Zerto Reviews

Our primary use case is disaster recovery, as well as data center migration when we went to a new VMware infrastructure platform.

The first benefit was being able to sleep better at night knowing that we can recover instantly. Because we do public safety, we have some databases that are terabytes in size, and were we to have to recover them using standard backup software, it would take a significant amount of time. With Zerto we can recover instantly in the event of an emergency. 

And when we went to a new data center, we had the ability to do a cross-center migration of the systems, and we found Zerto was much faster. We could migrate 25 to 30 servers and have them up and going in less than five minutes in the new environment, with very minimal downtime.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We find that we really only need one person to manage it. That person was able to write up documentation so that any of the other system administrators can jump in and handle it, because of the ease of use.

For me, the most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops.

Also, the ability to adjust the journal is important. If there were a ransomware event and we were not able to recognize that ransomware event for, say, four hours, we could go back, literally per minute, to the previous 24 to 48 hours to have instant recoverability. That, to me, is the big value of the product: to have our systems up with very minimal downtime.

We've been using Zerto for three to four years.

The stability has been excellent unless there is an issue with something on our end. For example, if a virtual replication appliance exists on a specific host and we take the host offline, Zerto will flash alerts at us, which I love. Zerto is always telling us when there's an issue with recovery. But the application itself has never gone down.

We haven't even noticed any over-utilization across our circuits, with the ability to throttle how much it's using. And once the initial sync is done, it's just kilobytes to keep it in sync. We don't see any downtime from using it. We haven't had a disaster situation recovery yet, but when we do, we're confident because our tests with it are successful.

Scaling has been easy in that we had multiple data centers that we needed to combine into one. It was very easy to create "spokes," where we installed different Zerto appliances in the other data centers and then linked them to the master to migrate them over. From a VPG perspective, we've had to scale out and it's never been a problem.

We have about 250 virtual servers. We had about 100 and we recently purchased another 150 licenses so that we could protect the entire environment. We're in the process of applying those licenses to all of them. We haven't applied all of them yet because we like to categorize which Virtual Protection Groups we want them to be in, so that they spin up at certain times. We like to think that out a little.

Their support has been very good. I haven't had to open very many tickets, but the few times I have, I have gotten a response within an hour or two. The support is good. They handle everything all the way through to completion and then they say, "We'll keep this ticket open in case you have any more issues."

Positive

We used VMware's SRM, which was a great solution; there was nothing wrong with it. But with Zerto, it's like riding a bike. Once I learned it and knew how to do it, I could let it run and do its thing. Maybe a month later I would have to jump in and do something, and the user interface is so easy. I don't have to relearn or remember how it works.

Zerto is quite a bit better when it comes to ease of use, compared to SRM. It's very user-friendly. With SRM, I definitely had to do some learning and read some things. With the VPG, it was almost self-explanatory, such as how to set up VPGs, how to recover things, how to do a failover, and how to do a test. Even as a proof of concept for management, I was able to take a VPG, delete a bunch of files on it, and then recover them from a few minutes prior. It was so user-friendly that even my management was able to watch me do it and understand what was going on.

SRM was just kind of there, in place, and it worked. Zerto is the one that I've really dug into and got my hands dirty with. Once we started utilizing it and realized how quickly we could recover. We realized that it could be used for migrating to a new data center. When we called Zerto we found out that that is a use case people use it for. From a speed perspective, the servers were down for less than five minutes when we migrated them. It was really fast with very little downtime.

The whole process was extremely straightforward. I did a little bit of learning in the Zerto University on how to do a quick deployment. There are not a lot of steps to the quick deployment. After just a few steps we were up and going, almost instantly.

After the installation, it prompts you to log in, and as soon as you log in, it starts telling you what to do. It says, "You need to deploy your virtual replication appliances." And then it says, "Great. Now that you've done that, you're ready to create VPGs." It was almost like the application was literally telling me what to do next.

We deployed it ourselves. I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it. But the initial deployment didn't need any technical support. It was that easy to deploy.

We looked at a few other solutions. Zerto was the one that really stuck out, especially once we were given a proof of concept.

Definitely try it out. I was able to leap right into it and use it immediately and do a test case within a matter of minutes. I was able to show management the ease of use and the ability to recover, and of course, that makes management happy.

We've got two data centers, and for any of our applications that are not in some kind of a load-balanced or high-availability cluster, we use Zerto to replicate them, to make them as highly available as possible, without building that into the solution. We replicate between 100 and 150 different VMs from our North Carolina data center to our Chicago data center.

A small example of the way it's made things simpler is that we were building out a new product, and the original recommendation from the vendor when we were deploying that product was to have the application server closest to the end-users and the database server at our main data center in North Carolina. Once it was implemented, we found out that wasn't the case. We used Zerto to fail over the database to the same data center that the application server was in. We were able to do that really quickly and easily, without having to do a whole lot of extra work, such as having to rebuild the database server. That's one example of how we use Zerto, not just in a standard failover scenario. It made the process a lot easier than it would have been had we not had Zerto.

We have also used it when something happened to a configuration or a database file and it had become corrupted. It happened in the evening, after-hours. Rather than getting the backup engineer involved and trying to restore the files from a backup, we used Zerto to grab the file from a couple of hours previous, restored it, and got things back up and running really quickly. It's definitely a time-saver. We were able to handle it ourselves without needing to get anybody else involved.

One of the most valuable things about the solution is the ease of use when it comes to failing things over. The ability to easily test your failover capabilities is really nice. We can actually stand up a VM in an isolated environment, validate that the VM is up and running and that it boots properly, and we can do that in a matter of 30 seconds. Being able to show that to upper management, and that it's working the way it should, provides a lot of value.

It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple.

If everything is set up and configured properly, a failover of one or two systems can be done by one person. Nobody has to be involved other than the application owner, to validate everything, once the failover is done. It's a one-man show.

Continuous data protection is what it's supposed to do. Being able to bring a system up within a matter of minutes is the next best thing to having an actual high-availability cluster. If you're not building high availability into a solution itself, Zerto is the next best option. If we're talking about one or two applications or one VPG (Virtual Protected Group) a failover takes under five minutes, from the point of clicking "Start Failover" to the point of validating everything on the application end.

The only thing we've noticed that needs improvement is the backend cleanup within VMware. There are some little issues there. I would like to see tighter integration with VMware. From a recoverability standpoint, it's great when using VMware. But what we have noticed is that orphan data is an issue within VMware. It doesn't clean up properly when you're moving stuff around.

Our company has been using Zerto for several years. I took over management of it within the last six months, but I've dealt with Zerto in the past as well.

We've had no stability issues. We've had to open one or two cases on small issues, but they've been pretty trivial. There haven't been any critical issues with its stability.

It scales really well. Out of 500 VMs, we're using it for about 150 of them. That's probably not a lot compared to other Zerto customers. But as you add more ESX hosts to your environment, you just add new VRAs to the ESX host. There's not too much to have to worry about when you're scaling up.

We utilize it for everything that we don't build in a high-availability cluster. A lot of our stuff is designed as an HA cluster, but anything that is not designed that way is automatically protected by Zerto.

The technical support is as good as, if not better than, most of the technical support that we deal with. Opening tickets is easy. The support portal is easy to use. Depending on the severity—I've never had to open a Sev 1 case—Sev 2 and Sev 3 cases are answered within 24 hours.

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution.

I did not do the initial setup of the solution, but the upgrade from version 8.5 to 9.5 was very simple.

Our engineering team members, three systems engineers, are the main users of Zerto. We don't have segregated roles. I'm the point person for Zerto, and the other guys are backups for managing it and doing recoveries. Maintenance only requires one person.

We have seen ROI from a time-management standpoint.

I don't know if Zerto reduces the number of people that we need to have involved in a recovery scenario, but it definitely simplifies the process compared to using Commvault, which is our backup solution. If it's something that we need recovered from within a day or two, it's much simpler to recover that file with Zerto than it is from a backup solution like Commvault.

Anybody on our engineering team can probably recover a file using Zerto. I'm not so sure that's the case for Commvault. Our backup admin would probably have to get involved if we're doing a recovery from Commvault. Using Zerto, the UI is so much simpler.

There may be a small possibility that we will look at Zerto to replace Commvault whenever we do replace Commvault. That's a possibility, but it hasn't been brought up yet. We do know we are getting rid of Commvault at some point.

I've used other solutions, like Dell Avamar and Veeam. Veeam is definitely pretty easy to use and on par with Zerto. It's 100 times easier to use than Avamar. Ease of use is one of Zerto's strongest points.

Go for it. It's the best-of-breed for high-availability replication solutions. It really is dead simple to use and easy to implement and maintain. It's not one of those solutions that you have to spend hours a day managing. You look at it for five minutes a day and forget about it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that high availability, having a good replication solution in place, doesn't have to be a big, complicated, scary mess. It can be simple. It doesn't have to be some huge hurdle that you have to overcome.

We use Zerto for real-time replication of our systems, company-wide. The main reason is disaster recovery failover.

We use the long-term retention functionality, although it is not deployed system-wide. We have a lot of critical systems backed up, such as our file servers. We utilize it to hold things for up to a year and we send our long-term retention to ExaGrid appliances.

When we need to failback or move workloads, this solution has decreased the time it takes and the number of people involved. The entire process is, realistically, a one-person job. We usually have an application specialist involved just to validate the health of the server. Whether it's an SQL server or application server, we have somebody that runs integrity checks on it. That said, the entire process is very painless and easily handled by one person.

I estimate that this product saves us hours in comparison to products like Veeam. Veeam would take several hours of time to fail something over. 

Our company fell victim to a ransomware attack that affected between 50 and 60 servers. Until we knew for sure that the entire situation was remediated and that we weren't going to spread the infection, we restored the servers in an offline manner, which only took a matter of minutes to complete. Then, we pushed all of that data into Teams and OneDrive directly for people to start accessing it.

From the SQL server perspective, we failed those servers over, running health checks such as anti-virus scans, just to make sure that the failed over instance didn't contain the same situations. Thankfully, they did not. We probably saved ourselves several days worth of work in the grand scheme of things. In total, it potentially would have taken weeks to resolve using a different solution.

I wouldn't necessarily say that using Zerto has meant that we can reduce the number of staff in a recovery operation. However, I think it's probably mitigated the need to hire more people. Essentially, as we've continued to grow, we've avoided adding headcount to our team. Using Veeam as my problem child to compare against, if we were using it, it would have required a lot more management from us. It would have cost us more time to recover and manage those jobs, including the management of the ExaGrid appliances, as well as the VRAs, which are basically proxies.

Definitely, there is a huge saving in time using Zerto and although we didn't reduce any headcount or repurpose anything, we've definitely mitigated at least two people from the hiring perspective.

Zerto saved us considerable downtime when we experienced the ransomware attack. It may be hard to substantiate that just on the one situation but we saved at least a couple of million dollars.

The most valuable feature is the continuous recovery with the five-second checkpoint interval. Just having those checkpoints prior to when a situation arises, we're able to get the transactional data that occurred right before the server failed. That has been a blessing for us, as we are able to provide a snapshot with no more than five seconds of data loss. This means that we don't have to recreate minutes or hours worth of data for an industry that includes fulfillment, shipping, warehousing, et cetera.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. It does a very good job keeping up with the system and it creates five-second interval checkpoints. This has been helpful when it comes to needing to fail something over, getting that last moment in time that was in a usable state.

This product is impressively easy to use. It's dummy-proof, once it's set up.

The long-term recovery is a little bit weak in its granularity. Veeam is definitely superior in that aspect, as it's able to provide a granular view of files and databases, et cetera. However, it just kind of depends on what a business' recovery strategy is.

From our business perspective, it's really not impactful to us because our recovery strategy is not based on individual files. But, I could definitely see it being a challenge if there is a very large instance of individual files, as a subset, that need to be recovered. I think that if somebody has terabytes of data then Zerto will recover it faster but navigating through the file explorer to get to files is not as easy with Zerto.

One thing I don't like about the product, and I know this is where their claim to fame is, but whenever I have a VPG that has multiple virtual machines in it, and one virtual machine falls behind, it'll pause replication on everything else in that job until the one server catches up. The goal is to keep symmetric replication processing going, so the strategy makes sense, but for our business model, that doesn't really work and it has created a challenge where I have to manage each VM individually. It means that instead of having one job that would cover multiple servers, I just have one job to one server, which allows me to manage them individually.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

From a company perspective, a few years ago, I would have said that it is very stable. It is a solution that is thriving and growing. At this time, however, HP is in the process of acquiring them. While I had assumed that was their long-term plan, I didn't quite anticipate HP being the one to pick them up. As such, I am a little bit worried about what will change in the long term.

Scalability-wise, it's a very painless product. As we continue to grow out our virtual environment, Zerto is able to, in a very nimble fashion, scale with us with very little effort or overhead involved.

I'm covering approximately 400 VMs currently, which is approximately 360 terabytes worth of data. That is between two separate data centers.

Rating the Zerto technical support is a little bit tough because I've had some experiences that were truly 10 of 10, but then I've had one or two experiences where it was definitely a two or a three out of 10. It really depends on who I've gotten on the phone and their level of, A, comfort with their own system, and B, comfort helping the customer.

Some people have said this isn't within their scope of work, where others have said, "No, let's absolutely do this." In that regard, it's been a little hit and miss, but it's usually been a decent quality in the end.

Overall, I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

I have worked with Veeam in the past and although I prefer Zerto, there are some advantages to using Veeam. For example, long-term recovery offers more features.

In-house, we had also used the Unitrends product, as well as a SAN-to-SAN replication using an old HPE LeftHand array.

The main reasons that we switched to Zerto were the management ability, as well as its ability to provide continuous replication. Veeam was a very cumbersome product to manage. There were a lot of instances to monitor and manage from a proxy perspective, whereas Zerto's VRAs are relatively transparent in their configuration and deployment. These are painless and I don't have to continually monitor them. I don't have to update them since they're not like standalone Windows instances. It's very low management for us.

Of course, continuous replication is critical because Veeam, even though when we had owned the product, it claimed 15-minute intervals were doable, it never seemed to actually keep up with those 15-minute snapshot intervals.

One final reason that we migrated from Veeam is that they were utilizing VM snapshots at the time. I know that they've moved away from that approach now, but it was very painful for our environment at the time. The VMware snapshots were causing some of our legacy and proprietary applications to fail.

The initial setup is very simple.

Our implementation strategy involved setting it up for our two data centers. We have a primary and secondary data center, and Zerto keeps track of all of the VMs at the primary site and replicates them to the other site.

In the future, we plan on looking into the on-premises to cloud replication. On-premises to Azure direct is on our roadmap.

I completed the setup myself without support or anybody else involved in the deployment.

It took approximately an hour to deploy.

I handle all of the administration and maintenance. As the senior manager of infrastructure, I oversee our work and server group. I have also retained private ownership over the disaster recovery plan and failover plan.

We have probably not seen a return on investment from using Zerto. We don't really have lots of situations where we have to use it and can substantiate any kind of financial claim to it.

I do not like the current pricing model because the product has been divided into different components and they are charging for them individually. I understand why they did it, but don't like the model. 

Our situation is somewhat peculiar because when we bought into it, we owned everything. Later on down the road, they split the licensing model, so you had to pay extra for the LTR and extra for the multi-site replication. However, since we were using LTR prior to that license model change, they have allowed us to retain the LTR functionality at our existing licensing level, but not have the multi-site replication.

We have not evaluated other options in quite a long time. We very briefly evaluated Rubrik. 

When we first decided to implement Zerto, it wasn't very important that it provides both backup and DR in one platform. In fact, realistically, even now, while we have it and we used it on a limited scope, I'm not sure that it's needed.

With respect to our legacy solutions, I'd say that the cost of replacing them with Zerto is net neutral in the end.

My advice to anybody who is considering Zerto is that it's an awesome product and it won't steer them wrong. That said, there are some issues such as the licensing model and the situations where VPGs falling behind suspends the replication. Overall, it is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Zerto for ransomware resilience and data recovery.

Zerto has improved my organization by allowing us to replicate individual VMs or groups of VMs. It allows flexible protection and recovery of data. It is also easy to integrate with other solutions.

It has had a positive effect on our recovery time. It is very fast.

Zerto is easy to use. As long as you have the technical know-how, it is easy to use.

The near-synchronous replication is good. It ensures data availability and fast data recovery. I love that. We use Zerto to replicate the VMs from one site to another, ensuring data availability, protection, and disaster recovery.

Zerto has had a good effect on our RPOs. There is continuous protection and availability of data because it is all automated.

It is very fast. It has had an effect on our RTOs. It has reduced our downtime by 20%.

Zerto offers a comprehensive solution for data recovery and protection. It has saved us a lot. It has saved about 30% of the time.

Zerto has a user-friendly interface and intelligent dashboard. It is easy to manage. It has saved about 40% of the time.

We have had a positive impact on our IT resiliency strategy. Continued data protection and automated DR have been very helpful.

Zerto has simplified our compliance with industry regulations.

I love the seamless data integration between on-premises and cloud environments. Fast disaster recovery is also valuable.

I also love that it provides real-time and historical analytics.

It simplified my work. It has a user-friendly interface. It is easy for me to create my views in the dashboard. It makes work easy for me.

I am enjoying it so far, and I am happy with its capabilities, but it is expensive.

Their support can be faster.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

It is stable. I have been using Zerto for three years, and my company had been using it before I joined. It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

Its scalability is good. Zerto can meet the needs of any business.

We use it in multiple departments and at multiple sites. There are ten people who use Zerto. They are strictly admins.

My experience has been positive. They are always trying to help.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because we sometimes do not get a fast response.

Positive

I have used the Microsoft Azure solution, but I could not get the fastness, scalability, and ease of management that I wanted. I was looking for these capabilities, and that is why I went for Zerto.

Zerto is a better solution, but it is expensive. Zerto is a bit faster than other solutions. Other ones have automated disaster recovery, but Zerto is faster.

It is deployed on the cloud. Its deployment was straightforward. It took about three hours. Three people were involved in its deployment.

Like every other software, it does require some maintenance from time to time, but it is not much.

We have seen an ROI. Whatever we do, we are getting a fast result. It is always an advantage for the business. Zerto has had a positive effect. I do not have the metrics, but it has saved us a substantial amount.

It is expensive.

I would recommend Zerto to anyone who wants fast disaster recovery and protection. It has most of the features that people are looking for. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

Our environment primarily integrates Zerto with VMware. This includes offering Zerto's self-service portal, which integrates seamlessly with Cloud Director. Additionally, we have Zerto integration at the vCenter level in situations where we don't use Zerto Cloud Manager and its self-service portal. This variety reflects the different use cases within our current processes. Since Zerto is our primary offering for disaster recovery solutions, we tailor the implementation based on customer needs.

We implemented Zerto to safeguard our private cloud infrastructure workloads. While disaster recovery is its primary function, we also leverage Zerto for data migration.

Our RPO with Zerto is under five minutes. The RPO time is dependent on the bandwidth. 

We have asynchronous replication with Zerto.

Zerto integrates well with Asynchronous Continuous Delivery tools. However, unlike SRM, Zerto offers protection during workflow rollbacks. This rollback functionality, along with its centralized reporting and UI management, makes Zerto an attractive solution.

Zerto offers a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, eliminating the need for physical data centers. In this instance, we leveraged Zerto to protect a private cloud workload running VMware and ensure its seamless recovery in Microsoft Azure. Disaster recovery in the cloud is crucial. As part of the private and hybrid cloud infrastructure team, I'm involved with a service in our catalog that runs workloads in a private cloud but configures disaster recovery primarily for the public cloud, Azure in our case. This is important for both the customer and the organization that provides the service.

Zerto offers significantly faster recovery times compared to SRM. SRM's recovery process involves multiple steps, requiring a detailed checklist to ensure the correct sequence is followed within protection groups and recovery plans. This complexity is a common issue with other data recovery products. Ideally, any product, not just from a design perspective but also from implementation and operation, should be user-friendly. It should be intuitive and easy to operate to achieve its intended purpose. This is a key reason we chose Zerto over other data recovery solutions.

Migrating data with Zerto is incredibly easy. It performs a continuous replication of our data in the background, even while our primary server is running. This live replication ensures all changes are captured before the server is shut down. In other words, it includes everything, resulting in a seamless migration process. Triggering the migration is also straightforward. We simply need to choose whether it's a move operation or a scale-over operation.

It helps reduce downtime during migrations. While there might be a brief interruption when workloads are shut down, there's no data loss. However, downtime for disaster recovery depends on the specific application's RPO. RPO isn't a fixed value; it varies based on how much data loss an application can tolerate.

It helps to reduce our overall DR testing. The solution is designed so that we can trigger the app or a move operation within three steps. Making it easier and quicker for the administrator or customer that is working on it.

Zerto's user-friendly interface simplifies operation and management, allowing us to minimize the number of people involved in overall backup and DR management.

The user interface is very user-friendly. Additionally, the journaling feature allows users to restore their progress to any point in time. This is a valuable feature, especially since similar products, like SRM and SCX, don't offer this functionality. In my opinion, this journaling capability makes Zerto unique.

Zerto integrates with vCloud Director to protect workloads deployed there. However, it would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation. For example, Site Recovery Manager recently introduced integration with VMware Aria Automation, allowing the protection of workloads deployed through Aria Automation. This functionality, including site recovery management, is currently not available in Zerto. Zerto's strength seems to lie specifically in its VMware capabilities, which could be an area for improvement.

Another point to consider is the potential for Zerto drivers to cause issues in ESXi environments. In some cases, users have reported problems and discovered that the Zerto drivers are not verified by VMware. While HPE is a technical alliance partner for Zerto, improved collaboration between VMware and Zerto regarding driver validation would be valuable. This information seems to be missing at the moment. We are currently in touch with our technical account manager to clarify this.

I have been using Zerto for over five years.

Most Zerto issues we experience are at the ESXi level, likely due to the Zerto drivers. However, these issues are not currently impacting our work.

Zerto is scalable.

The technical support is quick.

Positive

I also use SRM but I believe Zerto is better because it's easier to integrate with other systems. While SRM also offers integration for workload protection through VMware Aria Automation and a SIM connection application similar to replication, it may have some limitations. For instance, Zerto might require an agent to communicate with the source system, which could be a disadvantage. This suggests that there might be features offered by other vendors that Zerto could incorporate to improve its functionality.

The initial deployment is straightforward. Zerto has introduced an appliance, making deployment even easier by removing the need for patching and object installation.

One member of our deployment team is needed for the deployment.

As a Zerto partner, we do all the deployments for our customers and provide comprehensive training.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

I recommend that new users take advantage of any training videos and documentation offered by Zerto to familiarize themselves with all the features and how to use them.

We use Zerto to back up our VMs to our disaster recovery site.

Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate.

The fast recovery speed is Zerto's most valuable feature. It gives us peace of mind to know that the VMs are replicated and are there if we ever have a disaster. We recently upgraded our license to include the cloud because we are considering migrating from our hosted data center to cloud-based DR. Zerto's near-synchronous replication has been excellent. We haven't had any issues during our testing. It has worked flawlessly, and we're very pleased.

It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script.

We have used Zerto for five years.

We haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't done a lot of scaling. We initially purchased a number of licenses, and we've kinda stayed about that number for the whole time. We're currently protecting 175 VMs, which is a small fraction of our total environment.

I rate Zerto customer service eight out of 10. It's been good. I haven't had to open any tickets with support, but we worked with our sales engineer to configure things, and it went well.

Positive

We've used backup providers before to do replication, but we've never had a solution that offered immediate recovery. We evaluated VMware SRM and some other backup providers, but none were quite on Zerto's level. The recovery speed doesn't compare to Zerto. Zerto is easy to use aside from the scripting aspect of things, but the other solutions aren't aren't any better in that regard. 

The setup is straightforward. We deploy an appliance, and it's up very quickly. The initial installation is done in a day, but it takes time to configure things exactly the way you want them, get the VMs protected, write scripts, etc. 

It's hard to quantify the return, but we can do what we set out to. We're able to recover critical services in a DR site. We haven't had to use it, but we know it's there, and we've done testing that shows it works. Hopefully, we don't have to use it, but it's a good insurance policy. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

Currently, we use Zerto to replicate our production visual systems at our disaster recovery site in Germany. This allows us to easily meet our RTO and RPO.

Zerto is easy to use. Zerto is the leading disaster recovery solution.

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

Zerto has helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication. Previously, we used to hire other providers for these services, but now we have everything in one system, saving us around 30 percent. For example, we used to have to keep a copy of our data on Veeam Backup, but now we can store it all in Zerto. This saved us time and money, and it has also made our IT infrastructure more reliable.

With Zerto, we are meeting our RPO better. Previously, it took us 20 minutes and now it is five seconds. 

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

In our simulations, we observed a reduction in downtime when using Zerto.

Our recovery time with Zerto is excellent in data recovery situations, such as those caused by ransomware. We can save around five hours compared to other solutions.

Zerto reduced the number of people involved in our data recovery by 30 percent.

The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation.

File management can be improved. Zimbra is the only platform that allows for file replication.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

The technical support is average. We have had some cases where we were not as comfortable with the outcomes as we were with other solutions.

Neutral

We previously used a custom solution, but we switched to Zerto to unify our systems and improve visibility.

The initial setup was simple. We were able to deploy one FPE every two weeks. One person was involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto, which saved us 30 percent of our costs and improved our disaster recovery time.

The price is reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we were confident that Zerto was the best, as indicated by the Gartner chart.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is deployed to replicate our on-premises and virtual infrastructure data between our two offices in Germany and Italy.

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

I recommend that new users take advantage of Zerto's flexible license program to buy one or two licenses and try them out before fully committing.

Zerto is primarily used for site-to-site replication and recovery, low RTO and RPO, and migration from onsite to the cloud.

Currently, we have ZVMs installed on Windows Servers in our environment, vRAs and VRAHs installed on our vCenter environment, and ZCAs installed in our Azure environment.

I am not the primary user of Zerto. I am sort of the implementation or API specialist on it.

It gives us a seamless, performant data center migration. When we were migrating between physical data centers, we did what normally would have been a 72-hour job in about 18 hours. A large part of that was thanks to Zerto being able to rate limit and throttle how much data was being sent or transfers were happening. Being able to script around it and create governors was important. We didn't have that previously. That is one big use case that has saved an immense amount of time and effort. 

Previous data migrations were really tough and hard. It was high stress with late nights, no sleep, and a lot of coffee and Red Bull. We didn't have that this time. Everyone felt that we got through this in a slightly longer working day instead of 72 hours. So, we have seen a return on investment.

Another use case is being able to do disaster recovery testing at will, whenever we want to. That has been really special.

Primarily, the most valuable feature is the simplified deployment methodology, but also use the REST API and script ability for modularity. 

Zerto API Wrapper is really good. We don't use the Zerto module specifically. Instead, we use API Wrapper, which is a lot better in my opinion. The fact that we can extend the functionality of Zerto to high-level policies or processes via the API, whether it is through API Wrapper or otherwise, sort of brings out a lot of interesting usability use cases for us. We can do self-service replication of servers via ServiceNow, scripting, etc., offering extensibility. It is really easy to use. It helps to save a ton of time as far as replication goes.

There are open API calls. Things are available via the UI and API that may not be documented really well. You can open developer tools, inspect those elements, and see what those payloads are, but it is an extra step. For someone who is kind of new to the game, they may not know how to do that. 

Zerto is not an API-first company, but an API-now company. A lot of the functionality that is in Zerto UI is not in the Zerto API. That is likely because it is baked in code or compiled down DLLs. Every business has to make a decision to work on something, and I don't think Zerto has committed resources to working on that part. It is a problem to do cleanup for Azure Blob Storage, recovery site storage, or whenever you remove a VM from a VPG without deleting the VPG. That needs to be improved. 

Doing scheduled disaster recovery connection tests, e.g., being able to migrate things up and get things working on a recovery site without needing a user to do it, would be helpful.

Analytics has a 90-day window, where it keeps data. It would be nice to have on-prem storage instead of cloud storage for that so we can keep the data for longer. Unless you discover the problem within three months, you don't know that you need the data. Then, it is gone by the time you realize there is an issue. 

I would like to be able to offsite some data. We export our analytical data so we can keep it longer without having to script around it. It is possible right now, with the API, to script around it. However, I don't want to have to write a monthly process to export the last three months of data to a spreadsheet so I can just have it if I need it. 

A lot of the PowerShell documentation in some of Zerto tutorials or how-tos is a PowerShell-to-legacy sort of paradigm. It needs to be updated to at least 3, likely 5, or probably 7. It looks like it was written by someone who didn't know PowerShell, but had to learn it really fast. It does the job. If you copy and paste it, then it will work, which is something. That is way better than what a lot of people do. However, I feel like a bit more effort should be pushed towards PowerShell.

I would like them to build an alerting system. I am trying to find a way to connect it to my business continuity people, so the Zerto people don't need to be pseudo-business continuity people all the time. They can just be IT people. 

I would like more creature comforts for the scripting engineer. It would be nice if they could expand the development community around building different APIs or API structures for Zerto.

I have been using Zerto for two and a half to three years.

Stability of Zerto is significantly better now than it used to be. It was a little unstable, especially when you were doing massive amounts of migrations. I think there was a disconnect with Zerto's handling of jobs and the ticketing systems inside of vCenter. I am not saying that was a Zerto problem. It might have been a vCenter problem, where vCenter was unable to communicate how much availability it has to field those jobs, then its internal tickets were consumed in a way that Zerto couldn't deal with them well. There was probably some type of internal timeout that was reached when things failed. 

If you are not prepared to rapidly click retry a bunch of times, that will be a big problem for you. You can get around it by scripting. That is how we did it. You can get around it by updating Zerto to at least version 8, maybe even 7.53. 

The stability now seems solid. If there are some disruptions of service, I am not seeing it. We have taken off restrictions on our network throttling. So, we are not throttling that at all. We fullly let it go and it doesn't seem to be having a problem.

We have hundreds of terabytes up to petabytes of storage and replicated data. Triple-digits up to thousand-plus virtual machines are being replicated. There is RDM to VHD and VHDX-VMDK conversions. We have temporary disks or bypass disks involved for situations where VMs might be turned off or removed from environments without any lead time, thus pausing VPGs.

I don't think it has a problem with scalability. We haven't yet run into a problem scaling it. You could always deploy more ZVMs and ZCAs. The analytics engine has a calculator to figure out how many you should deploy. Follow that. It isn't perfect. If anything, it's a little conservative. Just don't test the waters unless you are prepared to sink a little bit. Be prepared to sink if you're going to try to min-max it. You can always tweak it. There are so many tweaks you can do on the ZVM and ZCA side. We have had to do probably a half dozen of those because our environment isn't the same as every other environment. 

You can push it to its limits. I don't think it is a problem with scalability. I think it is a nuance of your environment.

There were some hurt feelings with some of our engineers. They were told that it would just be plug and play. They didn't realize that it would actually take up a duplicate amount of storage. As a point of policy, that is how it works. I asked them, "How do you think it should work? If you don't think the storage should double, where are we putting the bits? Where is it going? How is replication happening?" It makes sense to me, but I think they were told something else. I don't know if that was a salesperson from Zerto's side or an advocate on the company's side, but they were misinformed. 

Zerto support is usually very good. I feel like we always get those Sev 1 cases where something is wrong with the core product. For example, every time that they have released a new minor or major build, there are release notes of what has been fixed. We have had five of those line items since version 7.

We have been using it since version 5. However, since version 7, we have had five big line items for those changes since we have a big environment and script a lot more, and maybe we script more than a lot of Zerto customers. We found a lot of weirdness in our environment, and that matriculated up. I got a call from the East Coast technical representative for the dev team. Every day, I had a call on the update of those tickets. You don't see that a lot. 

Some platforms work flawlessly. Some platforms are more simple. Zerto is a complicated platform doing a lot. After that initial burn-in period with our support team, we got grade-A service, which was really great. I would probably rate them as eight or nine out of 10. There is room for improvement, but if they never improved, I would be happy with the level of service and support that we have now.

I am pretty patient. From a programming standpoint, technology is hard and environments differ greatly, and I am willing to forgive a little bit. I don't speak for all my company. There are people in my company who don't accept that. They want it fixed tomorrow (or yesterday). Personally, I understand that it is hard and takes time to understand as the logs only tell you so much. 

Positive

I can't even remember what the previous product was. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment. I have been involved with subsequent deployments, which were straightforward. Originally, I babysat it, then I owned it in tandem with another engineer who was actually the owner of it. I helped with the scripting part since I had more scripting knowledge. 

Subsequent deployments take 15 minutes, which is not long. With ZVM installers, they ask you a question, then you put it in. If you don't have the answers, then you go get them. You have no business deploying Zerto if you don't have those answers to begin with. ZCM is just as easy.

Don't buy Zerto expecting to save money and get 100% performance. That is not how it works. That is not what you are buying. You are buying a solution that you have to invest in. Don't invest in buying the license, but none of the technology to support it. Ask the hard questions and expect answers that aren't, "Yeah, it will do that. No questions asked." 

I don't have a lot of experience with other solutions, but I have used a lot of technology. I know what approachable and unapproachable platforms look like. Zerto is an approachable platform. If you know the concepts of data replication and data recovery and know what those data protections look like, then you should be able to pick up Zerto with relative ease. 

Generally speaking, things in Zerto are where I would expect them to be. That is hard to do sometimes on other platforms. Sometimes, you get designers, UI developers, or user-experience people who don't really understand how engineers will approach a product. The Zerto platform seems tailored for people who are full code, low-code, or no-code, which is really special. I don't feel like you see that a lot. You start to get more of it now. However, having someone who is not specifically geared towards data replication, data recovery, or data protection accessing Zerto, they can use it if they have some of the nomenclature. They need to know a very small vocabulary in order to be able to navigate Zerto since things are where you think they will be.

Determine your questions in advance and ask them to the Zerto sales team. Get them to engage the engineering team as best they can. It does what it is supposed to do. It is not a magic silver bullet that just takes out everything. Everything is in layers. Zerto is only as good as your storage, back-end network, and replication infrastructure layer. It is only as good as the things allowing it to be good.

It has done a great job for what we needed it to do. I don't really have to worry about it doing the job. It is already doing it.

I would rate Zerto as eight or nine out of 10.