HPE Zerto Software Reviews

My main use cases for the HPE Zerto Software are VMware, to do DR to the cloud.

We wanted less time for recovery, which this solution provided.

Luckily, we haven't had a disaster yet, however, during our DR tests. It provides us with peace of mind.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most are the continuous data protection and the ability to test. 

The continuous replication has been very important to our company. 

HPE Zerto Software has positively impacted my RTOs and RPOs. With the old software, we were talking a few hours to maybe a couple of days to recover a server, whereas with HPE Zerto Software, it's just a matter of minutes.

The solution has significantly helped to reduce my organization's DR testing. Our full DR test has been reduced to a couple of hours instead of a few days. The actual test in HPE Zerto Software itself is just a matter of six, seven hours.

My organization wanted near-real-time backup and recovery by implementing the HPE Zerto Software. A lot of that saved time has been allocated to value-add tasks; it's been great. We've been able to do other things.

The HPE Zerto Software can be improved with more visibility. It's really hard to find out what stores and what drives I'm using, and then to translate that over to the cloud solution.

I have been using the HPE Zerto Software for about a year and a half now.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as excellent. We have not had any issues with the solution at all.

HPE Zerto Software scales really with the growing needs of my organization. I've just moved to different clusters of VMs.

I evaluate my customer service and technical support experience as great. On a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best, I would rate my customer service/technical support as a ten out of ten. They've been great.

Prior to adopting the HPE Zerto Software, I was using another solution to address similar needs, and it was mainly for performance. The RTO and RPO for our critical systems were just too long with the other solutions.

I would describe my experience with deploying HPE Zerto Software as positive. The install went smoothly. I didn't really need support at all.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the HPE Zerto Software was positive. We were one of the lucky ones who got it before the price hikes, so it was a pretty good price. It costs a lot more now.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, I considered using Veeam. We're still using it for our backups, but for DR, it just wasn't cutting it.

The capability that is most important when choosing my Cyber Vault solution is the ability to be completely air-gapped from your network. It would probably have taken a couple of hours to a few days for me to recover with a different solution that I have used. The solution has not helped me reduce downtime in any situation before I had HPE Zerto Software.

I am currently using a Cyber Vault solution or immutable data copies to ensure recovery from cyber threats. 

My advice to another organization that's considering the HPE Zerto Software is to do it without a second thought.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate the HPE Zerto Software a nine.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery automation for our most critical, highest priority, and time-sensitive failovers.

I understand that Zerto can enable disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but that's not the use case that we have here.

We primarily use Zerto as a disaster recovery product, but we haven't had a disaster. It hasn't allowed us to minimize downtime. However, it helped us avoid the need for downtime during testing scenarios. 

Zerto helps to protect virtual machines in our environment, and that is our primary use case. Zerto provides the most aggressive RPO in the industry, and it really is one of the only products that can give you near real-time recovery.

We use VMware as a hypervisor platform to run all of our virtual workloads. Zerto is the replication service that I use to automate the failovers between my environments without having to have expertise in bringing application replication up, like a SQL cluster would require or an Exchange cluster would require, because the entire VM comes over. It helps us to reduce our overall VM footprint because we don't have to run resources in two different data centers. We can just shift them between the two using Zerto.

The ability to test a failover non-disruptively with Zerto is valuable, as it doesn't create any downtime for the business.

Near-synchronous replication works effectively, and it's important for our databases because that's going to give us the least amount of data loss on the failover.

I run a very dense VM-to-host ratio in my environment. Whenever maintenance is being performed on a host, all the VMs on that host have to be powered down and/or moved off to complete that maintenance cycle. It is frustrating when the protection of VMs doesn't get relocated to another host before the replication appliance powers down. It sometimes works great, but if the host has a lot of VMs on it, there may not always be enough time to relocate all of the VMs from a protection group standpoint to other hosts before the replication appliance that Zerto uses to manage that powers itself down. In such a case, you are breaking replication for the duration of that maintenance, and that can cause some support issues when you bring it back online, where you have to go in and manually recover it. I know they added improvements over the years. It's not as bad as it used to be, but at times, I still end up breaking replication when I do maintenance on my hosts.

I've been using Zerto in my career for about six years.

I've never had any stability issues with Zerto, as the management console has always been reliable, though there are occasional web timeouts. You just have to refresh your browser session to log back in if there's a stale browser window open or something like that, but it has always been easy to log in. I never had to open a support case to use the product. It has been more along the lines of a configuration change or replication. It is very reliable.

Zerto is quite scalable, as they added functionality where if you need to attach more disks and storage, it spins up additional replication appliances automatically. It doesn't require anything from the user to manage those. It happens automatically. I've been able to scale up as needed, with hundreds of VMs without any issues.

I've contacted Zerto's technical support. I've always had a good support experience with Zerto. The engineers are knowledgeable and respond quickly. When I open a ticket, I usually get a call within an hour or two. It's definitely good and better than other vendors that I've worked with.

Positive

I was previously using the VMware Site Recovery Manager, but it was very difficult to keep it functioning. We could not rely on that kind of uncertainty for a disaster recovery product. We needed something that's just going to work and not require a lot of assistance to keep it running, whether it's compatibility or upgrades. We needed something that was going to run when needed. Zerto is very reliable. It has definitely been a very stable product for me.

Zerto is the fastest among the solutions I have used. It usually takes less than five minutes to have a full recovery of the VM.

The initial setup with Zerto was easy. I did a proof of concept and got it running within the same day. Deploying it into production was again a very quick experience. The time required depends on how much of the initial configuration you want to do for the VMs you want to protect.

It was just me handling the setup and implementation of Zerto.

I ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove to the business that it was worth the investment. We started with 15 VMs so that I could show the product does what it needs to do, but ultimately, we needed to protect all of our SQL workloads, so we quickly scaled up from there. 

It's cost-prohibitive for non-critical workloads, so we wouldn't put development servers or any non-business-critical systems in there because we wouldn't need the aggressive RPO and RTO that Zerto gives us for those types of workloads. I accomplished those failovers through other replication technologies.

Overall, I would give Zerto a ten out of ten. 

I use Zerto for replications for my DR site.

It allows us to have effective backup and recovery.

It hasn't helped anything directly, however, it does give us peace of mind to have a backup we can rely on.

The ease of use, ease of setup, and the dashboard, which is quite user-friendly, are valuable features. Zerto is very impressive and much more resilient. It's very easy to learn. Within a day a user can get up to speed.

It makes us more resilient overall.

The near-synchronous replication is impressive. We have around seven-second RPO times. Our RPO used to be 24 hours. It's drastically reduced RPO.

We have our own data center that we replicate to, however, we're actually in the process of changing that to replicate to a cloud environment.

We've reduced downtime by 90%.

We've been able to reduce DR testing time by 75%.

The speed of recovery is 90% faster.

Zerto works great. The pricing could always be lower.

I have been using Zerto for probably about seven years.

The solution is very stable. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I'd rate scalability nine out of ten.

I use Veeam for backup and replication. With Veeam, I only had the 24-hour replications.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Implementation probably took just a couple of hours. We had two users involved in the setup, and we have it set up in two locations. There are two people who work directly with the solution. There is a bit of maintenance in terms of updating. They are pretty easy and quick.

I haven't saved any costs since I haven't had a disaster.

The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

It's way better than anything else on the market. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I would rate the solution to other users. It works very well. 

We use Zerto as a disaster recovery as a service which allows us to bring up our entire network infrastructure and all of our critical resources into the Zerto cloud.

The near-synchronous replication feature is very important to us. In the event of a total disaster, we would be able to maintain our presence in the cloud where all of our critical infrastructure will be moved from our on-premises to the cloud.

The RTOs and RPOs are both extremely good; we are talking about minutes versus hours and days to practically have a restore done. It is really helpful for us that we know exactly what the RPO times are, and all of those features allow us to do this.

Zerto has had an impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We are a small company; I am basically the CTO, the CSO, and I do desktop stuff. Having this very easy interface and reduced time to do things allows me to focus on other things that I need to focus on. It has me more at ease knowing that it will work the way it is supposed to, and if I need it, it is going to be there.

Zerto helped to reduce downtime to minutes. We have 90% less recovery times. I can go in there and see exactly what those times are to completely spin up the infrastructure.

I appreciate most that we can do quick failover tests without actually going to live failover, which is very helpful because we have to do SOC audits, and they want to see that we do test this. It is extremely easy to test to show whether or not these things boot up in a test environment, which they do.

Zerto is easy to use. There is a dashboard we log in to, and it shows us everything we need in one dashboard.

There can be a bit more logging. It seems a bit harder to find logs for test restores and all that. If they had a way to email the results of a test restore, that would be excellent.

We have been using Zerto for a good two years.

It is very stable.

Scalability is good. We have to pay for more scalability, and we would have to reach out to them if we were to scale up or scale down.

It was good. It took a little bit longer than I would have thought, but they were able to resolve my problem pretty quickly.

Neutral

We used Unitrends for our disaster recovery, as well as our file backups, but mostly for disaster recovery.

Zerto is 100% above and beyond that. Unitrends was very clunky. It was hard to find stuff, hard to navigate, and extremely hard to use.

It was fairly easy. They sent some documentation, and I worked with the deployment team. It took a little bit; there was a learning curve since this is something I have never used before, but they did help with the initial setup and questions I had.

It was just me.

Zerto has reduced our organization's DR testing. Before, it was a huge cost. It was several thousand dollars to do a DR test, whereas now, I click a button.

Pricing is kind of expensive, but for what we get, it is probably worth it. I know they just had a huge price increase due to the VMware stuff getting expensive, which added about a thousand dollars a month to our bill.

I would absolutely recommend Zerto. If you need a good DR solution, I would say go with Zerto. There are a lot of other options that are cheaper, but you are not going to get the functionality that we have.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

The primary use case for HPE Zerto Software is disaster recovery. I use HPE Zerto Software to help protect VMs in my environment.

One of the most important features of HPE Zerto Software is the ability to easily recover systems based on the required point in time. The possibility to recover systems to the desired point in time while containing consistency within the whole application is significant.

My impression of its near-synchronous replication is that it covers the majority of all use cases. It cannot cover all scenarios and very sophisticated requirements, such as near-zero replication. However, in most cases, these capabilities are fully sufficient to have the system fully operational because I am aware that in case of a real issue or real disaster, there is always the loss of data. This is acceptable functionality in my opinion.

HPE Zerto Software is not reducing our DR testing because we have DR tests based on our policies and they are conducted periodically. However, the amount of time needed to perform DR exercises itself and the engagement of teams required to be present during the recovery test helps much and lowers the costs for the company. This software allows for almost fully automatic recovery, which means that the teams are required only for the verification phase, not during the entire recovery process. This also impacts the costs for DR exercise execution, meaning the costs are lower compared to the scenario when the team responsible for the application needs to recover the system from a backup solution.

In my opinion, it is hard to predict how HPE Zerto Software can be improved in the future because this software is used for a very specific purpose which it works fine for. This purpose is quite limited, so there are all required functionalities now provided by HPE Zerto Software within the application. It is possible to recover the virtual machines and recover pods from Docker solutions, for example. The application itself cannot recover physical servers, so I would point that out as a feature request that could be discussed by the HPE Zerto Software team as a new functionality, if possible.

Regarding specific security examples that made me decide to switch to HPE Zerto Software, I did not have security concerns. Before using HPE Zerto Software, we did not have the specific requirement from the security perspective to use such software. Probably now as there is DORA requirement, NIST, and NIS requirement. However, we were using this software before this law started, so we already used this software.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for almost 10 years.

I am generally very pleased with the technical support provided by HPE, so I would rate it a 10.

Positive

Unfortunately, I do not use any other software in this approach because we have only HPE Zerto Software. Therefore, I do not have experience with any competitors, such as Veeam, Rubrik, and others. I did not have the chance to use them in a normal production manner.

The initial setup of HPE Zerto Software is not complicated; it is very simple. You have everything from an infrastructure perspective prepared, so you have the privileges configured on the hypervisor solution, along with all components such as network, storage, capacity, and CPU prepared. The installation itself lasts one to two hours at most. After the initial installation, it is only the configuration for the production workload, depending on needs and scenarios and how many systems you have in protection. From my understanding, the initial configuration and installation are very easy and smooth based on my experience. However, some preparation is required, but this is normal for any solution, not just for HPE Zerto Software.

I am not able to estimate the cost of downtime. However, let me imagine that a typical application recovery process lasts two to three hours and it takes two to three persons to be involved in this process. Let me assume that such engagement is not for one application but for 100 applications. Then let me compare it to the situation when you have all these systems protected with HPE Zerto Software and one person is able to recover their systems in minutes and only asks the application teams to verify if it is working fine after recovery. This causes huge numbers of FTE engaged in the DR process, whether in simulations or the real disaster recovery process, measured in many hours compared to minutes that can even be done in parallel. I think the return of value is huge. This is based on not only one action but comparing activities performed four times a year because of the policies requiring such exercises, which many teams are involved in.

I can confirm that HPE Zerto Software has reduced downtime in various situations, and it has reduced, as I mentioned previously, the engagement of the teams required to recover their systems.

Comparing HPE Zerto Software's recovery speed to competitors, I cannot compare what is the time required to recover the systems. However, compared to backups, as this is the initial way to recover systems after failures, it is much faster because it is measured in minutes to recover systems. Compared to traditional backup solutions, it is much faster.

I assess HPE Zerto Software's overall effect on my RPOs by stating that we use it both in simulations, meaning the DR exercises, which we perform periodically in our production environment. As it is, the DR exercise is controlled, which means that we have no loss of data in that case. However, we also had examples of using the software during a real disaster that happened in our infrastructure, and it also worked fine. The RPO requirements were met during the recovery actions, so for us, it proved that it worked fine.

Regarding the pricing of HPE Zerto Software, I find it reasonable. I rate this review a 10.

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is disaster recovery.

By implementing HPE Zerto Software, my organization was trying to solve the challenge of achieving multi-zone coverage, as we have two different data centers, and the SRM we had wasn't very useful without HPE Zerto Software.

It allows us to do DR tests seamelssly at this point. 

I appreciate the automated recovery functions of HPE Zerto Software the most. These features benefit my organization by allowing us to perform DR tests seamlessly; before, it was a check-the-box process with hope it worked. 

It's extremely easy to use with one of the shortest setups I've ever done.

The solution has not saved me time in data recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes at this company, but it did at the previous company. At a previous company, HPE Zerto Software helped to reduce downtime, as we were able to fail over to our secondary data center in about 30 minutes for 400 plus VMs.

HPE Zerto Software has impacted my RTOs and RPOs. Its recovery speed compares to other disaster recovery solutions I've used as being hours instead of months. I don't have current examples because we haven't finished the implementation at the current company.

The solution has helped to reduce my organization's DR testing, as it's now a one-day window instead of a few-week activity. IT is always extremely busy, so any saved time from HPE Zerto Software is easily respent on value-add tasks.

My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication are excellent, as we typically see targets under five seconds, which no one else is achieving. The near-synchronous replication of HPE Zerto Software is extremely important to my organization because we run different point-of-sale systems, and if we lose transactions, it would take days, if not be impossible, to recover from.

I want to hear more about the Commvault integration that was announced, as I don't know what's included in that one yet.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for about a year at the current company, and overall, I have five years of experience with it from my previous job.

I haven't experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues. I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as excellent.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization very easily, and we haven't hit any limitations.

I have not expanded usage yet. We probably will in about a year and a half.

We haven't had to use customer service and technical support much yet. I would rate customer service and technical support as a ten out of ten since we haven't had to use it.

Before adopting HPE Zerto Software, I wasn't really using another solution to address similar needs; we had some SRM set up, but it was very limited.

My experience deploying HPE Zerto Software has been easy.

I have not calculated an ROI with HPE Zerto Software at this time.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software seemed reasonable, though the quoting for the Cyber Vault was probably the stickiest part, as it had to be tailored to our size of company. That's probably going to get better as time goes on for other customers.

Since I had past experience, HPE Zerto Software was the de facto option I considered before selecting it.

In my previous role, when we evaluated HPE Zerto Software, the evaluation was sufficient to prove it worked; we set up critical systems and were able to test fail them over in hours, and it speaks for itself.

We are deploying HPE Zerto Software's Cyber Vault in this new deployment; we haven't used it yet. The type of solution I am using is HPE Zerto Software's Cyber Vault, as it comes. The capabilities that were most important when choosing a Cyber Vault solution were the offline copy, which was the real decision-maker when we brought it up for management.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate HPE Zerto Software a ten.

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is the replication of data to a DR site.

HPE Zerto Software has helped tremendously with my organization's RTO and RPO, bringing it down to an hour rather than taking 12 hours to restore data the traditional way. 

When we were trying to bring the disaster recovery side up, we had an issue with the VMs not coming up. We had to go back and restore. The solution has saved me time in data recovery situations. During DR tests, we were bringing the site up within the first couple of hours. With a different solution I previously used, it would have taken 24 hours to 4 hours to recover.

HPE Zerto Software has helped me reduce my organization's DR testing. Instead of three times, we do it once. Rather than spending time preparing for the test configuration to do a full restore, with HPE Zerto Software replication, it's automatically up within an hour, and then we can start our testing.

The feature of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most is its ease of use. This feature has helped tremendously in getting our DR plan easy to implement. 

My impressions of HPE Zerto's near-synchronous replication are very good. Near-synchronous replication is very important to my organization, and we are using it every day. It works consistently.

HPE Zerto Software could be improved in the future with easier upgrades. I am not aware of any additional features I would like to see included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for a long time.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as very stable. I have experienced some issues sometimes during upgrades. Other than that, it runs smoothly.

I have expanded usage, and the process was smooth.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as second-hand support since I am not the primary customer for HPE Zerto. I use them through my DR services. I would rate the customer service and technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using regular recovery and backup restore systems to address similar needs.

Deployment of HPE Zerto Software was streamlined. It worked quickly and sufficiently.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software. Fast restores are a notable example. It saves us a lot of time and gives us the ability to perform other DR plans for other systems.

It's provided by the DR replication vendor, so it's not a direct cost to us.

We are considering a cyber vault solution as part of our infrastructure. When choosing a cyber vault solution, the capabilities that are most important to us are fast recovery against ransomware and the ability to do multiple checkpoints. 

My advice to another organization considering HPE Zerto Software is to go for it.

I would rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.

Our company uses Zerto very heavily all the time for DR activities and other activities. We are only maintaining our tier one applications with Zerto while using different tools for our tier two, tier three, and tier four applications. But only for tier one and tier two, we are using Zerto.

Zerto's product and support are unparalleled. Their responsiveness sets them apart from other vendors, as they swiftly engage with customers and manage to sort issues out quickly during calls, without needless delays for log submissions. Their replication service also boasts a sub-10-second RPO and I often see servers synced as quickly as 6 to 7 seconds.

I think Zerto should make the product less expensive, as that's the only reason many people are not registering the product with their companies. We are not using Zerto everywhere across the board, probably due to licensing costs; it could be excessive to manage it. That's why we are only maintaining our tier one applications with Zerto while using different tools for our tier two, tier three, and tier four applications. I definitely think it's expensive, and that's why we are not using that product for the other applications for tier four and beyond.

I have been using Zerto for more than 5 years; I would say almost 7-8 years.

We do see some impact sometimes on our RPOs due to various reasons; it could be because the cluster on the source side may not be stable, or we might have migrated the host to a different cluster where Zerto was not configured.

I am very familiar with Zerto, which is a very good service provider. We had very good feedback. Every time when I work with them, I always receive a really positive response from them and a good solution. Whenever we come across any problem, they try to jump on the call right away. They have very little waiting time. When I open a ticket, within an hour or so, or less than an hour, someone will get connected to me. The good part is that normally, when I work with other vendors, they always look for various logs; they tell us to upload it and try to buy time for almost 3-4 hours by asking questions and wasting time to provide logs when I really need it. Zerto is not like that; they try to jump on a call with you. Another good aspect is that they provide guidance to upgrade our product to be under the supported version if the product is not a supported version. Unlike other companies, they don't just say, 'We don't support the product; follow this document and upgrade.' Instead, Zerto actually makes sure that you have a successful upgrade on your product so that they can support it.

Positive

I used Storix in the past to recover apart from Zerto; we use Storix as well. The biggest difference is the faster recovery with Zerto compared to Storix. As I mentioned, Zerto's product and support are good, too. I was not complaining about the Storix product; they were good but not better than Zerto.

The deployment for the first time definitely requires knowing about the product and how it works, so you need training. Any new person will not be able to manage or do it unless they know how to get things to work. You need proper documentation. Installing the product for the first time is definitely not easy if someone is not aware of the product, but we need to know about the product and how it works to install it for the first time.

The product really provides good support. I'm not aware of the pricing as I'm not from management, but the product is really good. I love the product and their support. If they need any logs, they will try to get them during the call. In that way, the customer can understand that they are really responsible for the product they are providing and they try to help us out. We feel comfortable while comparing them with other vendors because I have worked with many vendors, and I can say that only Microsoft vendors are as good as Zerto in terms of jumping on calls right away to help you out. By using their product, we reduce the downtime of our outage, so if anything goes wrong, I use the Zerto product to reduce downtime. My team has used that one to ensure that we don't experience much downtime. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 9.