Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery replication between two sites.

We started to use this solution to help with disaster recovery planning and fast recoverability.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have two different SANS by EMC, VMware as our DOS network operating system, and we have a mixture of Windows, Linux, Red Hat, and Cisco switches.

We haven't done DR in the cloud because we don't do anything in the cloud.

We haven't used Zerto for immutable data copies because everything is on-premises. We just use it in a VM environment for the VMDK replication.

It's made us feel more secure, and we used it a couple of times for failover, so it's an essential part of the business operations.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been business critical. It's almost as important as a running production server.

It reduced our downtime. We can recover in five to six minutes versus 12 hours. That amount of downtime would have cost our organization $30,000.

The solution saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware. We got infected, noticed the infection within seven minutes, and restored it to a point in time. We failed over to our disaster site, deleted the infected server, and 24 hours later we replicated back to our corporate site.

It helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It's easier to plan, and the procedure is the same no matter the operating system or the applications installed.

It reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery. It also reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management, but we have not reduced our workforce because of it.

Real-time or near real-time replication is the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential.

The ease of use is great. You just have to be familiar with it, know how to set up your virtually protected groups, and know what fits your environment the best.

I love the solution's near synchronous replication. It's business critical to our organization.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment.

It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual.

Zerto hasn't replaced all of our legacy backup solutions.

I have been using this solution for about nine years.

I would rate the stability 10 out of 10.

I haven't had any issues with scalability. We don't have any plans to increase usage and buy more licenses, but we will if we need to.

Technical support is really good. We've used the solution for more than eight years, and we've only needed to call them three or four times.

I would rate technical support 10 out of 10.

We previously used VMware DRS. We made the switch to Zerto because of reporting and ease of use.

There was a learning curve, but the setup was pretty easy. For our deployment model, we have one VPG per server, so it's one-to-one.

For maintenance, there are quarterly patches, and we set up testing of our VPGs every six months.

Deployment was done in-house.

We've seen ROI in active disaster recovery and failover.

I wish it were cheaper, but I would purchase it again at the same price.

We haven't reviewed any other product in the last eight years, but if I can say that I can get six to eight seconds RPO and RTL, that's incredible.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is just easier to use, it's not as cumbersome, it's straightforward, and training is easy.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

For those who are interested in this solution, my advice is to evaluate it, test it, and buy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto since 2016 in my career.

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

Zerto is very scalable.

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

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

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

Positive

The initial deployment of Zerto was easy for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use Zerto to replicate our Oracle databases from the main site to the other site. I have a number of fairly large Oracle databases, approximately four or five terabytes, and we're replicating to a Doctor site. We're actually moving our Doctor site from Colorado to Virginia, and I'm not sure Zerto can support the move. We'll just have to rebuild the reputation in the new site, but I'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it.

We explored cloud disaster recovery with Zerto, but because of the size of our database, it's not cost effective.

What I appreciate about Zerto is that it's set and forget. It just works. As long as you give it enough space for journaling and things like that, it's really resilient. It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, and I know that it's always going to be available if I need it.

The near synchronous replication is great because I can restore a production database up to a minute, and the granular restore or the brick level file restore option is beneficial. It's great for real-time or store level recovery, too.

We tested it, and it performed excellently. I know it works.

I wish there was a mechanism or a plug-in to do IP failover. We have to change the DNS entry and Infoblox manually, although we can script it, but we haven't gotten around to it.

One aspect I don't appreciate about Zerto is the plug-in, especially when it migrated from appliance from Windows server to the appliance, and you have to configure Active Directory authentication. I think it's unnecessarily complicated. That should be simplified for sure.

I have been using Zerto in my current position since we acquired it three or four years ago.

Support is fantastic. Many vendors, especially after COVID, have seen their support decline, but not with Zerto. Their support is consistently great.

Positive

I have experience with Veeam before. Zerto is better. Veeam seems pretty simplistic compared to Zerto.

The setup with Zerto was easy. It's pretty intuitive. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but not significant.

I would rate Zerto eight or nine out of ten.

While we primarily function as a service provider rather than serving a direct use case, our core focus lies in disaster recovery. We employ a rigorous testing process akin to gear testing and actively engage in recovery operations using Zerto for a diverse clientele, including numerous entities in the financial and government sectors.

Zerto is straightforward to use.

We started to see the full benefits of Zerto one month after the implementation.

The effort on the RPOs has been excellent, greatly enhancing our operations. We have a diverse range of customers who are quite satisfied and express confidence in the timeline for recovery. 

Even Zerto's RTO is low.

Zerto has helped significantly reduce downtime and helped reduce DR testing by over 45 percent.

The most valuable aspect of Zerto is synchronized replication, which is very useful. Additionally, the availability of the virtual machines is quite good. Regarding the recovery point, we achieved at least ten recovery points, and the availability of the virtual machines is particularly notable.

The main issue with Zerto is its user interface, which lacks flexibility and presents a steep learning curve. To improve usability, the UI should be simplified and streamlined, making it more accessible to technical and non-technical users. Additionally, the UI should be better aligned with the platform's various options and features, ensuring a more intuitive and efficient user experience.

I have been using Zerto consistently for almost four and a half years.

Zerto continues to be a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable.

We interacted with technical support many times. They were totally fine and very polite. We receive support around the clock, which is excellent.

Positive

The initial setup of Zerto was straightforward, and their customer service was instrumental in helping us achieve a stable implementation within one month.

A team of five implemented Zerto in-house.

One of Zerto's main disadvantages is its pricing structure, which involves significant upfront costs and limited options for startups with minimal initial funding. Although Zerto offers a comprehensive suite of features, the high cost and lack of flexible payment options, such as pay-as-you-go subscriptions, present a barrier to entry for many businesses. To increase accessibility, Zerto should consider offering lower pricing tiers or more flexible subscription models tailored to startups' needs.

We evaluated a lot of different solutions.

There are some disadvantages; therefore, I rate Zerto eight out of ten. 

We are not a partner, just a customer, but we are trying to collaborate with them as a reseller within one year.

No maintenance has been required as of yet.

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

We have not seen any instability.

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

Zerto could improve the product by lowering the cost. 

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

I have not noticed any crashing or instability with Zerto.

Zerto scales appropriately for my pretty big company.

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.

It's easy to use. It wasn't too difficult to start with. With most vendors, initially, you have a learning curve or configurations. In this case, Zerto was quick to understand. The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple. The experience is comparatively good with Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication has not been used much. That said, it does help when talking about storage layers. The availability of the VMs is good. In terms of resiliency, there are a lot of benefits to it. Most have a recovery of 24 to 48 hours; Zerto has gotten recovery down to four hours. 

We've done a POC with a DR to AWS. It was limited, however, it worked well and there was support. We didn't run into any challenges. 

The effect on the RPOs has been excellent. It's been impacted greatly. Customers enjoy the shorter timeline to recovery. The customer confidence is high. 

Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that. 

I've used the solution for almost five years. 

The solution is pretty stable. Sometimes there may be bugs, however, so far, I haven't personally found any bugs beyond the initial setup. 

There is a wide range of scalability with different storage solutions. 

We've deployed Zerto with 40 TB of storage layers. 

Technical support is good. 

Positive

We used NetBackup and v-Motion. I'm familiar with Commvault and Veeam, which is also a fast solution.

When we used VMware V-motion or other methodologies, with Zeto, once you have your SAN hooked up well and your networking component set, then you failover to the recovery. With Zerto, the recovery times were less compared to what we witnessed with our previous traditional methods. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. My job was to get Zerto up from scratch and make sure the configuration, network, storage, et cetera were up and running. It's fairly simple. There's a learning process, however, once you know it, it gets easier. 

I'm not involved in the licensing process. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.