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Zerto pros and cons

Vendor: Zerto

4.5 out of 5

279 reviews
98% willing to recommend

2,602 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Zerto offers ease of management with straightforward setup and efficient usage, delivering significant time savings in migration and disaster recovery. It provides continuous data protection with real-time replication and low RPO, enhancing disaster recovery capabilities and supporting multi-site replication for data resilience. Challenges exist in enhancing support for VMware Lifecycle Manager, alerting, analytics, and the replication layer. Improving long-term storage cloud strategy would further strengthen Zerto's offerings.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Zerto offers easy system management, allowing seamless VM replication and recovery at disaster recovery sites without disrupting production environments.

It features real-time data replication and low RPOs, enabling precise and up-to-the-second restoration of mission-critical applications.

Zerto provides robust testing capabilities, permitting businesses to routinely test disaster recovery implementations without impacting daily operations.

Its journaling and continuous data protection features allow users to restore systems and data to specific points in time, greatly minimizing potential data loss.

Zerto supports multi-site replication, enabling simultaneous replication of VMs to multiple locations, ensuring higher data security and availability.

CONS

Licensing needs to be more flexible and less complex for ease of implementation.

Zerto's alerting system requires better control over frequency to prevent excessive notifications.

Zerto should offer a cost reduction per VM to be more competitive with other options like VMware SRM.

Improved integration with VMware updates and automation platforms would enhance compatibility.

Technical support response times and overall effectiveness need significant improvement.

Zerto Pros review quotes

JC

Director of IT at Arnott Inc

Jul 28, 2021

If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building. In most cases, Zerto is definitely one of the front lines. It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection.

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TK

Senior Director of IT Security & Infrastructure at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 2, 2022

We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit.

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JL

IT Director at Kingston Technology

Jul 27, 2021

If we lost our data center and had to recover it, Zerto would save us a great deal of time. In our testing, we have found that recovering the entire data center would be completed within a day.

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DR

Enterprise Data Management Supervisor at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company

Jun 25, 2020

In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy.

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Paul Mickenbecker

Senior Analyst, IS Infrastructure at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2023

We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way...

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DC

Senior Server Storage Engineer at MAPFRE Insurance

Jul 9, 2020

Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it.

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CS

Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Apr 27, 2021

In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image.

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BW

Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Aug 26, 2021

The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do. It is pretty easy to use. I've done the restoration of servers several times, not as a disaster. When an upgrade on a server goes wrong and it messes things up, I can just fail back to a previous version and try it again. So, that has been really helpful.

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reviewer1464378

Software Engineering Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 2, 2020

The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution.

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reviewer1456953

Systems Architect - Cloud at Kronos Incorporated

Nov 19, 2020

Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection.

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Zerto Cons review quotes

JC

Director of IT at Arnott Inc

Jul 28, 2021

If I were to nitpick, I would say that I wish I had a better account manager. Our sales guy has changed a couple of times. I would like a little more responsiveness from our account manager. I've had a couple of issues where getting in touch with him has been a little difficult, and I end up just going around him and dealing with support and support has handled it right away.

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TK

Senior Director of IT Security & Infrastructure at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 2, 2022

In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them.

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JL

IT Director at Kingston Technology

Jul 27, 2021

The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do.

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DR

Enterprise Data Management Supervisor at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company

Jun 25, 2020

The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be.

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Paul Mickenbecker

Senior Analyst, IS Infrastructure at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2023

We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload.

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DC

Senior Server Storage Engineer at MAPFRE Insurance

Jul 9, 2020

The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue.

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CS

Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Apr 27, 2021

In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if the implementation team had a better best practices guide and made sure things like the journaling are very clearly understood.

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BW

Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Aug 26, 2021

We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement.

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reviewer1464378

Software Engineering Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 2, 2020

Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it.

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reviewer1456953

Systems Architect - Cloud at Kronos Incorporated

Nov 19, 2020

The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale... We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going.

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