Zerto Reviews

Real-time replication for our Disaster Recovery site, which is currently hosted in another on-premise site but will shortly be moving to a Data Center in the Cloud.

I have also used this solution to do point-in-time restores of Exchange mailbox items and to check updates from Microsoft.

This solution has given us the confidence to know that our complex systems are being backed up off-site in real-time and are testable on demand. This gives me a real sense of ease when speaking to Management about our resilience, and being able to demonstrate it includes everyone in the processes to confirm that.

The ability to fully test your entire environment without actually performing a failover is invaluable.

I really appreciate the Mobile app that allows me to monitor, at any time of the day or night, whether the replications are up and running.

Creating Virtual Protection Groups allows us to treat business services as one.

There needs to be more flexibility in the licensing. I've mentioned to Zerto Management that I find the licensing at twenty-five VMs to be very restricting to an SME business, and could there be some flexibility here? Businesses like ours constantly change their IT due to the flexibility of Virtualisation and it would be great to get Zerto on board with that same flexibility.

It has been very stable and gives me minimal problems, especially when compared to other parts of the business network.

I would imagine that the product would not have an upper limit due to its architecture. It seems to cope easily with our own environment of approximately forty VMs.

The person I worked with was very friendly and had excellent knowledge of the product and understood the wider implications of the installation.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. The installation and configuration are incredibly easy for someone who is reasonably familiar with IT Management.

We implemented this solution in-house.

We do not consider an ROI analysis to be relevant in this area.

While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install.

Before choosing this solution we extensively tested the built-in functionality of our EMC VNX SANs but they didn't function to an acceptable standard so we looked to third parties.

After researching the market thoroughly we decided that this was the one to go for.

I'd strongly suggest carrying out a proof of concept if you're looking at this part of your IT solution.

We use the solution for disaster recovery purposes. 

We implemented Zerto because it is crucial for our organization, especially as we move into the cloud. We needed to ensure that we could retrieve data properly and migrate easily. The solution allows us to keep our users collaborating throughout the migration process, making it much quicker than our previous solution.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It's easy to use, especially when moving data to keep our users collaborating. Putting the server into maintenance mode and moving our systems has worked well for our team.

Zerto is easy to use because of its simple setup and configuration. It also has a user-friendly interface, making data migration, seamless server maintenance, data recovery, and automated replication easy to use.

The replication feature is very valuable. For example, the solution provides synchronous replication, ensuring that data is almost instantly copied to the recovery site with minimal latency. This real-time replication means that the data at the disaster recovery site is nearly up to date with the primary site, reducing data loss in the event of failure.

It is very important to our organization because replication is a fundamental aspect of modern IT infrastructure and disaster recovery. It ensures continued access by having a copy of the data available at a secondary location, which is critical for major business operations during a primary site failure. Even in cases of data loss, replication allows for the restoration of data from the latest copy, minimizing downtime and aiding in quick retrieval.

The main benefits of using Zerto include improved data protection, data recovery, and operational efficiency. Regarding data protection, replication's continuous availability and redundancy ensure that our data is always available at a secondary location, protecting against data loss. Redundancy means having multiple copies of data, which is critical for recovering from data corruption or loss.

We have used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Implementing automated backup solutions has helped us save time in data recovery situations. Regular backups ensure we always have copies of our data and systems for recovery. It has helped ensure that our organization is well-prepared to handle protection and disaster efficiently. By identifying the request and replying promptly, we can ensure the resilience of our overall service.

The tool must improve its long-term storage cloud strategy, making it more seamless and improving the solution's downtime features. 

I have been working with the product for one and a half years. 

We did not encounter any issues in stability. 

The solution's technical support is good. 

Positive

We used AWS Cloud before Zerto. From my experience, both Zerto and AWS solutions are easy to use. They both have user-friendly interfaces that simplify managing disaster recovery tasks, including setting up replication and handling failover and failback processes.

AWS offers a wide range of cloud-native disaster recovery services, like AWS Backup and AWS Disaster Recovery, which are integrated into its management console. AWS also supports automation through APIs and integrates well with enterprise systems, which allows organizations to automate backup, recovery, and failover processes.

The initial setup is straightforward and can be completed within a month. The configuration process is minimally complex. We first assess the current environment, looking at training requirements and infrastructure. After that, we do design and configuration, including architecture design, installation, and configuration. Lastly, we do testing and validation. We have finally distributed the team. After that, we will train our employees through training sessions. We'll give them documentation and train them. And lastly, we do the deployment rollout.

Our in-house team did the deployment. There were ten resources. 

Automated testing and recorded tests can vary based on several factors, including the complexity of our IT environment. For us, it takes around seven to eight days. It's still taking the same time, so we must explore more. Our team is exploring the process more, so it's still taking that much time.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use it primarily for DR.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is that it is the easiest to install, upgrade, and manage. Most things in the product are fairly intuitive and easy, including upgrades. You don't have to dig through a bunch of manuals or go through a bunch of technical data to make it work.

The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us.

The alerting could be fine-tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them.

It could be cheaper as well.

I've been using it for six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any real problems or downtime. The only thing is that it runs on Windows, so that has its own problems.

Zerto's scalability is very good. We haven't had any scaling problems. We tested out DR in Azure, DR to VMware on GCP, and DR on AWS. It performed on all of those. The AWS setup was the most complicated, but AWS with Windows is a little bit messy.

We currently have 400 licenses. We have two ML350s, and we use Zerto to keep them replicated. If one fails, we just move to the other. That has been expanding, and that's where we've been adding licenses.

Zerto's technical support is very responsive. We had some posts that were not working properly and caused some issues with Zerto. The technical support staff were very helpful and worked through the night to help us resolve that. They always solved any problem I've had, so I'll give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used SRM. It had a lot of specialized plugins and specialized machines, but was very cumbersome. We weren't guaranteed that it would work all the time. It was very complicated to set up and manage as well.

SRM was storage-vendor-dependent because you had to have plugins through the storage vendors. It wasn't IP-based at the time and relied on storage-based replication. We had disparate storage arrays and disparate systems, and the IP-based replication treasury was much more resilient on our end.

The initial setup was unbelievably easy. We had Zerto up and running in five minutes, whereas setting up the SRM replication took weeks and needed technical support staff.

We deployed it ourselves.

In terms of ROI, it was quite expensive, but I think we got a lot of value out of it, such as being able to have a reliable DR method, particularly offsite. We have very poor latency locations, and sometimes, we replicate those. Zerto makes that very easy.

From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high.

We looked at Veeam, but Zerto was a better match for our needs.

I would advise you to give Zerto a try in your environment. Get a trial license and see how it works. I think you'll be very impressed.

Overall, I've been very happy with Zerto, and I'd give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use the solution for continuous data protection and cloud onboarding.

The analytic tools are great. 

The external API is something we're using quite a lot. It was upgraded, however, we still haven't upgraded to nine. We were starting to work at six, then seven, then eight, and now we are at eight of five updates. We've been working with this product quite a lot, and they have constantly added a few features. The long-term journal is one feature that is useful in that it allows us to use the product as both CDP and backup. You don't need the backup and disaster recovery tool. That's lowered the overall maintenance and operational costs. The OPEX gets reduced, once you use these two products. 

They have reasonable support. The Zerto university for training staff is very useful. It's very easy to get people on board and to get technicians to work and be familiar with the product. The virtual labs are very useful. You have a sandbox and you can easily play and try the product.

Unlike other products that split the VPG into protection plans and activation plans, they're doing everything within the same location. 

Technical support is good.

It's a very stable solution.

They could improve their online documentation.

From a reliability perspective, the product is around seven. It's less reliable than, others for example. They have one limitation when they have a virtual protection group that does everything.

From the ease of deployment perspective, it requires expertise and time. It's not very easy to do auto-tagging or to run multiple VPG genes at the same time. So, from multi-tenant or multi-complex scenarios such as using Zerto external products, such as firewalls, while their own product is good, it's part of a larger ecosystem, that still has a long way to go.

The triggering of external products could be better. Combining a master runbook and not just a single VPG or splitting the protection group from the activation plan could be better. There will be a protection policy and activation policy as being done in other products. 

Better tagging and better multi-term support are needed. Currently, there is no tenant admin support, only global admin support. They should work at the tenant level instead of the global admin level.

Right now it's an HPE product; they're no longer a startup. We are hoping that being bought by a major company will do good for them and they'll fix what needs to be fixed. There were very good products, to begin with, and HPE should work to make it even better.

We've been using the solution for the last three years at this point. 

The stability of the product is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable and the performance is good.

Technical support has been great. We are happy with the level of support.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployments. In terms of the cloud we are using, we are using Azure. We are using our own Cloud provider; we are using VMware Cloud Director.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities. They are a very good product, however, they are not perfect just yet.

We utilize Zerto to backup our on-prem environment to our cloud provider. We've also used it for migrations from on-prem to our cloud provider.

Our deployment model is a hybrid. We're using on-prem and also replicating to Azure.

It is used in our production environment and also our lower environment, on-prem. It's like a DR, as we're backing it all up to our cloud provider. There are a handful of servers involved, replicating and backing up.

It saves us about eight to 10 hours a month in staff time.

Another benefit is just the peace of mind that everything is backed up. We rely on the backups, that they're good backups. It's not like we have to second-guess them.

It has also helped us with our migration to our cloud provider. It's made it easier, sped up the process, and taken a lot of the guesswork out of it.

The solution has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations for our backup and recovery side by at least two people.

The most valuable features are 

• the single pane of glass
• the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform.

In addition, the RPOs and RTOs are great on it. It keeps up with things. The protection has been perfect so far when we have done our tests of spinning things up every six months or so. All our backups have come up with no issues at all. They just make great replication copies.

Zerto is also easy to use. That single pane of glass makes it very easy to check on the status of replicated items, and if there are any issues, to dig into them to fix them.

So far, it's been pretty good. I haven't had any issues. If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that.

We have been using Zerto since 2018.

So far, it's been very stable. We don't have any issue with the services or the ZVAs. They just keep trucking. There have been no stability issues at.

It's very easy to scale with it. As our environment has grown over the years, we've been able to add ZVAs to it, configure them, and they just fall right into the mix. Scaling is very easy.

Technical support has been very helpful and quick to get back with responses. Ticket turnaround time has never taken more than an hour for me to receive a response back to a general question.

We used Avamar. The primary reason we switched to Zerto was the integration with cloud providers that it provides.

I was not involved in the implementation, but I do remember that it was a pretty short implementation time. It included setting up the ZVA agents in our on-prem environment and connecting to our provider's cloud storage. The longest part of the implementation was getting the data, the initial seed or the backups, up there. But that's nothing against Zerto. Every environment will be different on that and has to get its initial copy up there. Since then, keeping copies up to date has been good. It meets up with RPOs and RTOs.

The initial implementation and getting everything set up took us about two and a half weeks. After that, to get everything that we are protecting into the cloud took us close to a month. We had to do it in stages, due to our work environment and our connections at the time. We didn't have the biggest connections, but that's more on our side, not Zerto's.

There are three people involved in maintaining Zerto for us. They're systems engineers.

Zerto is a lot easier to use than Avamar: easier management, easier setup, and the single pane of glass to watch over everything makes it better. I wouldn't say there's really a cost savings. They're probably comparable in price, but there were a lot more features and options with Zerto than in Avamar.

If you want something that's easy to set up, with a single pane of glass, and that doesn't take a backup administrator to admin, Zerto is the way to go.

The only lesson we really learned, and this has been resolved now, is that when we initially started using Zerto there were some hiccups when it came to Linux servers, hiccups that we had to work through. Support was very helpful and resolved it for us, but it made it a little bit of a manual process. In the later releases of Zerto, they've resolved those issues. They just had to work out some kinks.

We use Zerto as a robust failover and replication solution.

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

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

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

I love all the features really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup is very straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use this solution for disaster recovery. The initial sync was from Pure to Compellent, and DR with disparate storage was great. Once we identified our critical servers, vetted the Live and Test Failover, and got the necessary configuration at our DR site, we are now able to perform tests in a safe bubble.

This solution is an integral part of our DR plan. The data and servers we needed are protected in a group as I need them. Changing or adding servers is easy and fast. The ability to protect resources that are in hurricane zones has been fantastic. Being able to safely perform DR testing remotely has enabled us to meet DR goals that were put in place. The first DR test with everyone in a room was fun, as everyone who hadn't seen it was amazed at how fast a server can come online.

The replication has been outstanding, it was three times as fast as initial Compellent replication. The ability to copy new data and protect new servers without a significant delay in getting the data is very valuable.

The ability to perform DR testing to ensure data integrity is critical.

The mobile app is great.

Increased granularity in how long to keep the journal would be nice, currently you can only do hourly up to 1 day, after that it is only daily.  The ability to test failover for a single VM in a VPG would be beneficial for testing purposes.  Currently alerts come from both replication managers at times, creating a lot of alerts; reducing those would be good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Setup is really easy and quick. Make sure that you have your desired networking for replication and testing in place.

You are getting what you pay for, as this is a solution that requires minimal management after it is configured.

We did not evaluate other options that are worth noting.

EMC was too expensive and everything else was tied to the storage vendor.

It has been a great purchase, and we have no regrets.

Not much can be improved in this solution as it has performed to what we had hoped and has the features we currently desire.

We use it for backup and replication.

The total time for replication has been reduced drastically for us and that really adds value in the long run because time equals money and resources.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. Previously, when we were doing it across our own locations, we had to make sure it was working by doing a lot of testing back and forth.

Also, the solution is already up to the mark on audits and certification.

For us, the most valuable features are the quick upload time and how the sync works. The sync is pretty good and that's really helpful. The quick upload is important to us because other solutions were lagging behind. We have VMware SRM and Veeam, and they have been pretty slow and sluggish. We have had some challenges with them.

We have been using Zerto for seven years.

We're just replicating and I assume it runs on some kind of cloud as an overlay, so the stability is pretty good.

The scalability is insane. Really good.

An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time.

Neutral

We still have some other solutions in-house. We are not fully dependent on Zerto. We are still trying to get rid of the others, but we have not entirely moved on.

In 2014, when Zerto was launched, the initial setup was pretty simple.

We used an integrator. Our experience with them, at our engineering level, was that it was pretty smooth and streamlined, the first time we used Zerto. We had a few issues in the initial deployment, but later on, when we moved to scripting, the process became streamlined.

I would like to see different service levels. They're good, but it still takes a lot of our budget in ops.

We evaluated Veeam and SRM. Zerto is an HPE product, and we have been using a lot of HPE servers. That trust in HPE won our business.

When comparing Zerto with Veeam and SRM, the latter are newer in the market. They try to provide a multi-cloud strategy with tie-ups across six different clouds, which is different from Zerto. That's where I would use them if I had to.

All the solutions were almost equal but Zerto is still better because they have a lot of releases and new versions.

We are just using it for backup and replication. We have not yet had an event where we have had to restore.