Zerto Reviews

A lot of use cases involve how we effectively manage our DR and make sure there's not a lot of manual effort. On the business side, we proved the solution worked and showed the analytics on the DR report afterward. Those are the requirements.

At one of the banks I worked for, we used it for our merger and acquisition to replicate a legacy application that was no longer supported. Rather than try to rebuild it, which would have taken days or weeks, we could use Zerto to replicate it to our data center and join it to our domain. That was one of the biggest use cases we have had. 

Another use case is for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and to migrate service to a public cloud.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is great. Not a lot of solutions can do that, and most organizations don't know that Zerto can do it. Once you have that near-sync capability, you can see how much more you can recover and be more resilient. 

At the end of the day, we're trying to protect our data and not put the company at risk, whether it's from a cyber attack or just any sort of DLP data loss. 

In financial services, data is paramount: protecting it, making sure you don't lose it, and integrating it. Having that near-sync ability is useful to any organization.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. It really increased how many points in time we can recover, and not only the time to do it but where we want to do it too. 

Generally, we choose a point in time because they're simulated tests and controlled. In the event of a true disaster, I'm sure I'd utilize one of the closer points to have more recent data, but it's good to have that option. Luckily, I haven't had to use that option.

It's night and day. With other solutions, you're locked into specific RPOs and RTOs based on how that solution works. Zerto gives us the flexibility to choose which we want to use and recover effectively.

The main valuable features are the fast RPO and RTOs we could achieve and the analytics behind that. 

In my role these days, I have to make sure I can prove to the executive team as well as the business lines why we chose this solution and how it can help us.

One of the projects we're working on is DRaaS service. Once that's implemented, we'll test that solution. The whole premise of using Zerto is to replicate one-to-many and then test that scenario.

Zerto should continue adding new features. When I used it at the other bank, it wasn't good with replicating VDIs and automation. They've made a little more advancements in automation and scripting since then. 

At one point, it was custom, requiring professional services. Now, Zerto has more built into its engine that will help with the failover of virtual desktops.

I was an early adopter. I worked for a managed service provider in New York City back in 2009 and was introduced to Zerto near the end of 2010, early 2011. That's when we started implementing it for our clients. I've been bringing Zerto wherever I go ever since.

Stability is great. Sometimes you have network blips, and you can be out of sync, but it'll catch up eventually. There are very minor issues, if any.

It is very scalable. For example, there's a tertiary site that we're building for the DRaaS service. 

We just go to initiate the one-to-many and replicate up there. It's easy.

The customer service and support are responsive initially, and then they help you solve your problem. There was only one time with the custom scripting for the VDI that they wouldn't help because it was custom, and they wanted more money for that. They incorporated that into their solution a few years later.

Positive

In the past, I have used a different solution. I've worked with SRM, Double-Take (which is terrible), and BMC Recovery Point. Ever since I got hooked on Zerto around 2011, it's been pretty much Zerto.

The installation itself is very easy. Any problems I've run into, either when I was managing it or doing the installation myself, support has helped every step of the way and has been very easy to work with.

It's on Expedient's cloud, which might be AWS. I'm not sure. I just know we're doing it through a third party.

A lot of the ROI is with engineering hours. If it took eight hours of overtime to pay one or two engineers to do a DR test, now we can do it in one hour. 

We can factor in how many DR tests you do and calculate the cost savings. That alone is a good ROI.

The pricing is pretty fair. It increases with the number of VMs you have. When we had about 600 VMs at my last bank, we did an enterprise licensing agreement that helped cut down the cost. It required signing on long-term, but it was the most effective.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I've used this solution for so long and have seen it mature. It's just easy. In IT, especially in a managerial role, we want things to work. We don't want it to be complex. If it serves the business goals of data resiliency, then that's all I need.

Definitely do a proof of concept (POC) and make sure it fits your use cases. On paper, it will, but every company is different. Sometimes, for some reason, it won't work. Or not that it won't work, it just doesn't fit what the business is trying to achieve. So do the POC and see for yourself if it works.

We store a lot of raw data for reporting and use Zerto to protect that data.

Before implementing Zerto, we lacked a data protection and recovery solution, resulting in a significant data loss incident of approximately 70 percent during a past event.

Zerto is easy to use.

The near-synchronous replication offers a critical advantage for our customers' multi-platform environments by providing continuous data protection with minimal delay.

The main benefit of Zerto is that it doesn't affect the performance of the cloud platform while protecting the data. We realized the benefits of Zerto within the first three months.

Zerto's implementation has significantly improved our recovery time objective, allowing us to get our systems back online much quicker.

Zerto has significantly improved our disaster recovery capabilities, reducing downtime from days to just two hours.

With Zerto in place, our disaster recovery time has been reduced to a maximum of two days, whereas previously we lacked a recovery solution altogether.

Our disaster recovery testing with Zerto exceeded expectations. We aimed to restore all data within five days, but using Zerto's capabilities, we achieved a full recovery in just two days.

Zerto saved our staff three days of work, freeing them for other tasks.

Zerto's continuous data protection, journal-based recovery, automation, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support, and non-disruptive testing have significantly improved our IT resilience strategy. These features not only enhance data protection and improve our Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective but also provide the flexibility and scalability needed for a robust IT environment.

It facilitates a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, eliminating the need for a dedicated physical data center to ensure business continuity in the event of an outage.

Zerto was our disaster recovery solution of choice because it offers a cloud-based implementation, which perfectly aligned with our organization's prioritization of cloud-based disaster recovery.

It stands out for its user-friendly approach to data protection and recovery, allowing for quick and efficient backups and restores.

Zerto's pricing structure could be more competitive to better suit the needs of a wider range of businesses.

The setup process could be simpler. A more streamlined installation would improve the user experience.

Zerto's long-term data storage capabilities, specifically how long data can be retained and managed, could benefit from further development.

I have been using Zerto for ten months.

We sometimes face challenges that require multiple hours of downtime but it is rare. I would rate the stability eight out of ten.

Zerto is expensive.

The technical support is quick to respond.

Positive

Integrating the initial deployment into our infrastructure proved to be a complex undertaking.

To ensure a smooth implementation, we prioritized planning and engagement, starting with management and then incorporating other stakeholders. We piloted the project with the operations team for a month before a full organizational rollout.

The deployment took around one week and involved six people.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto provides a return on investment through the peace of mind we get knowing that all of our data is protected.

Zerto is expensive.

After considering both Commvault and Carbonite, we ultimately decided Zerto was the best fit for our data protection needs.

Zerto emerged as our choice for data protection because its feature set directly addressed the specific needs of our organization.

I would rate Zerto eight out of ten.

Maintaining Zerto is manageable as we have a dedicated team of three people responsible for its upkeep.

Our organization consists of 40 analysts in one site.

Zerto provides robust data protection and excels in disaster recovery for businesses, but its cost may be steeper compared to other solutions.

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery replication side to side. 

We were running VMware Site Recovery Manager and it ran well. It was a great solution compared to what we had before. We didn't have disaster recovery issues. We were just doing our test. It ran superbly. Zerto improved the amount of time it took to failover and address any issues. We went from failing over in about three or four hours during the test to it taking one hour. It was very fast.

It's in a single department in a single company. Luckily, we don't really have to support much of our field force. We have approximately 4,000 agents who are in eleven states, but we don't have to go out into the states. We're on in one building and it's one business unit. We manage the failovers but it's just one group management.

Approximately four users use the solution.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of management. It's very easy to manage. My team grew and a team member took over my role for Zerto support. He was able to pick the ball up and run with it. It was very easy for him to pick it up and go forward. I haven't had to do a lot of management of the product. 

Our RTO is between four to ten seconds to our site, which is about a hundred and fifty miles north of my location. We bought dedicated lines and we've been very happy with Zerto's performance. 

Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do.

The near-synchronous replication Zerto offers is exceptional. Our pipe is 10 GB and we haven't overloaded that connection. We are very satisfied with it.

During our test last year, we moved systems around for users to test with. We had some misconfigurations in the journal sizes, they just weren't big enough. There was logging left on some SQL servers. Our DR test lasted for three days. We had a dedicated group come in and test. We failed back to production and then put it in the test phase again. We did it all within thirty minutes, and it worked very quickly. We were very satisfied.

Zerto has had a major impact on our RTOs. We've been feeling the impact for a while. It's steady here. It's exceptional. SRM dwarfed as far as our targets for RTOs. 

Zerto has reduced our DR testing. It reduced the amount of time we have to test because it's so easy to failover. We've been very pleased with that. It's even given us the option of where we might be able to test more often anytime. We would like to get to a place where we test it once a month where we would allow some business units to test, and then do another business unit the next month.

It used to take us a week for the failover process and testing. The testing has been majorly reduced to where it now takes a day. It took a day to failover, to get everything lined up and running, and it never worked. We never were able to officially have a successful DR test. SRM fixed that and then Zerto took it to the next level. It improved drastically. This has freed up staff to work on other tasks. It used to be that we needed a room full of people for the test where we now need two. 

I don't feel like we're a big enough customer to warrant being called every week or every month but it would be good to get a little bit more contact with a salesperson or engineer group. Our account executive is very good. He's done a great job, but it was hard for him to tie down an engineer. It was a little bit of a strain to get somebody lined up to show us what version 10 was about. Once we got it, it was perfect. It would be nice if it could be easier to do that. 

They have VPGs and VRAs. The management of that when trying to do a VMware upgrade can get a little finicky. You have to bring nodes or hosts up and down where the VRAs are running on the hosts. Sometimes the VRAs won't come back up or they may not respond. So when you're done doing your work, it could be that you have fifteen servers that are not replicating. So you'll have to stop, delete, manually remove what you need to do, recreate the VRA, and that's easy enough but you have to go through and do that, and then resync. That's part of IT. They are a little finicky. 

Version 9.7 has been a little easier to work with, and it integrates with VMware a lot easier. It shuts down the VRAs. The VRAs are finicky about how they get shut down. 

I have been using Zerto for six years.

We've been very satisfied with the stability of it. 

It is scalable. 

Support has been pretty good and responsive. I would rate them a nine out of ten. They're good. 

Sometimes getting in touch with somebody is hard. We're not that big of a customer though. 

Positive

It's been easy for new users to pick up and it was pretty easy for multiple people to work within the UI.

I was indirectly involved with the setup. It didn't take very long, it was like doing an upgrade. 

You just build the servers and the proxy up, install the VRA, and then one by one had them sync.

Seven months ago we had to do a complete resync which took about four to five days. It was straightforward. There is a lot of documentation on Zerto's support site. My advice would be to get the documentation off their site. Open a ticket for support at the same time. 

We have seen ROI in terms of resources and time. For our overall management of the system, it doesn't require too many resources. The upgrades are not too bad. You may have to dedicate a staff member to do it for a couple of days. I didn't have a lot of experience with it and the two upgrades I did were simple.

In terms of time, it has saved us north of 30%. It cut down on a lot of manpower. There has been a reduction in our management pattern from other prior solutions.

You pay to play and it's not cheap but it's worth it. 

We know we have the capabilities to do disaster recovery in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center. We're replicating about 150 miles north of us. That's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years for us. We're making a pivot to where we know we're going to have to go that way with some of the cloud solutions.

We have not had to use it for data recovery due to ransomware. We have gone through the industrial hardening of our environment. We have been rated as very mature as far as our security stands. We have actually had some counterparts that experienced some issues and they didn't have anything in place, and it was very bad for them. Luckily, we have not had to use it in that capacity. We feel really good about its capability from the testing we've done. We know we can use it for malicious attack response.

We have tested it to help protect VMs in our environment and we have found that it will work for that. We got decent results with testing and I was very impressed.

In terms of it reducing our overall backup and disaster recovery management, it hasn't. We needed two staff members for the last two solutions we used. This year we will need three because I will also be involved with Zerto.

Zerto has replaced our DR and replication legacy solution. We're using Veeam for our backups but Zerto has replaced everything replication-wise. It saved costs to manage them by 20%.

My advice would be to do a POC for its concept and everything you get. Get it. Do it. It's a good product. I have friends that work with other companies that provide similar services and one of their engineers told me that you can't beat Zerto. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. 

Zerto is deployed on a VM, and we use it to replicate the database for our POS system in our data center.

Zerto helps us when our server has an emergency. When we needed to get something from a server that had a corrupt file, it saved us from needing to go back to a tape or a backup to use that server. The recovery works better than our backup. I would rate that nine out of a 10.

It works great because we only use it in VMware for our virtual machines. We use Zerto Instead of snapshots. Zerto is a lot quicker than other solutions. It cuts our downtime in half when we need to recover data.

Data replication is the most valuable feature. The near-synchronous replication works in the background, so it does not interfere with the production usage of the server. Zerto is challenging to set up but easy to use. It's not difficult to configure once you see how it works. I'd give it at least eight out of 10 for ease of use.

I've been using Zerto for about a year.

Zerto is highly scalable. Even though we only have it on a couple of servers, we could do all of them if we want to.

Customer support is great. I'd say it is at least a nine. When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond. That's a problem everywhere.

Positive

I've used backup solutions like Veeam in the past, but Zerto seemed like a better, faster solution. We adopted Zerto because of the speed, and because we wanted to do everything in-house. I would rate Zerto eight out of ten for ease of use, but Veeam seven out of 10. 

Setting up Zerto is straightforward, but I needed to call tech support a few times with some basic questions. I handled the setup by myself because I'm in charge of servers and VMware. It doesn't require much maintenance aside from updates. 

It reduces the time and effort needed to get our data. 

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten. When I first installed it, I learned a lot about how it worked and how to integrate it with my storage. I needed to configure our storage to work with this because we do everything in-house. It's crucial to understand how everything works together.

You need to read the installation instructions thoroughly and prepare your VMware environment. I jumped right into it and didn't go through everything. Read everything and watch some videos first to prepare. If I do it again, I will watch the videos a few times to make sure I understand what's required and go from there.

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

We use Zerto to protect our centralized environment on our data center.

We implemented Zerto to ensure our environment keeps running in the event of power failure or hardware issues.

Zerto is extremely easy to use.

The near synchronous replication is powerful and eliminates the need to use other storage solutions. The near synchronous replication is important for the services that we are providing.

It has drastically reduced our downtime. Previously, recovering from an issue took three days, but now with Zerto, we're back up and running in about an hour, minimizing disruption and keeping our business operational.

The continuous data protection has transformed our IT operations. By enabling us to restore our entire environment and resume functionality within hours, it eliminates the multi-day downtime we previously experienced in recovery situations.

Zerto has significantly reduced our operational costs and time commitment by 90 percent. Compared to our previous solution, Zerto requires fewer resources and allows us to complete tasks much faster.

Zerto safeguards our virtual machines, ensuring critical applications recover in minutes while less essential ones are restored within hours. This significant improvement replaces our previous recovery time of two to three days for the entire environment.

It has reduced our downtime by 85 percent.

While we hadn't previously tested our disaster recovery plan, our current backups and improved recovery time give us greater confidence in our ability to respond to an incident.

Zerto strengthens our IT team's disaster recovery plan by boosting their confidence in the system's reliability. With Zerto, the system can now recover quickly from the biannual power outages that used to cause instability, thanks to its improved stability within the failover environment.

The most valuable features of Zerto are the ease of use and recovery speed.

The most valuable feature for enhancing our data protection strategy is the ability to test and validate that the protection is up and running when we need it.

While Zerto's current version supports VMware environments, I'd like the added flexibility of using Hypervisors as well. Although previous Zerto versions offered this functionality, it seems to be missing in the latest iteration.

I have been using Zerto for one year.

I would rate the stability of Zerto nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Zerto nine out of ten.

The technical support team was responsive and effective in resolving the small number of problems we encountered.

Positive

We used to rely solely on Veeam for backups, but now we have a layered approach. We still perform Veeam backups for long-term data protection. However, we've added Zerto for disaster recovery, enabling much faster recoveries of our critical systems in case of a major outage. This way, we have both comprehensive backups and the ability to get our key functions back up and running quickly.

Zerto boasts faster recovery speeds than Veeam and offers a significantly easier testing process.

The deployment was straightforward. It was completed by one person in one day.

The time Zerto saves us restoring our services provides a significant return on investment.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Our Zerto deployment spans multiple locations and is managed by a team of eight administrators who are responsible for protecting 30 virtual machines.

While Zerto itself doesn't require regular maintenance, it's important to conduct periodic tests to verify our disaster recovery functionality and generate reports to monitor its health.

I would recommend Zerto because it provides better and more simplified protection.

We use it mainly for our disaster recovery, so we replicate our production VMs between our data centers.

The solution meets our high availability and disaster recovery needs.

The disaster recovery reviews itself and it has the ability to fail over within seconds and get new machines up and running on a new data center in a matter of minutes.

It's pretty easy to use. It depends on how detailed you get into the product. If you get real detailed into the product with some of its backup capabilities, it can get a little bit more detailed, for example. However, for the disaster recovery piece itself, it's it's pretty easy to use.

The near synchronous replication is effective. It works really well. The replication and the RTO, RPO times are pretty much the best in the industry.

We saw some benefits right away in that we were understanding that we were now highly available. We also started to see more and more benefits as time went on.

It helps protect virtual machines in our environment.

Our downtime and our ability to replicate happen within seconds. We've seen other products that take about five minutes. Now, we take seconds to get things back up and going. Therefore, the loss of data is virtually nothing. We've been extremely happy with that. 

It's helped reduce downtimes in pretty much any situation. We've had instances where a data center or a cluster in a data center was down or we were having problems with it and being able to have that replicated data being able to be spun up within a matter of minutes. It's significantly helped where if we didn't have that ability, we were probably looking at at least three to four hours, if not a day, of downtime. We're talking about the difference between minutes of downtime versus hours to potentially days.

With Zerto we haven't had any any actual instances where ransomware or anything like that actually comes up. We do yearly testing where we'll fail over an entire data center. While we haven't had any malicious incidents, we've had success with conceptual testing.

Zerto hasn't necessarily reduced the overall testing in our organization. We still have to do the testing. That said, it's reduced the time in which it takes to perform that testing. So, we still have our requirements to do yearly testing. However, it's at least reducing the amount of time it takes. Before, the testing would take an entire weekend and multiple departments in order to complete it. Now we're finishing our testing in a matter of hours. We're knocking off quite a bit of time with Zerto - plus hours of time in order to complete testing.

Zerto is now our resiliency strategy. We're able to replicate all of our data and be able to bring up an entire data center within a matter of minutes, which has become our go-to for our resiliency within both of our data centers.

Recently, they started forcing everybody to use a Linux-based appliance for their z/VMs. That appliance has been extremely touchy and, in some cases, problematic. However, there were Windows-based z/VMs prior, and we never really had issues with them. But now we're running into problems where certificates aren't able to be imported for things like LDPAPS and SSL. We've run into actual downtime with the z/VMs recently, which is new to the Linux app appliance. Overall, the appliances had some bugs, and they've not been as reliable as they were in the past.

I've been using Zerto for a little over 4.5 years.

There are the no real lag issues, We've only had a couple of instances where the system has been down, and wasnew since our Linux appliance install. Overall, it's been pretty reliable with the caveat that the new Linux appliance has had some downtime. Prior to that, we hadn't had any. 

Scalability's been good. There's a couple of instances where they could allow for some more local replication, however, scalability has been good.

I quite frequently contact technical support. On most things, they have been pretty good. The issues that we've had with that z/VM, those tickets can take quite a while. I have one ticket that's been open for about four and a half months now. They're still trying to figure out some of the bugs within their system, which has caused some tickets to take longer than they really should.

The quality of response has been pretty good. Maybe 7  or 8 out of 10 are quality responses. They're they're pretty good, pretty knowledgeable. Again, there are some instances where they're still learning the system as well, or there's something new, and it's a little bit odd; however, other than that, their answers are typically pretty spot on and pretty well documented.

Neutral

We used to build products by Nutanix. Their RTO times were much higher. That's about the only solution that I've used at least recently.

I wasn't part of that decision making process. Zerto had been onboarded by the time I came on to to the team here.

The deployments have been pretty easy as long as you have your network topology figured out. If you're just starting up a brand new appliance, and you're running through a setup, signing IPs , et cetera, you have to make sure that the z/VMs can talk to each other. It's a pretty easy process.

Usually, for the setup, we have the SME, which is me, and then a backup to be a second pair of eyes, however, a lot of the work is been done just by myself.

In terms of maintenance, there are updates that need to be applied. The certificate imports need to happen depending on expiration dates. There also is their key cloak integration for authentication, and that requires some upkeep as well depending on how you're signing permissions and what you're signing permissions for.

I've done redeployments myself, for example, when we switched over from Windows to Linux to z/VMs. That was all in-house. At the time when they did their very first deployment, they had used a third party vendor to assist with that. We've not needed them since. 

I don't have any visibility on the pricing. 

We're a Zerto customer.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

New users need to understand the product prior to deployment and make sure that they're taking the time to whiteboard this out. Your VRAs are going to take up a good amount of space. So users need to understand that when you're replicating data over, you are making a second copy of that data, and understand what your test scenarios are going to be. You need to understand if you need things like a test environment to actually be within Zerto since that will be taking up more space. Overall, people just be aware that the Linux appliances still have to have their bugs worked out. For first-time users, especially, I would keep those deployments as simple as possible to start.

A lot of our focus area has been around capacity planning that includes virtual machine rightsizing and then construction for failover and resiliency-type models. The other area that is important to us is looking at data in motion, data at rest, and data in transit.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted to be able to go ahead and focus a lot on workload migration and disaster recovery.

I can quickly restore data by reverting anything with more or less a nightly backup. I can pretty much have the data through recovery checkpoints, and each of the checkpoints can only be around five seconds apart.

When I need to work a lot with VPGs, it has a lot of capabilities for that. Monitoring is also very important for us. We do work with Splunk, and I am looking a lot around for logs, metrics, and traces. The capabilities that I get are system throughput, and CPU and RAM input/output.

I have used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have pretty much followed a 3-2-1 strategy. We have three copies of production data and two backup copies. We have two different media and then one off-site copy. It has this offering there.

It's helping very much in terms of the malware. They have a ransomware protection capability.

I have used other solutions jointly with Zerto. What is happening is that they have a focus on isolating and locking with a cyber resiliency vault, and what I have been doing more or less around the vault is working with the Delinea Privileged Access Manager solution. So, some areas have intersections with other tools in our stack. I would love to continue seeing more use cases out of Zerto so that I do not have to defer this anywhere else.

It has enabled us to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I think of it as a cloud migration tool. Having DR in the cloud is very important for our organization. I use it with Microsoft Azure.

With Zerto, I have seen five-second near-synchronous replication, so there are thousands of checkpoints in one day, and then afterward, I can have a periodic backup. I can space it out between twelve-hour snapshots. We can have one to three checkpoints per day. I can recover to the state seconds before any sort of attack, and I can utilize Zerto's in-built orchestration and automation. I could easily fail over the entire site without any sort of disruption. Those are the things I see very much in terms of positives. There is a lot of information that it can gather with synchronous replication. The other thing is that I have seen other disaster and backup service offerings, and they very much focus on getting a container image installed or some sort of binary file and then deployment from there afterward.

I find it easy to migrate the data. Once somebody understands how Zerto works, particularly around areas for analytics and automation, with the reference architecture, they will be able to quickly deploy it.

I see a lot of visibility in terms of proactive management with SLA monitoring, run metrics, and other things. We are able to test infrastructure using live and personalized data. It, in turn, becomes very much of a team effort.

Zerto provides complete visibility in terms of storage and consumption data. We get to know the capacity and application volumes. I can also address compliance aspects, such as PCI DSS which is important for us as part of the RPO.

They have an intelligent, predictive infrastructure, so I can just pretty much determine the required compute storage and other server networking resources, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.

It also saves recovery time. We pretty much monitor that information. In terms of time savings, we are able to ensure that we can set up a backup quickly, figure out the integration details with the use of APIs, and meet our requirements around client security. Afterward, there is the cost consideration. Better documentation on the restoration process would be helpful.

Ransomware is one area where we are using Zerto. If we were utilizing another solution, that might have only been AWS-specific, and we might have not gotten much assistance in proceeding with their public cloud vendor as a result. We might have to figure out what we can do around working with an XDR or another mode of ingesting that data for any vulnerabilities and how to focus on encryption thereafter. If we were to consider another vendor, some of them may not have support for Azure. They might be AWS-focused.

Zerto has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. We can create failover tests seamlessly, and we can do this routinely. We are able to save time and look at how we can discern between RTO and RPO.

Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Our team size is still roughly the same. We have not seen our headcount change as a result, but we do not need to hire external consultants to support a project.

If I wanted to focus on operational recovery, which may be recovering instances in the database with a 15-second data loss, there are systems administrators designed to take care of that. With Zerto's offering, someone can utilize the Zerto solution as opposed to depending on any sort of manual human intervention.

The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center.

Zerto has near-synchronous replication. I like it very much. They had an acquisition and are now a part of HPE. I see it very much as a robust solution.

A slight disadvantage of Zerto is that it requires the Windows Server operating system as the base OS. Over time, I would like to see more offerings in that regard. There should be more deployment options other than just the Windows operating system.

The implementation is very quick and painless, but it would be good to have more information that is not case-sensitive. In the server portal, some fields are case-sensitive. It took some time for me to understand initially.

If a VPG goes down and an application host is not responding, I want to have a little bit more flexibility to automatically point the recovery to other hosts. I would like to see a little bit more flexibility to automatically sustain two applications in their most optimal state. If the VPG is going down and any of the recovery hosts are in maintenance mode, there should be a way for maximum flexibility so that it can automatically utilize Zerto to point that recovery to other hosts.

I want some more information about how to work with bare metal drives. I have been doing some work in capacity planning for using MDM and FormFactor cable and then looking at system throughput, App latency, and a lot of scripts in Linux. I would like to have a little bit more information for anybody needing to work with bare metal drives.

I have been using Zerto for several years.

I have not seen any service disruption that impacted us. If anything like that were to occur, they would communicate it ahead of time.

It is scalable. We have more than 20,000 endpoints.

I do reach out to Zerto, and if there are any questions, we have a ticket in-house, so everyone is working on reviewing it at the same time. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. There are no negatives.

Positive

We were not using a similar solution. 

By bringing in Zerto, some legacy work has been discontinued. There is operational recovery, application migration, and application cloning. These are the three areas where Zerto has helped us.

We have a cloud version. It is a public cloud.

Its initial deployment was straightforward. I have been trying to focus on capabilities and encryption and how a long-term retention repository works, at least looking at the data capture. Another thing is utilizing some information with APIs and cloud scaling. I have broken down a lot of my use cases, and we have Zerto on the public cloud. Based on that, I was able to figure out how to work with features like compute as well as storage.

Its implementation took about two to three months. In terms of maintenance, it requires maintenance. We focus a lot on metrics such as RTO and RPO monitoring. Somebody can also put it in maintenance mode operation.

We had Zerto representatives, and we also had work done in-house. 

I work with a team. Other colleagues are also involved in the effort. We have a team of around ten employees.

We did look at a few other vendors' offerings, but we decided on Zerto. Our organization has a partnership with them, and the other thing was that there were a few industry events, and they were able to effectively make a pitch. Their demonstration was very effective. It was also something in which the client was interested in.

To those looking to implement Zerto in their organization, I would advise creating use cases of their own and then trying to see how Zerto effectively helps them. A few areas where they can work are gathering information with the virtual machine rightsizing and being able to go ahead and create resiliency models. Afterward, they can look at compliance. For us, PCI DSS and locating the public cloud environment being used, which in our case was Microsoft Azure, were important. After they have created use cases on their own, they can come to Zerto and see how they are able to effectively handle it. If they are able to think through what they need, they can come up with specific questions and then get Zerto to effectively deliver.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.