HPE Zerto Software Reviews

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is to grab big data from our remote locations. In my daily work, the agents from the remote locations are uploading the data, and with HPE Zerto Software, we are receiving this data in packets available to our main head office, especially since we have limited internet connections availability on our remote locations.

We are very happy with HPE Zerto Software, and most importantly, we have a 0% loss in data, which is the great thing we have seen in HPE Zerto Software.

The best features HPE Zerto Software offers for us in our use case are its ability to downsize the data and signatures into multiple packets and send it to the head office due to our limited availability of internet.

This feature of downsizing data and sending it in multiple packets does not impact our workflow because the most important thing is to have data properly available at the head office from a remote location.

The impact of HPE Zerto Software on our organization has been positive, as we have had no issues getting our data from the remote locations, ensuring data availability is always on our location, making our system work very easily with routine jobs ongoing.

Since implementing HPE Zerto Software, we have seen a time save, especially since our main concern was having that data from the remote locations, and there has been no downtime, with everything going smoothly for almost four years now.

HPE Zerto Software can be improved. We are happy until now, and obviously, we are not looking for any new features, but we are sure that if new features were added to the software, they would obviously be helpful for us.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for almost four years now.

HPE Zerto Software is stable in my experience.

The scalability of HPE Zerto Software is nice, as it is scalable due to our many new locations coming into our system.

The customer support for HPE Zerto Software is great.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software, as it has saved us a lot of time and money, and the new system and features help our employees learn about new technologies.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good, but hopefully, Zerto will do something with the pricing and the license.

Before choosing HPE Zerto Software, we did not evaluate any other options; we went with HPE Zerto Software directly.

I would advise others looking into using HPE Zerto Software to consider it because of the stability and cost savings. I have provided a review rating of 10 for this product.

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. 

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.

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 implemented Zerto because we wanted a flexible and quick tool that allowed us to recover in different situations. This purpose was successfully fulfilled by Zerto during the proof of concept phase, so we implemented it.

Zerto helps with quick recovery and integration with other processes. Providing as a service approach allows end-users to operate and perform recovery operations on their own assets based on their requirements and schedule preferences. It helps not only with recovery but also with DR tests that need to be executed at specific time frames, such as out-of-business hours. We had a few different requirements during its implementation, and Zerto helped us very well with all these needs.

Zerto has some specific options for replication, but it is mainly for virtual machines. We mainly use it for virtual machines. Zerto is not suitable for physical servers, but it can be used for virtual solutions such as OpenShift, Kubernetes, etc. In terms of its effect on our RPO, as I have not used a similar solution previously, the RPO value that we are getting is very good. It fits the requirements that we have from our customers because what we provide to our customers needs to be proven by the tests that we perform. Usually, their expectations are much lower than what we receive from Zerto. For example, we have application owners for whom 24 hours duration is enough to recover the business as compared to the 10 minutes that I have using Zerto. We use Zerto in real DR exercises and ask our customers to verify the results and the status of the recovered system and answer if the recovery was successful. We provide them the time needed to recover their system, and often, it is much quicker than what they require, so from our perspective, Zerto is very good. However, we cannot verify everything because we have some limitations in our DR test scenario. I can be 100% sure of the results of recovery only in the case of a real disaster on my infrastructure. At this time, based on the DR tests, it meets my customer needs.

We conduct DR exercises at least twice a year to measure the downtime we would have in the case of a real disaster. We simulate the disaster in a controlled environment and perform all related exercises. Once all activities are performed, we measure the time needed to recover systems from the data center that is down due to a natural disaster or technical issue. We get an idea of the downtime but the actual downtime varies depending on the issue type. It might not always be predictable or reduced through tooling as network or server issues can arise. In some specific scenarios, the downtime could be lower by using Zerto, whereas in some cases, Zerto would not help much. Based on the results of disaster recovery exercises and the RTO measured not only for one application but for recovering all of the applications in affected data centers, we can say that the time we need to recover the full data center is much lower than using traditional backup recovery solutions. Recovery with Zerto is much faster because we can recover in parallel many systems.

I am quite familiar with the user interface. It is easy for me to operate and perform different operations because I am an experienced user. In my opinion, the user interface is easy to understand and operate. The user interface is user-friendly.

Another important feature is the tool's automation capabilities, as it provides an external API to integrate with other tools and processes. This allows for a comprehensive IT ecosystem within a single dashboard, tailored to specific needs. Some operations can be limited for end-users. All of this can be provided not only through the GUI but also using the API. You can create your own application, integrate it with Zerto API, and develop features in your own application. You can use the API to integrate with your application and provide only the features that you want to end-users, facilitating custom application development. You can split the responsibilities based on the roles provided as well as based on your requirements. It is very flexible. From my point of view, the end-user experience is very good as an administrator of the tool and as the person responsible for the disaster recovery process.

As a user who used Zerto for eight years, there are specific issues that it cannot address. For instance, recovering physical servers is directly connected to the virtualized solution in use, meaning your infrastructure needs a VMware or Hyper-V solution. It cannot be used for bare metal physical server solutions. One improvement could be addressing the market segment related to physical servers. I understand this is a limitation of Zerto's technology. Still, from a customer's perspective, I would ask the vendor to find a solution to use Zerto for virtualized physical systems, such as physical servers. 

A second area for improvement relates to the speed of implementation. There should be a more streamlined process for enterprise applications.

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I did not encounter any issues during the operations, so I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability, so there is room for improvement on the vendor's side.

From my perspective, given the size of my infrastructure and the limitations based on the vendor's requirements and documentation, it fulfills my needs. Therefore, I would rate it a ten out of ten because I have not faced a situation where I needed more than what it provides.

It is being used at multiple locations.

I have the opportunity to use Zerto support, and I have used it many times for various questions and solving different issues or problems I encountered in my infrastructure. I would give them a rating of ten because it represents the highest level of support based on the technical knowledge of the support team, response time, and effectiveness of the provided resolutions.

Positive

Zerto was the first tool I started using once I took on the disaster recovery manager role in my company. I did not have experience with other tools.

The speed of implementation is an area for improvement. While deployment on straightforward infrastructure is easy, an enterprise company with strict access and vulnerability limitations requires manual configurations. This is neither easy nor quick. 

Implementation depends on the environment and customers. From an enterprise perspective, I expect a more streamlined implementation process, as many steps require manual action. This challenge is specific to my company due to limited access and port blockages. Implementing such tools is a one-time task. My intention is to provide feedback related to the installation process, not the operation.

I do not have much experience with different tools, so I cannot directly compare Zerto with other solutions. While conducting our proof of concept, I compared prices with just one other vendor. At the time, the price for Zerto was more favorable. Since I only use this tool and I do not have the need for others, it is difficult to compare the price now.

Zerto is an asynchronous replication solution. It provides what they call near-zero RPO value. There is a delay of a few seconds depending on the parameters of your infrastructure, such as the bandwidth, the workload in your infrastructure, the distance between data center latencies, and the speed of the network connections. There is no one solution that meets all the needs. You need to decide whether you need a synchronous or asynchronous solution. You should be aware of the pros and cons of both and the requirements of your organization. Synchronous replication might be risky in some specific situations. What looks good on paper might not always be good in reality. Zerto meets our needs for flexibility. It mitigates different problems related to infrastructure, even though there is always the possibility of losing some data.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten considering the features, support, feature development roadmap, and the frequency of new features provided to customers.

I use Zerto for continuous data protection.

The solution is very effective at preventing ransomware attacks. 

We have very good security now. It's enhanced our security. It has also massively improved disaster recovery.

The solution offers the shortest RPO time, the five-second RPO time, and continuous replication. The RPO is beyond our expectations. It's improved our RPO rate by 50%. These are great features. We have enhanced our security level after using Zerto, and there is a massive improvement in disaster recovery as well.

It's a straightforward product.

The near-synchronous replication is a great feature.

We've used Zerto to protect our virtual machines. 

It's impacted our RTOs by improving it by 200%.

Zerto has reduced downtime. We now have zero downtime using this product. It's improved overall by 90%.

We've saved a lot of time with Zerto. It's hard to quantify since we don't have any ransomware getting attacks.

It's reduced our disaster recovery testing by 50%.

It's helped our IT resiliency strategy by 100%. Before this solution, we didn't have a solution in place. Now, we are quite resilient. 

I don't see any improvements needed so far; we really enjoy using this product. However, there could be improvements in support. Here, in Malaysia, there is no on-site support.

I have used the solution for between one to two years.

I would rate the stability ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability ten out of ten.

I would rate the customer service five out of ten. There is room for improvement. We need more local support.

Neutral

We only have experience with Zerto. I can't compare it to other products. 

The initial setup took one day. It was easy.

We have Zerto deployed on-prem. We have it deployed in multiple locations. 

The solution does not require any maintenance. 

The implementation was done by just two to four people.

The return on investment has been around 50% to 60%.

Zerto is cost-efficient.

Zerto has fortified and improved the resilience of our IT infrastructure. We currently experience zero downtime and use it to protect our virtual machines. The improvement exceeds our target. However, we desire more local support.

I'd recommend the solution to other users. It offers a short RPO time and will fortify a company's IT infrastructure. 

I rate the product ten out of ten. We're a Zerto customer. 

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.

I am actually a value-added reseller. I personally do not use Zerto. I have customers that use Zerto, and they use it as their cyber recovery. They have also used it to move VMs.

When exactly a company can expect the benefits of Zerto depends on the use case scenario. In the instances I have seen with my customer, it has been both near and immediate-term benefits. Since it is easier for them to use and they are able to work with it and get their workloads done, they also saw benefits from a budget standpoint down the road.

The most valuable features in Zerto are ease of use number one and the support that has come from the Zerto team. They have been very hands-on with 'we are here to help you, train you and teach you how to fish, so you can drive it yourself.'

For us, the impact that Zerto has had on the IT resiliency strategy is that we use it as a way to help our customers set up data recovery should something happen. What we appreciate about it is the snapshot and how much easier it is to access.

The near synchronous replication works very well. This is not my experience. It is my customer's experience. They have been very happy with it. They had a bunch of VMs they wanted to move since they wanted to migrate some stuff, and it worked very well for them. It actually helped them beat their timeline as it worked so well. They were going to have a very, very, very hefty renewal that they had to pay. And so it saved them lots of money. It worked quickly and they were able to meet their timeline.

It's helped with DR testing. 

Better communication around pricing would be useful - particularly in light of the economic and tariff situation we have going on.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

We have not had any reports of instability in Zerto from clients. The use case I keep coming back to is our customer who used it to move a bunch of VMs. Once they got it up and deployed, they handily beat their schedule. At one point, they thought they were not going to get all the VMs moved and would have to do a renewal on part of them, however, the ease of use was so good with Zerto that they were able to migrate things much quicker.

Zerto's scalability has been good. One of the things that works for our customer set is what they call t-shirt sizing with extra small, small, medium, large, extra large and jumbo. Those are nice to have as a starting point to talk to a customer, however, then you can go in and tailor that specifically to the customer's needs.

I haven't had a need to contact Zerto's technical support.

Positive

I have used or sold alternatives to Zerto such as Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Zerto is the clear winner.

I find that the initial deployment of Zerto for a client is quite easy. The instances where we rolled it out at customers, the deployment has gone very smoothly. There seems to be something intuitive about Zerto that makes it easier for folks in a company to use.

There's not really any maintenance needed once deployed. 

On average, four people are required for the deployment.

The pricing is competitive.

If I were to compare Zerto to its competitors, Zerto is the winner in data recovery.

I am not a technical person, so I cannot answer that from a technical standpoint regarding what Zerto does better or worse than its competitors. I can answer it from a customer ease of use perspective. The biggest thing we have heard is that it is easy to use and intuitive. The sales teams and technical resources that Zerto has are there to help answer questions and teach the customer how to use it in their environment, so they are able to do things after the Zerto resources are no longer there.

My clients have tried to protect the virtual machines in their environment. I have not seen any effects on RPOs or RTOs. I am an official reseller of Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto overall a nine.