HPE Zerto Software Reviews

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is BCDR. 

By implementing this solution, we were trying to solve BCDR challenges and needed a vendor-agnostic solution.

The feature I appreciate most about HPE Zerto Software is its journal-based replication, which is a faster replication technology than what we had prior.

Overall, it has improved our RTO and RPO and reduced the engineering time spent during regularly scheduled DR exercises.

When failing over virtual machines (VMs), where VLANs aren't spanned across geographical data centers, it's essential to change the IP address of replicated VMs. The mechanism used to control and configure this process could be improved for customers with restrictions on DHCP usage.

Additionally, there are nuances to consider when dealing with Linux systems.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for three years.

HPE Zerto Software has had some issues, such as storage problems and logs filling up, but they were resolved by support.

Our replicated workloads are mostly static. We have not needed to scale our implementation, yet.

Their support team didn’t have all the answers, and some of the cases took far too long to address, especially on critical systems that needed to be operational before our scheduled DR events.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support of HPE Zerto Software as probably a five out of ten. 

Before adopting HPE Zerto Software, we were using a vendor-specific technology. We considered the change to HPE Zerto Software due to performance and the need to use multiple hypervisors.

Deploying HPE Zerto Software was pretty streamlined, but there have been some challenges with the support organization. There were instances where additional resources were needed to address cases, and the time to bring them on was longer than expected.

We were able to consolidate tools with HPE Zerto. That yielded a meaningful amount of cost savings for us.

My experience with the pricing and licensing of HPE Zerto Software is that it was more affordable than our previously used technologies.

My advice to another organization considering HPE Zerto Software is to get a good contact within the account team to ensure a quick path to escalation exists. 

Potential customers should be aware that Zerto does not support all hypervisors in the market. So, depending on your footprint, Zerto may or may not be a fit for your long-term virtualization strategy.

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

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is disaster recovery. For disaster recovery, I use HPE Zerto Software with set and forget options to protect critical production databases.

HPE Zerto Software offers the best features in that it works reliably, has set and forget functionality, and does exactly what it is said to do.

The particular features that make HPE Zerto Software so reliable for me are replication and failover. HPE Zerto Software has impacted my organization positively because it does what it is supposed to do.

HPE Zerto Software is fine the way it is and does not need improvement. I do not have any additional thoughts about needed improvements.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for six years.

I do not have anything else to add about how I use HPE Zerto Software in my environment. I do not have anything else to add about the features. I would rate HPE Zerto Software an eight on a scale of one to ten because there are some quirks and issues with deployment that keep it from being a ten. My advice to others looking into using HPE Zerto Software is to conduct your research and make sure the product is right for you. My overall rating for HPE Zerto Software is an eight.

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are for DR failover and recovery.

HPE Zerto Software benefited my organization as it allows us to test changes without impacting production.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most include being able to recover VMs, change the target, and either deploy the VM with the same IP address or a different IP address on different networks for a digital twin.

My impressions of HPE Zerto's near-synchronous replication are impressive, and this feature is particularly important to us. Unfortunately, we're not a HPE Zerto Software customer anymore, but I've been actively trying to push for us to get it again. 

The solution has saved me time in data recovery situations due to data corruption scenarios, though not specifically for ransomware. 

The solution has helped reduce downtime by approximately 10 hours. I cannot specify how much that amount of downtime would have cost my organization since we were a managed service provider managing HPE Zerto Software for their company. 

HPE Zerto Software has significantly lowered our time to recovery. It performs better than other recovery solutions I've used, including Veeam and the native VMware solution, which I found inadequate. 

It has helped reduce our DR testing by about two hours. I am not currently using a cyber vault solution or immutable data copies to ensure recovery from a cyber threat. We have discontinued using HPE Zerto Software. 

I don't know how HPE Zerto Software can be improved; I think it's pretty great. If it can recover VMs or infrastructure into public clouds or vice versa, that would be awesome. 

One potential improvement for the future would be competitive pricing with Veeam.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for three years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software scaled effectively with the growing needs of my organization. The multi-tenancy capabilities were beneficial since we were a managed service provider and could resell that to our customers.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as exceptional, though I never needed to engage them. On a scale of one to 10, I would rate them as a 10, though I never really interacted with them.

Positive

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, we were using Veeam and the VMware equivalent simultaneously. We ultimately chose HPE Zerto Software because we were unhappy with the other products we were using.

My experience with deploying HPE Zerto Software was that it was pretty straightforward and easy to deploy.

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

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, we were using Veeam and the VMware equivalent. We chose HPE Zerto Software because we were dissatisfied with other products.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution a 10.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is that it would be unwise not to purchase it.

We use it in our data center. We have two data centers, one in Baton Rouge and one in Las Vegas, and we use it for replication. It is all used in the data center.

We did not have replication previously. Once we got Zerto, we started seeing everything backed up and replicated, and we saw its benefits pretty early. Over the years, we have kept renewing Zerto because it seems to get better. There have not been any issues with it.

Near-synchronous replication works very well. We use pretty big storage with them and never had a problem. If it is close to going over, we always get an email, and it is easy to keep up with all that, which is pretty important here at Credit Union. I have nothing but positive to say about Zerto.

Zerto is easy to use. When we first started using it, we used the emails they sent at the end of the night to see everything was fine. About five years ago, they got their own portal. Since then, we have been able to see everything in real-time. It has been super easy. I automatically get notifications on my phone or email. That has been a real high point for me with them.

We have several VMs, and Zerto has been a part of the protection plan for them.

Knowing what is going on in real-time has helped with breaches and things like that. Recently, there have been no issues. Luckily, over the last year or two, we have not had any security issues. Zerto and VMware are what we count on in our data center. As long as the data center is up and running safely, we are good here at the branch.

We run reports on XDR and get an idea of anything that has been going on. Luckily, we have been safe for the last year or two, but in 2022, there was an issue. Zerto was right on it, and we were able to get it cleaned up. Zerto has definitely helped in the ransomware aspect.

The portal is a valuable feature. I am here in Baton Rouge, and I can get into the Vegas data center and see real-time replication on the portal. The portal has been upgraded over the past several years, and it is probably the most helpful part of it.

I always get some blowback about the cost. It does not seem too bad to me. We had to upgrade to a premium subscription to get some other features. Maybe a one-size-fits-all option would be better. 

I have used Zerto for eight to ten years.

I have not experienced any stability issues. We are a heavy usage bank, and it has always been steady for us. I do not have anything bad to say about that.

Scalability has been good too. We started with the one in Baton Rouge and added the one in Vegas about five years ago. It was very easy to connect them and get them mirroring each other. Scalability has been good for us.

When my staff member went to Vegas, there were some issues with logging into the device. He called the tech line and was able to talk to someone. We have had luck getting in touch with those guys. Their customer service deserves a good score, at least an eight out of ten.

Positive

At the previous bank, it was a big Cisco shop, but I have been here for almost ten years, and we have had Zerto for that long. Zerto is what I am used to.

I did not personally do the initial setup. A guy who works for me went to Vegas, called it in, and got it set up pretty well. I do not go to Vegas much, but I have been to Baton Rouge. I have tested it and played with it, and every time I have done that, it seems easy to use. My network administrator has never complained about any difficulty. For the most part, it is easy. They have a good tech support line, and if we have any trouble, they are easy to get in touch with. We are happy with that.

We have a maintenance contract with them, but I did not have to use it except for one instance a few years ago when we thought that we were going to get ransomware. We had maintenance on that. The good thing is that it is a part of the renewal. It is safe to have it, but luckily, we have not had to use it over the last few years.

Price-wise, it works fine for me, but my budgetary team is always looking for ways to cut costs, and it seems like they first look at the data center and the IT side to find savings.

Take advantage of the maintenance plan; even if it is not required, it is definitely worth getting. The techs there are really good. There are local Zerto reps who come around. Use the tech support when needed because they are always very good. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

We started using HPE Zerto Software for the disaster recovery (DR) segment. For DR implementation, we are using the HPE Zerto Software tool.

HPE Zerto Software helped to reduce downtime in our corporate IT environment, and it was a very smooth dry run. In our corporate IT environment where we used HPE Zerto Software, it was a good experience regarding RTOs and RPOs. 

HPE Zerto Software is very quick. It reduces our DR testing and takes less than 30 minutes.

To copy the data from one site to another site, HPE Zerto Software is a very powerful tool. We have two environments, Dell and HPE, so now it's very easy to move files from one place to another with HPE Zerto Software. 

HPE Zerto Software is a very good tool with ease of access. We can easily move data from one place to another and replicate it. To manage two types of data centers, DC and DR, HPE Zerto Software is a very useful tool. Replication with the HPE Zerto Software is very smooth. 

The migration part of the HPE Zerto Software is already there. In terms of improvement, we have VMware and Nutanix, and we are looking for solutions to perform migration between these two setups to save costs.

We have used HPE Zerto Software for more than a year.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software.

We are expanding the usage of HPE Zerto Software currently from a two-node to more nodes.

The technical support for the HPE Zerto Software is good and very quick. Whenever we raise tickets, we generally get the solution fast. I would rate the technical support of HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten because when we raise technical issues, they can take a little time but they do provide a solution.

Positive

Earlier we were not using any other solution for DR. We recently started using HPE Zerto Software for DR.

We have two environments. There's a corporate IT environment and a smart city environment. We have done the implementation in the corporate IT, and it was very smooth. We had a good experience with the solution. 

During the implementation, we encountered no major challenges. Everything is working smoothly, and the implementation process is very quick. The partner support has been excellent. Currently, we are using an on-premises setup with two data centers. One data center serves as our primary data center, while the other acts as a disaster recovery site.

It's still in the implementation stage, but we have seen an ROI.

We have not had any incidents of ransomware. The cost of any downtime for our organization would be approximately $10,000.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for the HPE Zerto Software was good. 

We started the communication with HPE for HPE Zerto Software for DR, and did not look around at other solutions. HPE Zerto Software was already in place, so we started using it for DR.

We are using Fortinet as a cyber vault solution, but in the future, we can explore other options. DDoS attacks and other aspects have to be covered in the next version of our cyber vault solution approach.

I would rate HPE Zerto Software a ten out of ten. It offers ease of access and fast implementation.

Our current use cases for Zerto involve using it for DR, as we replicate to each other for disaster recovery across two different properties. We back up locally and then replicate across using Zerto.

I use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in my environment.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is the simplicity of it all. It has allowed me to rely on Zerto to do file-level backups which, as a normal DR solution, you usually don't get. I've used other platforms for disaster recovery, and Zerto by far has been the simplest to implement and maintain.

The near-synchronous replication feature is incredible; I haven't used another solution that does it as fast and as seamlessly as Zerto.

I have not seen any effect on my RPOs. Prior to Zerto, we were not able to publish our RPOs, but now we're confident in them.

For improvement points, because Zerto is not a backup company, if they could implement some kind of backup solutions, it would help us out significantly. They can do file-level backups, but if in the future they could achieve application-aware recovery, that would be an incredible help for us.

I have been using Zerto since 2016 in my career.

I have not seen any instability, such as lagging or crashing, in Zerto.

Zerto is very scalable.

I have contacted Zerto's technical support and customer support.

Their support is very knowledgeable about the product. I was concerned because I had reached out to Zerto support directly before they became an HPE company, and although I had never had a problem, I found that after reaching out to support following the HPE acquisition, they did not skip a beat. The support has not dropped off whatsoever.

I would give them a nine out of ten for support.

Positive

The initial deployment of Zerto was easy for me.

I was up and running within an hour to fully set it up.

It was just me who handled the deployment—no team was needed.

Regarding the pricing for Zerto, it's right on target. I was pleasantly surprised once I was introduced to Zerto. I was very impressed with the product but had that in my back pocket because I figured it was going to be overpriced. It was surprisingly affordable.

I have used VMware's SRM tool as an alternative to Zerto in my career.

The biggest difference between Zerto and SRM in my opinion is simplicity. SRM was clunky; you almost had to have an engineer maintain it, and it seemed it was a daily project. We just don't have the manpower, as we don't have an extra engineer or staff member to manage it, and it was way too clunky for us.

Fortunately, Zerto has not needed to help us reduce downtime in any situations, as we have not had a situation where we would have had to use it. We do bi-annual failover testing within Zerto, and they've always been successful.

My advice for new users on how to start with Zerto is to start with a demonstration and watch the product in action; don't just review slides by sales.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 10.

Our use cases right now are primarily for creating spot backup snapshots and things like that for recovery.

The near synchronous replication works very effectively. We do appreciate it as it's comparable to other vendors in that space.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime in situations when we roll out a change and the change needs to be rolled back. Zerto has been excellent at being able to recover that prior server before the change, so it has helped significantly in those areas.

Zerto has helped us to reduce the overall DR testing. Zerto saved us close to 90% on DR testing compared to traditional backups and restores. We were able to utilize that time for anything else we wanted to. We needed the time desperately, so it was a big benefit to us.

Zerto has had an impact on our IT resiliency strategy. It has improved our IT resiliency considerably; going from traditional backups to having backups with Zerto in addition was a lifesaver.

We use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in our environment pretty much exclusively. Compared to what we were doing with traditional backups, our RTO and RPO have improved by 90%.

What I appreciate the most about the product is its simplicity. It's very easy to use for my staff.

Expanding the product to compete more fully with products such as Veeam would be a big benefit in the market.

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

We have not seen any instability.

Zerto's scalability is adequate for us. It could expand a bit more to compete with those larger products that are a little bit more scalable. We're not a big enough enterprise to test it. We haven't taken it to the point where we feel the scalability is a problem, but I suspect it probably would be; that's just a suspicion, not anything that I have concrete evidence for.

We have not had to contact the technical support or customer support.

Neutral

I have personally used alternatives to Zerto, including Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, and several other solutions. Zerto competes effectively in the snapshot area for DR and synchronous replication. I've also used the Pure Storage system, which does asynchronous replication. It combines effectively with other products such as Zerto, Veeam, and so on, so I've used quite a few of them in the past.

Veeam is a more comprehensive backup software for an enterprise. Zerto gets most of the way there and would work for a smaller enterprise effectively, but for a larger enterprise, Veeam has capabilities that are beyond Zerto at this point. Veeam is an example of a more complete product.

Commvault also has a more complete product, even though it's not entirely as good. Zerto is progressing; they have a great start and a great product, but they probably need to expand it to compete more fully with those larger enterprise backup systems.

Its deployment is easy. We had it fully onboard and tested in about two weeks.

After the deployment, Zerto doesn't require much maintenance at our end. You have to administer it similarly to any other system, but it's pretty low maintenance.

We put a team on it so that everybody learned together. We put a three-man team on it from a group of seniors who would be responsible for disaster recovery anyway.

It was pretty appropriate. It was not too cheap, not too expensive. It was just about right.

I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten.

My current use cases for Zerto involve the protection of data to ensure that any ransomware or threats will not impact our endpoints. I have used Zerto to help protect virtual machines in my environment. The majority of our infrastructure is virtual, while less than half is physical. 

I've seen an impact on our RPOs and RTOs as our return to service has become much faster. We can return to business as quickly as possible. 

Our DR testing has been reduced. We still do it once a year, but now it's more about checking off boxes because we know what to expect. We must ensure the certificates and all related items are good, examine the return times, RPOs, RTOs, and verify everything is still functioning properly. 

Zerto has enabled the team to focus on engineering and spend less time developing APIs to work with custom solutions and security applications, positively impacting our IT resiliency strategy.

What I appreciate most about Zerto is that we can implement it via cloud now and on-premise. Mobility also stands out to me. The interface of Zerto is much easier to use. 

Zerto could improve the product by lowering the cost. 

I've been using Zerto for about three or four years, implementing it in various scenarios.

I have not noticed any crashing or instability with Zerto.

Zerto scales appropriately for my pretty big company.

I have not had an occasion to contact their technical support.

Neutral

A few years ago, I used an alternative. I prefer Zerto over Veeam, which is why we switched from one to another. It's apples and oranges: Zerto has a much smoother interface and is much easier to use with better features.

It was pretty easy. I do not recall hitting too many roadblocks.

It took around three to four months total to fully set up Zerto, including network configuration, firewalls, and all other components.

Zerto requires basically no maintenance on my end now. It's managed by Zerto tech, so we don't have to test packages and similar tasks. They inform us of product updates, plan for them, and implement them as SaaS-approved changes.

Zerto is not overly expensive. It's worth what we're getting for it, but with tough times, a discount would be beneficial.

I have not yet encountered a situation where I needed to perform data recovery due to ransomware or other causes. I will knock on wood as we haven't had that kind of incident yet. Thanks to Zerto and some other systems we use on the back end, though never say never.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

My current use cases for HPE Zerto Software include site-to-site and site-to-cloud.

HPE Zerto Software has saved me time in data recovery situations due to something like ransomware because we have protection against it. Due to the logging functions, we can go back in time and bring systems up a day before or a day after. We have been able to avoid ransomware issues with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I have found most valuable are the copy capabilities, specifically being able to copy a VM over to another site and bring it back up if I have an outage. I used HPE Zerto Software recently to go from cluster to cluster, and I was able to move VMs seamlessly. 

I find HPE Zerto Software very easy to use. Going in and being able to copy the VM makes it very efficient.

Near-synchronous replication makes it pretty easy for me to move things on the fly, so I can be up within about 10 minutes. Being up in 10 minutes is important for me because if we're not up in that timeframe, we have users complaining and calling.

HPE Zerto Software could evolve to where, instead of me having to push a button, it can detect disasters on the fly and automate disaster detection.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for about a year.

HPE Zerto Software is really stable. I haven't had an experience where I've had downtime.

HPE Zerto Software scales just fine with the growing needs of my organization; it's gone from a small test group to a larger test group with no problems.

I'd give their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The support team was really great. Everything was configured, and out-of-the-box configurations were seamless.

I have seen a return on investment from HPE Zerto Software, already just moving from data center to data center. Just moving the things over from one spot to another with no outage time, or very little outage, reflects how I've gotten the return on investment.

The licensing and setup costs have been reasonable.

I didn't consider any other solutions before selecting HPE Zerto Software. It was given to me.

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

We have two data centers, so we use HPE Zerto Software for site recovery. We fail over, run out of one data center, then we fail back and run out of the other, and we do failover testing. 

We were using VMC on AWS with VMware replication. The challenge was it had a five-minute RTO and we wanted something faster. At the time, HPE Zerto Software didn't support VMC on AWS, which was actually our first choice. Then we had a mandate to build a new data center.

We wanted both physical locations, so we went that direction and decided to go with HPE Zerto Software. We wanted something that we could fail over quickly, have minimal recovery times, and make sure that we could come up quickly. We use the move feature in HPE Zerto Software probably the most, moving from data center to data center. It allows us to meet with our compliance regulations to test our DR site and run in our DR site with seamless operation.

We've proven a few times that we can fail over within a very short window, and it works very well. Our RTO with HPE Zerto Software is less than five seconds. It is extremely important. We work in the financial industry, and being able to fail over and know that we can bring that server up within a very short window and that the data is going to be accurate means we're not having to go back and rework a day's worth of data. That's what we wanted and that's what we got.

The failover test option in HPE Zerto Software is the most valuable at this point since we can validate that things are going to come up, that the data is valid, and then tear it back down without having to interrupt the users. 

It's extremely easy to use HPE Zerto Software. 

Our first failover test went flawlessly. We failed over our entire data center, approximately 200 VMs in half an hour - very fast. This last fast failover, we ran into a couple of hiccups. Working with support, we found we need to do more testing in between our main failovers since we've actually had an 11% failure rate of things not coming up. They advised us to test, validate, and then resync if needed, so we're learning from it.

We haven't experienced any ransomware yet with HPE Zerto Software. Regarding time savings, it has definitely been beneficial. Once we've got it set up and can manage it, it really is a time saver.

We haven't had a situation where we've had to use it to reduce downtime. Comparing it to our other failover solution, the speed is notable. We used to schedule an eight-hour day to do this, and now we're scheduling a half an hour, which saves us significant time on weekends.

Regarding RTOs and RPOs with HPE Zerto Software, we can look at it and know exactly where every VPG is regarding recovery time. The speed to move it over and bring it up is extremely efficient for us.

The solution has helped reduce our organization's DR testing. Previously, we would isolate our DR and test in a defined bubble just to validate the data was there and users could access it. Now we can fail it over to our backup data center and actively run there. We can fail it back and run both locations in an active-active mode with HPE Zerto Software, which we hadn't been able to do before.

It has allowed us to trim the team down and focus on other tasks without constantly worrying about disaster recovery. We know it's there and we can validate and test it through our monthly procedures.

When we did our test this year with HPE Zerto Software, we had some failures that we weren't expecting. The challenge was realizing there was data corruption, and fortunately we found it before we committed the failover, so we could fail back. We could resync it, and we weren't in an actual disaster. If there's any way to validate that data on the recovery site without having to manually go in and do failover testing and try to validate, that would be a feature that would be really nice. We're not sure why we had some corruption, however, we did the resync and it seemed to bring it back up and fix the problem. That's probably the biggest area I'd ask about - some way of validating the recovery sites in an automated fashion.

We started using HPE Zerto Software in April last year.

We haven't had any crashes or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software, except trying to figure out why we had some data corruption. Overall, it seems to be functioning very well. Support's biggest recommendation was that we just need to do more failover testing and validate.

We have not expanded our usage of HPE Zerto Software.

The customer support I received from HPE Zerto Software has been very good. I haven't had any complaints about the support we receive. I would rate it a nine or ten. When I ask them a question, they give me a very quick response.

We were using SRM before selecting HPE Zerto Software. From attending different conferences, HPE Zerto Software was where I wanted to get to, however, at the time, our disaster recovery site wasn't allowing for it. Comparing SRM to HPE Zerto Software, I really prefer using HPE Zerto Software. It's easier to group, set up. I can see really quickly what things are doing and I feel a lot more comfortable that things are working.

Setup was extremely fast, and we had the system up and running within a couple of days. Our biggest hold-up was getting the network configured correctly. For training, we were able to take some online courses that got us up to speed very quickly.

During the setup for HPE Zerto Software, we were working with a technician who could walk us through it and that worked really well for us.

Since we just got HPE Zerto Software, our pricing didn't seem too high. Our renewal is next year.

We used SRM before adopting HPE Zerto Software to address similar needs.

My rating for HPE Zerto Software would be ten out of ten.