's pretty self-explanatory as you run through setting up your VPGs for your protection groups and then to do a migration or a test failover.

Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have.

We have been using Zerto for three months. 

So far, the stability has been great. We have not had any issues with that.

Only two of us work on it and we're both system engineers.

We do not need dedicated staff for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

It's being used to move a total of around a couple of thousand VMs, so I don't have any issues with scalability.

Currently, we aren't planning to expand capacity because we have a total of around 500 agents to protect, so until we get the true DR, we will have to evaluate if we need to expand that. We will primarily only be using it for DR and any server migrations we may need to do from one system to another.

Their technical support has been very good and prompt to get back to us with answers.

We would either use a Veeam or VMware solution, but we haven't had a real DR product outside of Veeam.

We find Zerto to be the most beneficial right now in helping us migrate from one data center to another data center for the testing environment. And for future capabilities, for a true DR scenario.

I would say it's a lot more simple to set up and maintain than VMware and Veeam.

Replacing these legacy solutions has saved us on the costs needed to manage them.

The implementation was really straightforward and easy. We worked with one of their support engineers and we got it up and running really quickly. The deployment took around one hour. 

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. It was about getting the server manager and server up and then walk through the installation steps. We followed their guidelines.

I'm not sure if I can put a dollar amount on ROI but the biggest return is time to actually get things set up and then begin to migrate virtual machines over to the new environment.

I'm not 100% sure about the pricing because I wasn't as much part of the pricing part of it, but it fell within our budget. Its features and price are good compared to the options we were looking at.

We also evaluated Rubrik and a solution from Dell. The main advantage that we found was that Zerto fit our current need for migrating from one environment to another better than others, and its good standing in the community where there are a few products.

My advice would be to plan out your Move groups and work with your business to get everything validated so you can back up on the other side.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We have servers in Houston and we have servers at a DR site, we need to be able to make sure that they're replicated in some form or fashion. That's what we use Zerto for, to replicate between our primary site and our DR site.

The biggest improvement for us was going from a possible 24-hour lag on our backups to real-time lag. With the hurricanes here in Houston, buildings losing power, and so on, it was nice having the ability to just go flip a switch and we're live with current data as opposed to we're live with what happened yesterday.

Zerto has helped to decrease the number of people involved when we need to failback workloads. It's a much smaller number. It's time-consuming because of the way it works, but it's not overly overbearing. Instead of taking a better part of the day or two to get everything up and running, it really only takes us three or four hours. It has also decreased the number of people we need. It would take three or four of us to bring up servers, make sure they're all running, test them, and all that stuff. Now, it takes one person to bring them all up and then there's a couple of us to test it, so we have half or less of what it used to take. 

We've never had a ransomware issue. The reasons for our failover has typically been natural disaster caused.

Pretty much all of the features are valuable. The biggest thing we use it for is replication, so the ability to set up our virtual server, set it to replicate, and Zerto handling everything else is the biggest feature that we like.

The continuous data protection is great. We love it because we can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product.

We currently don't use it for long-term retention. It's something we may look at in the future, but that's not the product we're using for that.

Zerto is very easy to use once everything's set up, which isn't difficult. It takes a little bit of time to make sure all the network stuff is all set up properly, but once everything's set up, using it day to day is very simple.

Zerto has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. Our DR is to a physical data center. We don't put our data in the cloud.

For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool.

We have been using Zerto for five years. 

Stability is great. The only downtime we have is during upgrades and patches. I really haven't had any problems with the platform or stability.

The time it takes to update or patch depends on the size of the patch. Major upgrades take a little bit longer, but I mean, it's typically a couple of hours at the most. It's not a huge thing.

Scalability has been great. It continues to grow as we grow. I haven't had any problems with it.

Zerto is being used 100% across our environment. 

We've got about 11 servers doing backups in the 20 to 25 terabyte range most of the time.

Only I work with Zerto in my company. 

The two times that we've contacted technical support, we didn't have any problems. They've been helpful. They made sure we got the issue resolved and did very well with it.

We previously used Veeam. We switched because of real-time backups. Veeam was a point-in-time backup. We said, "You're going to back up at this time." It took a snapshot and backed it up. Zerto just continually backs it up and makes sure that we're currently up to date and matching the server at your primary.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery to the DR site. We still use Veeam for our backup disk-to-disk local for file backups.

Once Zerto is set up and running it is much more hands-off. You don't really have to do anything. You just log in to check, make sure everything's going well, and you're pretty much done. With Veeam, I feel like I have to check in a little bit more often, make sure the backups are running properly, making sure all the files are there, and everything like that. There is a little bit more checking to do on a regular basis.

I don't know if we would have failed over with Veeam because of the amount of time it took and coming back online at the primary site. I don't know that we would have failed over, which would have been probably five or six days of downtime. If we had failed over, we'd probably have lost two or three days in one direction, and probably another two or three days coming back to the primary.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a little while to make sure we had everything connected right, and that it was going to the right place, but it's no more difficult than any other setup for something like this. I didn't find it difficult at all.

If you don't include seeding and you only include the setup and deployment, it only took us a day or two of planning and then another day of actually implementing it. The seeding took a while, but that's to be expected.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we were using a different product back then, which wasn't as up to date and live. We were just backing up at night, so we had a nightly snapshot that was being transferred to our DR site. Our strategy with Zerto was to get us to more of a real-time backup solution at the DR site and make sure everything was good. That was the entire purpose of going with Zerto.

We used a third-party integrator for the deployment. We used Centre Technologies and they were great. We've used them for other stuff and we didn't have any problems with it and never have.

The one time we had the failover and run at the DR site, instead of having two or three days of downtime, we really had less than one day of downtime. If you measure that in how much money we were able to make that day, it's around $200,000 to $300,000.

We are on the lowest license because we don't exceed the number of servers for the base license, so I don't have a lot of information about licensing. The price of it was comparable, if not better than what we were paying for Veeam. I have no problem with the pricing at all.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing. 

Make sure you know how long it's going to take to do your initial seeding. If you've got a lot of data, and you're doing it over a pretty good distance, just make sure your pipe is big enough for the initial seeding. Once the seeding's done, pipe size doesn't matter, but the initial seeding can take a good amount of time over a small-ish pipe if you're replicating a lot of data.

For our largest servers to seed can take a full week or to 10 days for one server, for our large file server to seed is about seven terabytes, but we don't have a huge pipe at our DR site. We negotiated to increase the pipe size temporarily while we were doing the seeding, and that reduced the time drastically on how long it took to seed. I can't really give a number or what to look for. I would just have that conversation with Zerto about how long a certain pipe is going to take. How long is it going to take to seed using whatever pipe size based on the amount of data that they have.

Make sure all of your notifications are set up well when it fails. It takes a little tweaking and making sure that everything is set up right, but when you want to make sure you're notified if you get outside your SLA on how long the backups are trailing, making sure all that's set up properly is key.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We use Zerto for disaster recovery data replication from our headquarters to an offsite data center at another location.

It has replaced all of my legacy backup solutions.

The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location. So if we were to have a disaster, it takes about five seconds right now if I look at it. If we were to have a disaster, we would not only have current data, but we'd also be up and running within hours at our offsite data center, rather than days if we had a tape backup solution.

We have begun using it for longterm retention. We also replicate our file server. Our file server has archive or historical data that we have to restore occasionally. And restoring from long term retention is applicable to those types of scenarios, versus the streaming of the data, the real-time data. The longterm retention allows us to restore from further back in time. Real-time is more for recent changes to the data, and the longterm retention is for if we have to restore from further back.

It provides continuous data protection. It has been extremely effective. I've done failover testing, and the data is accurate and current. It works.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is very intuitive. The graphical user interface of the application, both for monitoring VPG replication, longterm retention success, the configuration of VPG for longterm retention, and the analytics feature is intuitive and allows you to essentially analyze any changes to your environment. All of that requires some training but is not incredibly complex. It's presented in a very easy to use format. 

Zerto dramatically decreases the amount of time it takes to do a failover. I can essentially do it all by myself and I'm one person, I don't really need help. It allows me to restore our environment fully in a matter of seconds, literally. I can do that on my own from my desk very easily and with no outside help. 

Compared to other products, I would praise the intuitiveness of the product. But I think that can always be improved. The intuitiveness of the graphical user interface, while it is very solid and I don't have issues navigating it. I would say that it can always be improved.

I have been using Zerto for around three years. 

The stability is very solid. It just runs. It has not crashed or had issues. So long as you stay on top of the versions of the application and you have it installed on reliable hardware, you're going to be just fine.

It can scale into the cloud. I know it has that capability, but I have not done that yet.

It's essentially myself and I have one junior person that uses the application, but it's mostly myself.

It's used for all of our mission-critical servers. Not every single one of our servers, but probably about a third of our total servers.

I do not have plans to increase usage. 

The tech support is top-notch. I have an engineer who I work with on a regular basis that communicates with me anytime there is an issue. He has worked side by side with me on any issues, questions, and implementations that I have wanted to accomplish. They by far go above and beyond more than any of my other vendors and I have quite a few so that says a lot about them.

We previously used Asigra. We switched because of the cost, limitations, and complexity.

When we decided to go with Zerto, it was imperative that it provided both backup and DR in one platform. Granted, we didn't take advantage of it for a while but that's entirely my own fault. It was very important to have that functionality.

It was initially set up by a third party. But since then, I've had to re-set it up and it was pretty easy. It wasn't very complicated. It was quick. There were instructions that we followed pretty closely and there were no issues, so it was straightforward. There were a handful of steps, but nothing overly complex. The deployment took around 30 to 45 minutes. 

We haven't had a need to use it in an actual live disaster scenario, but we have that capability, which we did not before. But if we had to use it, it would save us a tremendous amount of money. Tremendous.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. 

We also evaluated Veeam.

It has not saved us time in data recovery situation due to ransomware just because we thankfully haven't had any issues. I've done some testing and in those types of situations, it would be greatly beneficial. But I have not had any of those situations currently.

At this time it has not helped to reduce downtime in any situation.

We don't have it replicated in the cloud at this time so it has not saved use money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center.

I would recommend Zerto to anybody considering it. 

My advice would be to make sure that after implementing the product, go through and accomplish the training labs so you know how to use a product really well, develop a disaster recovery plan in the event that you should need to use the product, and work closely with your Zerto engineer to ensure that the implementation fits your business needs.

The biggest lesson I have learned is how valuable real-time replication of data can be in the event of a disaster and how valuable that functionality is in the event of a disaster. It has the potential to save the company many days' worth of lost business.

If I could rate it an 11 (out of 10), I would. But we'll go with 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.