HPE Zerto Software Reviews

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.

We protect about 15 virtual machines. We use Zerto to replicate them from our home office in Pennsylvania to our co-lo facility in Arizona. Our main data center is in our Pennsylvania office, but if that office were to go down, we would use this as a DR solution so we could run our company out of Arizona.

When I started with the company, we didn't have a disaster recovery option. If our office were to have gone down, our company would pretty much have ceased to work. Having implemented Zerto, now we know that if there's a power issue or some kind of facility issue at our home office data center, we can run everything that's protected by Zerto out of Arizona.

The most valuable feature is the ability to spin up a copy of a virtual machine which is a complete copy, within minutes.

I also enjoy the Analytics, which is something they added recently. They tell me all about my virtual machines and what kind of data we're pushing back and forth. I've been very impressed with Zerto Analytics.

The only time I ever have an issue is because there's a virtual server on each host in our environment. If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable.

I've been using Zerto for between a year-and-a-half and two years.

It's extremely stable. I've never had any real issues with it. When there are issues, it seems to recover eventually, so I don't really have any problems with it.

It's very scalable. As long as you have the licensing, you can add more virtual machines or more VPGs, which are virtual protection groups, to the license. As long as you have the licenses, you can protect the whole environment and add and remove virtual machines from Zerto as you want.

We have 15 virtual protection groups which protect 15 virtual machines at this time. Because of the licensing costs we couldn't go crazy. We have a total of about 60 or 70 virtual machines, but we only needed to protect the critical ones. We're using 12 of those 15 licenses.

We don't have plans to increase usage of Zerto at this point because these are the critical servers. If we add more critical servers that need to be up in case of an outage at our home office, we may add more. But this 15 has covered us.

Their technical support is good. Just like any technical support, it's all based on the severity of the case. I've never had any outage cases, so I have never had to sit on the phone or wait for them to get back to me. 

I opened two cases with them and they got back within a reasonable amount of time. Both times, they knew exactly what the problem was and how to fix it, just from the details I left them in the case notes.

They also have a nice option where you can submit a case, or enable remote support, right from the interface. The support's pretty nice because they can actually look at logs, once you give them remote access right into your environment. That's very useful. And they're very knowledgeable.

We didn't have a previous solution. We selected Zerto because the RPO is extremely low, so you can get that server back up almost immediately. That was a huge thing.

Also, the ability to do failover tests, where you can test your environment, but not have it impact your production environment, was huge. 

Those two features were the main selling points for us to pick up Zerto.

The initial setup was very straightforward, very easy. We set up a virtual machine at both locations, which are both Windows, and then installed the Zerto software and gave it credentials to connect into our environments. It did the rest for us. Once it was initially set up, we just had to figure out which virtual machines we wanted to protect and which way: did we want it to copy from our data center over to the co-lo, or back to our data center from the co-lo. They walk you through step-by-step with wizards. It's incredibly easy to set up.

Because there's a lot of data initially to sync over, the deployment took about a week in total. The initial setup only took a couple of hours, but then you have to wait for all that replication to sync.

We didn't have an implementation strategy for Zerto. Because we didn't have a previous solution, we didn't have any migration to do. We just paid for the license, got it installed, and rolled with it.

I did it myself.

Technically there are four users who have access to it in our company. I'm the main administrator. The other ones are guest administrators and they have a little less access than I do. But nobody else really logs into it except me, unless there's an issue and I'm not there. But as the main administrator it's really all on me.

We have seen return on our investment with Zerto, absolutely. Just to have an option for disaster recovery in case our main data center goes down — which can happen, because we don't have a generator or anything in our home office — is a type of return. Not just IT, but everybody in the company from the C-suite, was happy that we have a disaster recovery option now.

First of all, you should figure out which virtual machines are critical and how many licenses you may need before you start getting prices. You don't need to go crazy if you only have a handful of servers that need licensing. 

Zerto sells licensing in bundles or packages, so I wouldn't go crazy and buy 100 licenses when you only need 30. Figure out what you need before you get your licensing, because it can get expensive.

We have Veeam which we use for backup and I know they have replication, so we looked into that, but it just wasn't as feature-rich or as quick to restore or bring up a VM as this was. We hadn't heard about Zerto really until we went to a conference in Philadelphia. They told us about it so we looked into it and it seemed like the best option at the time. We did look at maybe one or two other options, but this was the one that looked like the best option for us.

The biggest lesson from using Zerto is the failover capability and the testing capability. Those are two very useful things. If somebody calls me and they need to test something in a test environment, I can use the test failover copy of Zerto to bring up that virtual machine, or machines, and test things without affecting production. The other thing that is impressive is that you really can bring up a virtual machine almost immediately.

I would definitely give it a 10. I have no problems with it. I'm very happy with it.

My primary use case is doing demos and testing to make sure that Zerto is going to work for our customers. I test it mainly for disaster recovery and backup.

We've tested with VMware, Zadara, and AWS.

My clients found the DR feature to be the most valuable. It's something they deal with daily from a virtual machine using VMware, Amazon, or Azure.

Zerto absolutely helped to reduce downtime. My customers can bring up their machine somewhere else, and they can test on it.

Zerto's speed of recovery is very fast and efficient whenever I tested it.

Zerto added the backup feature, but it's not quite up to speed yet when you compare it with the backup capabilities of other solutions out there.

I've used Zerto off and on for about a year and a half.

The stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems.

Zerto can be scaled to any number of servers that you need.

My customers have used Zerto's technical support and had no problems with it.

My clients loved Commvault from a backup side of things, but Commvault just didn't do the DR right for them. It was not quick real-time DR. They brought in Zerto, and it worked phenomenally for their production systems.

From a backup perspective, Commvault is really good, but from a DR perspective, Zerto is way better. It's much quicker and easier to use, and it works right out of the box.

My customers said that though they had to pay for it, they were glad they bought it because Zerto works. It's got really great ROI coming from that perspective.

The licensing model is good. The price is a little bit expensive, but for what customers get on it, it tends to pay for itself. However, if more and more companies start to improve, then Zerto may need to look at their pricing and make it a little better.

We evaluated Veeam, Cohesity, and RackWare. Zerto is by far the best disaster recovery product out there.

You should set it up, test it on a few machines, and also test it in multiple environments. Most people have multiple clouds, so make sure you try it with VMware, AWS, etc. Also, decide whether you want to do all your critical tasks with Zerto and fully plan your DR as the top-level. Determine what is most important and then scale it down to the least important. You can then implement Zerto from that perspective.

Overall, I would rate Zerto at nine on a scale from one to ten.

For all the most important applications, we are using Zerto as a hot site in case something were to go on with our on-prem data center-based applications. We can immediately resort to Zerto as a failover.

It's deployed for replication from our data center into the public cloud.

The most important thing is the mean time to restoration. When anything goes wrong, we should be able to rely on the failover data that is available, and we should be able to restore it as quickly as possible. We have been able to reduce that mean time to restore the data pretty significantly with Zerto. It's gone from a few hours to a few minutes.

There are two things that are keeping us with the solution:

1. It does a very good job of keeping the data in sync at all times. 
2. In the event of a failover or in the event of a contingency, we are able to retrieve the data very quickly without any issues.

Both of these points are valuable to us because we have application data and it means we keep the data in sync. It is very important for us to know exactly where we left off in the event of any disaster or contingency. We can always rely on, or resort to, the data that we have as a backup or a failover. Also, in the event of a contingency, or even for doing a mock contingency exercise, the speed of retrieval of data and the speed of getting back up and running — minimizing the downtime — is important. That's where the second feature comes into play.

There are two areas which I would recommend for improvement. One is when we are trying to upgrade any virtual machines, we have to stop the virtual machines that have been replicated in Zerto and then upgrade or update to the virtual machines onsite. Instead of having to do it manually, there should be some way of automating that particular function.

And when it comes to AWS failover, the documentation has a lot of scope for improvement. It's come a long way since we implemented it, from the scantiness of documentation that was available to do a failover into AWS or recover from AWS, but they could still do a much better job of providing more details, how-to's, tutorials, etc.

In terms of additional features that I would like to see included in the next releases, if they could provide us some kind of long-term storage option, that would be the best thing. Then it could be a storage and a failover solution combined into one.

I have been using Zerto for two-and-a-half years.

It's a very stable solution.

It scales very well, in terms of the data size and the number of sites that we want to add on. It has scaled very well, at least in the last two releases.

We have plans to increase usage, but as it is we are using it for about 75 percent of the data at this point. The balance of the data will come onboard by early next year.

We have about 25 people using Zerto, and they're mostly database and storage administrators, infrastructure people, and security people. 

We have not used the technical support. One thing I can say is that they have a very friendly team of engineers. If you have a problem, they are at your beck and call. You can call them and get it resolved.

We were using another solution but I don't want to name it. The primary reason we switched was the ability to restore the. Our main goal was not only to have good replication of data, but to be able to restore the data as quickly as possible in the event of any contingency, whether planned or unplanned. 

From that standpoint, when we put Zerto against the existing product, what took us a few hours in that product took us a few minutes with Zerto. That was primarily the goal. Even though this product was a little more expensive than what we had prior to going with Zerto, we still went ahead with Zerto.

The initial setup is very straightforward compared to a lot of others. The user interface is very simple and very intuitive. It goes one step at a time so you can logically follow through the steps to set it up. Whether it's a small site or a big site, it doesn't really matter.

Overall our deployment took about two weeks. We had a detailed project plan, as we always do with any new products or projects that we come up with.

It doesn't require any full-time staff to deploy and maintain the solution. Once you turn on the process, all that somebody needs to do is just monitor the schedule and see whether it's doing things the way it has been programmed.

We have absolutely seen return on our investment with Zerto. We do mock disaster recovery exercises and, in every such exercise since we've gone ahead with Zerto, we've been able to restore the data within a few minutes, very easily, without any business loss. That gives us the confidence to say that, even in the case of a real disaster, we should be able to restore the data.

We didn't evaluate any other options.

Know your use case and then do a thorough proof of concept with your use case to see whether the solution works for your environment and your specific use case. Have a well-defined project plan and negotiate your way with the vendor.

The biggest lesson our organization has learned in using Zerto is that you should understand the product very well. You should understand what the product is capable of doing and leverage the options and features that are available in the product to the optimal extent. 

We use Zerto for replication to a DR site of Windows and Unix machines. We like having a testable solution which does not interfere with the performance on our production machines. It has an included feature allowing assignment of a specific LAN or IP address to segregate the machine while testing. We are replicating 56 machines, totaling more than 30 TB, but compressing at 70 percent for space savings. We use the email alerts as a way to monitor replication status. This helps in off hours alerting for potential problems.

Testing and auditing are required at our organization. Zerto has saved a tremendous amount of time in performing these tasks. I am alerted every six months to retest each protection group. This setting is customizable. All past testing reports are retained and available upon demand. It has also added assurance in recovering servers and/or files. Being able to run tests on a working machine is beneficial. Being able to group virtual machines in order to recover all of them to an exact point in time is a definite benefit.

The mobile application is very useful as a real-time monitoring and reporting tool. When management asks the status of our VM backup and recovery, an easy way to answer is to display the status on the real-time Zerto application on a mobile phone or on a local computer browser.

The Zerto Analytics tool helps predict future storage needs by tracking trends in space, journal size, and I/O rate. These are reportable statistics making quantifiable tracking easy and accurate. It is nice the see developing trends. 

Having a web interface simplifies access by other system administrators.

Certain areas were designed and work fine for VMware but are under development for Hyper-V. Eventually, all features will work for both platforms. Zerto support is very responsive when those questions arise. 

There is a comprehensive online training program which is a good start to using the application. But nothing can take the place of actually using the product in your own environment. 

The online search for solutions is very large. This is good, but also bad, as there are solutions present but you have to be diligent to find the answer you need.

I have been using this solution for more than three years. My organization utilizes Hyper-V instead of VMware. One big advantage of Zerto is its hardware agnostic. I have used various models of arrays and servers from Dell EMC and HPE with no issues from Zerto.

It picks up nicely where it leaves off (in the case of a reboot).

It easily grows at whatever pace is needed.

In the few cases that I have had, every one was dealt with quickly and by support staff who knew what they were doing.

We still use our previous solution because it creates a backup of both physical and virtual machines. However, there was an impact on performance running a backup on a running machine.

There is a slight learning curve when setting up, but nothing overwhelming for a good administrator.

Work with your local representative on running a live test to see if the solution fulfills your needs.

We use Zerto as a robust failover and replication solution.

Currently we replicate about 50-55 VMs to our DR site. We have run multiple test failovers, and have even done a full-scale, full company REAL failover.  Zerto worked flawlessly. 

We use Zerto to make sure that our primary Server farm is replicated and protected in case of a failover.

Zerto gives us peace of mind. It is also extremely easy to use and very intuitive. We don't have to worry about what would happen if our server room were to be damaged or our building destroyed. We always have that big red button available to failover to our DR site which Zerto does flawlessly and easily. We also have peace of mind with their Technical Support, which has always been nothing but stellar for us!

I love all the features really.

The fact that the interface is so intuitive is wonderful. The setup and customization of VPGs are great too. They allow you to customize all of the IP information and even the MAC (if you wish) for any and all VMs, allowing you to change the IP or Gateway, or whatever for any VM you might failover.

It is incredibly granular and I really appreciate that. Zerto has also caused us to organize our datastores in a better fashion that makes sense so that they are by priority and not just random.

I have brought this up to support before, but it would be really nice to have the option to "roll back" a particular VM to a previous time in the past if it were to become damaged, compromised, or infected. Zerto does not allow this. It's all or nothing, so you must roll back the entire VPG. You cannot roll back a single VM unless that VM is ALONE in a VPG all by itself.

It would also be nice if they could find a way to make it where one VM does not impact the entire journal history of the VPG. I do not understand why a single VM with mass amounts of changes should impact the journal history of the entire VPG. Although this has never caused me problems, it is an annoyance for sure.

We have been using this solution for a little over two and a half years.

Zerto is literally one of the most stable solutions we have. If we have any kind of bounce, drop, or failure on our fiber line to our DR site, Zerto quickly recovers and catches everything up as soon as the failure is remedied. 

It is incredibly scalable and easy to use. I think that's what makes it so valuable and attractive, especially to those who do not have a DR solution. 

Support is VERY important, and Zerto knocks it out of the park!

Every time I have called Zerto support, the person I have spoken with has been well informed and knew their stuff. Even if they couldn't readily solve my issue, they quickly escalated to someone that could. They are probably the best vendor we deal with in our IT Dept.

We had tried other solutions in the past including SRM and RecoverPoint for VMs. I can tell you they all pale in comparison, not only in functionality and user-friendliness but in support as well.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

They assigned us an engineer and we were set up and replicating within two hours.

We used a Zerto engineer, who was assigned by our Zerto sales rep.

The ROI with Zerto can't even be measured. The peace of mind we have gotten from knowing that all of our protected VMs are safely replicated with almost live RPOs is something that you can't even quantify.

I would suggest getting a dedicated, well-informed rep. I'm sure they all have great training but always hold your rep accountable. Ask lots of questions because there are no stupid questions. 

We have evaluated SRM, RecoverPoint for VMs, and other "built-in" Hyperconverged replication solutions.

Zerto is literally the best vendor that we deal with overall as an IT Department. They have always delivered, and have always been top-notch. I highly recommend them to ANYONE, regardless of whether or not they already have a DR solution. Zerto is better.

We use the solution for DR failover/testing on our DR site. We're a Windows/VMware environment and replicate 25 virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery site. The solution allows us to perform live failovers without shutting down our production systems.

Zerto has made the testing and the actual failover process of our replicated virtual machines seamless. The product has relieved the administrative burden for the IT staff responsible for the disaster recovery implementation of the organization. Adding new virtual machines is quick and easy, and managing the environment is straightforward.  

Failover testing is the most valuable feature. The fact that we are able to test the failover of live systems during regular hours is invaluable to our organization. No longer do we have to schedule failovers of our systems, which brings down our production environment.

There are a couple of minor areas that could use improvement.

The GUI could be streamlined a bit more to enhance the administrative tasks. I would also like to be able to throttle the email alerts, as sometimes they become a bit noisy, and get tough to keep on top of.

Our company has been using the product for four years.

This is a very stable solution.

It is easy to add new licenses for growth.

Support has always been readily available if there were issues.

We never used a different solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and seems to be in line with similar products.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this solution.