Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto for disaster recovery as a service and site-to-site migrations. 

Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments.

The most valuable feature is the overview Zerto gives you, providing quick insights into where your VMs are and whether they're replicating. It's an easy interface to work with. Configuring Zerto to failover in Azure is pretty simple. The biggest challenge is moving from on-prem to the cloud, but that's not an issue with Zerto. The problem is the difference in hypervisors.

I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother. 

I've been using Zerto for about a year now.

I haven't faced any stability issues. The only problems I've had have been self-inflicted, so it's pretty good.

Zerto's scalability seems pretty robust. I've had a few larger VMs that have been a little troublesome in terms of the RTO, but they are also outside of best practices. There should be no issues with scalability if you're working within the defined parameters of what's acceptable.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I've used their support pretty extensively. I would say the majority of the experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. Their response times and issue resolutions are satisfactory.  

One thing I would change about Zerto support is the fact that you sometimes can't find the answer you need online. Sometimes, Zerto reaches out with an answer to that particular issue, and it's in a document that the customers can't access without going through support. It doesn't feel like that information should be limited to internal use. I should be able to find that online without going through a support channel. 

Positive

I've also used Azure's native Azure Site Recovery solution, and there are definitely some benefits to using Zerto, such as the fact that it works at a hypervisor host level over individual VMs with agents. The performance is probably a little better in most cases. 

Zerto is easier to use than ASR overall, but the setup is a little bit more involved. After the installation, the daily use is pretty simple compared to Azure. With Azure's native solution, there's a lot more that you must do repeatedly throughout the lifecycle of any virtual machine or system that you're trying to protect. Zerto is much simpler in that regard.

The on-prem deployment is super easy and works well. Migrating from on-prem to the cloud involves a lot more steps and things you have to configure so that it can communicate into the cloud and build everything that it needs to. That takes more time. It probably requires twice as much time to deploy on the cloud. 

We see the biggest ROI from Zerto's real-time test environment. If we want to do a proof of concept on a hundred servers, we can spin them up within a few hours and have them ready to start testing stuff with real data to see how that might look if we were to deploy that into production. It's an excellent, accurate test environment that we don't need to maintain.

Zerto's pricing is competitive, given the benefits and ease of setting it up. It may seem more expensive upfront, but you're going to save that over the long term by spending less engineering time configuring, reconfiguring, etc.

I rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery. We replicate up to Azure, and that's essentially disaster recovery as a service.

Overall, the effects of RPO have been great. They are never more than a minute or two, even throughout the production day.

If we can replicate from our native VMware environment up to native Azure, it converts the machines for us. We don't have to maintain another VMware environment somewhere. It's really given us the ability to eliminate the entire data center.

Moreover, there are cost savings tied to this. We don't pay for the rack space, power, or hardware; all of that is gone. Because the machines aren't active, all we're paying for is storage in Azure. So it has saved us quite a bit of money.

Zerto's near-synchronous certification has positively impacted our operations. Any recovery point that's too far in the past, we'll lose transactions when we fail over. We really don't want to do that. Real-time replication gives us a much better sense of security for the enterprise. It simplifies things for us and reduces costs.  It makes management feel really good, too.

Using DR in a cloud environment has been a positive experience. We're saving money. We don't have to maintain the hardware. We don't have the rack space at the other data center. It just simplifies things for us and reduces costs. It's been a positive experience overall. It's pretty easy to use. Once it's up and running, it stays running. We have had a few times when we called support and the support has been very, very good.

Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better.

I have been using Zerto since 2020, so it's been three years.

It's very good. It's very stable. It doesn't require a lot of intervention. 

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have 75 machines protected by Zerto and it does a fine job.  

Support has been very good.

Positive

We used to use Site Recovery Manager when we had two data centers, and it was VMware to VMware. We were using EMC storage. Zerto is a lot easier to use than Site Recovery Manager. It requires less care and feeding. 

Site Recovery Manager occasionally would lose virtual machines, and it was kind of a pain, but Zerto just kept running. So overall, we're really happy with the switch to Zerto.

The initial setup was easy.

Since we don't have to maintain all of the hardware and the second data center, one person can manage the entire Azure environment by themselves. As a result,  Zerto has helped us reduce staff. 

We did an assisted setup with Zerto tech on the line, and It was really painless. It was simple and straightforward. The initial process including getting the servers and everything set up, was pretty short. The process included getting the VMs all added to the recovery groups and things like that. 

The whole process from start to finish took less than a week.

It has proven to be a cost-effective solution for us. 

It could always be less money. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It requires little care and feeding. Not a lot goes wrong with it. It just works.

We use Zerto as a DR tool. Instead of having to have a duplicate DR server, we can add a system to BPG and point it to whatever our DR site will be and replicate it for customers.

We also use it for migration planning. If we need to move VMs from on-premise to Azure or back, or it was built in the wrong place, we can easily move it over. 

It reduced the time for DR tests from the infrastructure side. Being able to get our work done in a matter of a couple of minutes so the app teams can get to work and can do their testing has been significant. 

Before we would have to use a backup recovery tool to restore it to a LAN, which could take hours at times, depending on the solution that was being used. 

The replication features are most valuable. It's fast to set up a BPG and get a system added. This aspect is very important to our business. Being able to provide customers with a very fast DR experience, whether it's for a test or live case scenario, and being able to provide the ability to move systems to Azure for cost savings or migrations, saves our ops teams a lot of time.

We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs. 

We would also like to have a native plugin for VRA built by either VMware or Zerto. That way there's actual support for it and we're not on the hook for trying to figure out what happened if it breaks.

We have been using Zerto for four years.

The only problems we've had stability-wise come from upgrades.

This is a scalable solution. The only challenge is that there's no way to manage it centrally at the moment. If you have 30 vCenters, you now have 30 appliances and you have to remember where everything is, which can become a pain point when it comes to trying to find where this VM is being replicated and what BPG it's in. 

The support for this solution could be improved. It is challenging for staff who actually understand the product. We had issues where we ended up spending hours and sometimes days on the phone, only for us to figure it out on our own.

They're very personable and fine to work with. It seems like technical expertise is lacking. I would rate them a five out of ten.

Neutral

I haven't used too many other disaster recovery tools. We used standard backup solutions and Zerto is significantly faster. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are replicating all of our production VMs to a DR site. We also have another offsite vCenter that we are replicating to a DR site for protection and eventual testing.

It makes me feel more comfortable that we have something to fall back on in case of a disaster. We are a large insurance company, so we have a lot of different applications and SQL Servers. We never had a disaster recovery site before, so this will protect us in the event of a disaster.

A good, valuable feature is using the preseeded LUNs, when deleting a virtual machine. Then, I put the VPG back to keep track of where I was at, so I don't have to replicate everything. Instead, I just preseeded LUNs since it needs less replication time.

It is fairly intuitive and easy to use.

You can go back fairly quickly. You push the button and there you are.

I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

It has been stable. We have had glitches between our site and DR site. When the MPLS comes back up, Zerto just kicks right back off, doing what it needs to do.

As we have been growing more VMs in production, I have still been adding to Zerto. So, I haven't had any problems with the amount of VMs and everything that Zerto can handle.

I haven't really had any problems with support. Most of the time, when calling support, I find the answer before they call me back. Or, they will send me an email, and say, "Here, try this."

I would rate the technical support as nine or 10 (out of 10).

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution.

It provides us with a safety net.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, which was very difficult to set up. Even as a test, it was hard to set up. With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy. Then, I insisted that the company buy Zerto for me.

RecoverPoint was difficult to set up and use. It wasn't as menu-driven as Zerto. 

We really haven't done any recovery or rollbacks. We are getting there. Later this year, we will be doing those types of failover tests, rollback tests, etc.

We haven't done DR testing. That will probably be done in the next three months.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.

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.

We're currently doing a two-tiered on-site and off-site replication, with one long-term retention being displaced into a cloud and one long-term retention being displaced to a third data center. We were looking to make our recovery solution more streamlined and efficient, that's why we implemented this product.

We're not as huge as everybody else. We just have large devices. We have four SQL servers running, each of which is about six terabytes, so our continuous replication is a lot larger than others. We also have multiple secured file storages in the two-terabyte range, so we replicate around 140 terabytes continuously, utilizing about 60 VM servers. Our primary and secondary production is VMware, and our third-tier backup area is a hypervisor. 

The most significant improvement is the reduced stress of running our operation. Before deploying the solution, we had two people on-call 24/7, one on-shift and one off-shift. Now our workload has been reduced, and we only have to give support over the phone, which rarely happens.

For this deployment, I realized the benefits very quickly. I already knew how the solution would provide a reliable safety net and offer a better risk-reward profile for our cybersecurity insurance. I knew this three deployments ago. The main selling points I presented for this deployment are the continuous replication, plus the reduction in man-hours and cybersecurity risk.

The whole package is valuable. The most useful feature for the company is the rapid RTO, which offers a faster return to operations and brings us back online quicker. The last time we had an issue, we recovered within about 36 minutes, which was probably the most valuable thing for us because, previously, it took four to seven days.

I've worked with Zerto since the beginning; I think it was when we were still on version one. Having that continuous replication, as we call it, where we have just a small delta point is paramount to being able to create that multiple mine backup solution or recovery solution. It's absolutely the product's selling point. 

Zerto is the simplest disaster recovery and data recovery solution I've ever deployed, and I've been doing this for 30-plus years. 

We have used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. That's the entire solution for us; it's all virtual. They can even calculate a number now, and I have 30-day testing documentation that gives them real-time data that shows a 15 to 40-minute recovery. It's astronomical because they now have a number they can guarantee to the stakeholders. 

There isn't much comparison with other disaster recovery solutions, though it depends on the configuration. A more dramatic or complex multi-tiered recovery would expand the time, but we went from four to seven days down to under an hour. For that reason, it's almost incomparable to other solutions. Depending on the deployment, even the VMware Site Recovery Manager takes four, eight, or even 12 hours. We can bring things back online in under an hour. I don't know any other solutions that can do cross-breed virtual environments or multi-hypervisors with VMware, with different types of cloud. We can go with Microsoft Cloud, VM Cloud, or Google Cloud. It's not even a comparison. If you have a good product seller and a buy-in from your network engineer and your software engineer, it's an easy sell. 

We currently have over 600 days of saved downtime. It's almost two years now without a single moment of downtime, because we utilized the failover to do maintenance cycles.  

Our last collapse was when we were hit by ransomware just about two years ago. It took out 80% of our systems, and we were back online in 36 minutes. 

I use the orchestrator for DR testing. I run a simulated test every 30 days, and we do two live tests a year. Before my arrival, they had never done a test, but that's what we do as a standard now. It only takes two members of staff, me and one other, for the entire test. It's very low-volume in terms of staff requirements.

The solution dramatically reduced the number of staff involved in recoveries. Before my deployment of Zerto in this organization, they had one disaster recovery and had to hire 19 people to do it. When we had the ransomware attack, two of us recovered the entire solution within an hour without having to hire anyone. The previous recovery costs were around $20,000 for the staffing alone, not counting the loss of revenue. I implemented the recovery during my regular work shift.

There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to the large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better.

We have been using the solution for two and a half years, and I've assisted in the deployment at three other companies. I personally have close to ten years of experience with it.

I've been using Zerto for close to 10 or 11 years, and the stability is probably in the 95% to 98% range. That's pretty good, and I give it an A.

This is the smallest solution I've ever deployed. It scales very well across multiple platforms and at a long-range. It's very scalable; I've implemented substantial deployments and deployments over huge areas. I'm impressed with the solution's scalability, especially the integration with vCloud environments.

I dealt with them recently, and they're pretty solid. The process is mainly automated, they connect remotely, and I don't have to explain much as they can look at the logs. With that capability, it does work very nicely.

Positive

I replaced the VMware Site Recovery Manager and a Symantec backup solution when I came in. I also replaced the third-tier snapshot replication, which they had never successfully tested or recovered from.

We switched because I begged them to. I've used Zerto extensively, and the amount of fluidity and flexibility it offers is necessary. It gives me peace of mind and allows me to sleep well at night knowing it will be alright, which is uncommon in this business. I said as much to the company and was able to convince them within about six months.

I used Veeam and some other bare-metal backup solutions before. Since virtual servers have been in place, Veeam and SRM are pretty much the two standards, with Symantec being the tape backup solution or virtual hard drive backup solution. Since Zerto came around and I saw what the product could do, it's all I ever push for when I get called in for a company that needs a DR plan.

I designed it all and already knew what I wanted to accomplish and what the product could do. Once we knew what direction we were going in and where the critical applications aligned, it was just a point of picking things up and putting them into placeholders already in the required image I designed for our purposes. It was pretty easy. It might take a little longer without prior experience and an idea of what I want to accomplish. It would still be pretty easy as Zerto provides excellent documentation. This is one of the most straightforward designs out there. End-to-end, with testing and approvals at each step, I think it took two and a half weeks.

I implemented the solution on my own.

I can't give an exact figure, but I would say that protection from Ransomware tech alone paid for the initial startup process and most of the maintenance needed. 

I wouldn't say I like the licensing pricing structure. Every year, it increases exponentially, which bothers me a little. It's worth it in terms of the value, but I worry the price will increase even more often after the Zerto merger. I still think it's worth it and that the solution is cheaper than the others. 

We evaluated Symantec, and NetApp, and we brought in Veeam.

The main differences between Zerto and the other solutions are the continuous replication capabilities and the ability to have two continuous replications simultaneously. These were major selling points for the company. With snap replication from NetApp or even Veeam, there isn't that consistency between multiple divisions. I showed the company we don't have to have VMware at the low MBR; we can have a hypervisor at a much-reduced cost, as the price was the last hope for the other solutions. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I don't give anybody a ten, as nobody is perfect. The best score I give is an eight, and they get that.

We don't necessarily use Zerto for immutable data copies as it's never been a requirement. I know it's there and what we can do with it if we need to.

We only use the physical solution because of the nature of our business, but we do long-term retention in the cloud. It is nice to have that long-term cloud retention, as it gives us another tier of data available for worst-case scenarios. 

I wanted to replace our legacy solutions, but we still have old-school solutions for legacy data recovery. We use Symantec for backup exec. on our bare metal, but I don't think it's critical because it's more for our legacy data recovery. After all, we're not like most companies. We have to keep our data for 24 years. 

We're replicating mainly some of our critical applications. One is our backup solution and then also some critical applications that we don't want to have to recover from tapes. That's been working very well for us. We actually just recently went through a DR rehearsal, where we ran a quick test and that ran for about a week and then completed that test. Then we were able to report that we were able to successfully recover our critical ERP system inside of the remote location successfully.

I don't have to worry about Zerto so much. It definitely continues working. We definitely have monitoring and everything like this to make sure things are working just fine, but I can't complain about it in any kind of way. I know we are a little behind on the version that we're using and we need to be on the latest and greatest. Right now we're on version 7.0.

It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery or in a data recovery situation. It's now only one person while it was four previously. 

Comparing it to VMware SRM, Zerto is by far the best that I've used before for providing continuous data protection. 

Different parts of the company use VMware, we use Zerto, and then we saw where they were taking us. Ours really takes less than an hour just to do a quick failover. So it didn't make any sense to go with VMware one, so we ended up going with Zerto.

An employee had actually introduced us to it and we looked at it and wanted to try it. He was working for a bank that does quite a bit as far as doing disaster recovery. So if a bank used it then I would definitely use it. 

It is fairly easy. It's not as technical to get around it or anything like that.

It's a fairly easy tool to use. 

I know that Zerto can definitely improve some functionalities. I know some of the cloud pieces probably enable that. At the moment, it's doing what we want for us, and what it's doing for us right now is plenty. I can't say there's any improvement that I can see that needs to be done at the moment.

I'm not sure if it has throttling, meaning, what's going over the wire and how we can throttle that to reduce the amount of data that's going across the bandwidth. I can't remember if that's something that's in this product. It might be in the more recent version. 

I have been using Zerto for three to four years. 

Their support has been very good. I can't complain about them. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for the admin that deployed it. It was not complicated. That person left and then another person came in who didn't know anything about this product and he picked it up fairly easily and he's able to manage it with ease.

He's a VMware administrator and he also maintains Zerto.

The deployment was done within a day.  

We don't have plans to increase usage because we are at the point where we're closing out. We're migrating some of our data centers and right now I know it's going to continue utilizing what we have. We haven't even hit the capacity of what we've got right now. Because I think the license we have is around 75 servers. We haven't even hit that. The only thing that's stopping us from right now is just that we need to increase the storage at the remote location to handle additional workloads. We have around 14 servers. 

We have seen ROI from Zerto. 

It has reduced downtime. It went from 24 hours to four minutes. It could even be seconds. It's fairly quick.

The dollar amount would equate to something in the millions. For an environment to be restored it means restoring our ERP systems. Then in that ERP in that system, it also has some manufacturing as well.

Pricing is fair. I don't see a big issue with the pricing for what we are trying to do. The things that we're replicating, if it were to go down it pays for it in itself there.

We don't have any plans for long-term retention. They talked to us about it. But at the moment it's not in our forecast to look at that.

We don't have to failback because we just fail to a bubble, in other words. We don't want to bring down production because we're going through migration of our ERP. So we fail it over into this bubble. And that's what we're using. It is the test failover that we're using in that environment. Then in that environment, everything is isolated. That's how we use it today. We have never had to failback back to our main site.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Originally, I was looking for a solution that allowed us to replicate our critical workloads to a cloud target and then pay a monthly fee to have it stored there. Then, if some kind of disaster happened, we would have the ability to instantiate or spin up those workloads in a cloud environment and provide access to our applications. That was the ask of the platform.

We are a manufacturing company, so our environment wouldn't be drastically affected by a webpage outage. However, depending on the applications that are affected, being a $15 billion dollar company, there could be a significant impact.

Zerto is very good in terms of providing continuous data protection. Now bear in mind the ability to do this in the cloud is newer to them than what they've always done traditionally on-premises. Along the way, there are some challenges when working with a cloud provider and having the connectivity methodology to replicate the VMs from on-premises to Azure, through the Zerto interface, and make sure that there's a healthy copy of Zerto in the cloud. For that mechanism, we spent several months working with Zerto, getting it dialed in to support what we needed to do. Otherwise, all of the other stuff that they've been known to do has worked flawlessly.

The interface is easy to use, although configuring the environment, and the infrastructure around it, wasn't so clear. The interface and its dashboard are very good and very nice to use. The interface is very telling in that it provides a lot of the telemetry that you need to validate that your backup is healthy, that it's current, and that it's recoverable.

A good example of how Zerto has improved the way our organization functions is that it has allowed us to decommission repurposed hardware that we were using to do the same type of DR activity. In the past, we would take old hardware and repurpose it as DR hardware, but along with that you have to have the administration expertise, and you have to worry about third-party support on that old hardware. It inevitably ends up breaking down or having problems, and by taking that out of the equation, with all of the DR going to the cloud, all that responsibility is now that of the cloud provider. It frees up our staff who had to babysit the old hardware. I think that, in and of itself, is enough reason to use Zerto.

We've determined that the ability to spin up workloads in Azure is the fastest that we've ever seen because it sits as a pre-converted VM. The speed to convert it and the speed to bring it back on-premises is compelling. It's faster than the other ways that we've tried or used in the past. On top of that, they employ their own compression and deduplication in terms of replicating to a target. As such, the whole capability is much more efficient than doing it the way we were doing it with Rubrik.

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. In the past, it was going to take us close to a month. 

Using Zerto does not mean that we can reduce the number of people involved in a failover.  You still need to have expertise with VMware, Zerto, and Azure. It may not need to be as in-depth, and it's not as complicated as some other platforms might be. The person may not have to be such an expert because the platform is intuitive enough that somebody of that level can administer it. Ultimately, you still need a human body to do it.

The most valuable feature is the speed at which it can instantiate VMs. When I was doing the same thing with Rubrik, if I had 30 VMs on Azure and I wanted to bring them up live, it would take perhaps 24 hours. Having 1,000 VMs to do, it would be very time-consuming. With Zerto, I can bring up almost 1,000 VMs in an hour. This is what I really liked about Zerto, although it can do a lot of other things, as well.

The deduplication capabilities are good.

The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do. When it's on-premises, it's a little bit easier because it's more of a controlled environment. It's a Windows operating system on a server and no matter what server you have, it's the same.

However, when you are putting it on AWS, that's a different procedure than installing it on Azure, which is a different procedure than installing it on GCP, if they even support it. I'm not sure that they do. In any event, they could do a better job in how to build that out, in terms of getting the product configured in a cloud environment.

There are some other things they can employ, in terms of the setup of the environment, that would make things a little less challenging. For example, you may need to have an Azure expert on the phone because you require some middleware expertise. This is something that Zerto knew about but maybe could have done a better job of implementing it in their product.

Their long-term retention product has room for improvement, although that is something that they are currently working on.

We have been with Zerto for approximately 10 years. We were probably one of the first adopters on the platform.

With respect to stability, on-premises, it's been so many years of having it there that it's baked in. It is stable, for sure. The cloud-based deployment is getting there. It's strong enough in terms of the uptime or resilience that we feel confident about getting behind a solution like this.

It is important to consider that any issues with instability could be related to other dependencies, like Azure or network connectivity or our on-premises environment. When you have a hybrid environment between on-premises and the cloud, it's never going to be as stable as a purely on-premises or purely cloud-based deployment. There are always going to be complications.

This is a scalable product. We tested scalability starting with 10 VMs and went right up to 100, and there was no difference. We are an SMB, on the larger side, so I wouldn't know what would happen if you tried to run it with 50,000 VMs. However, in an SMB-sized environment, it can definitely handle or scale to what we do, without any problems.

This is a global solution for us and there's a potential that usage will increase. Right now, it is protecting all of our criticals but not everything. What I mean is that some VMs in a DR scenario would not need to be spun up right away. Some could be done a month later and those particular ones would just fall into our normal recovery process from our backup. 

The backup side is what we're waiting on, or relying on, in terms of the next ask from Zerto. Barring that, we could literally use any other backup solution along with Zerto. I'm perfectly fine doing that but I think it would be nice to use Zerto's backup solution in conjunction with their DR, just because of the integration between the two.  

In general, the support is pretty good. They were just acquired by HP, and I'm not sure if that's going to make things better or worse. I've had experiences on both sides, but I think overall their support's been very good.

Zerto has not yet replaced any of our legacy backup products but it has replaced our DR solution. Prior to Zerto, we were using Rubrik as our DR solution. We switched to Zerto and it was a much better solution to accommodate what we wanted to do. The reason we switched had to do with support for VMware.

When we were using Rubrik, one of the problems we had was that if I instantiated the VM on Azure, it's running as an Azure VM, not as a VMware VM. This meant that if I needed to bring it back on-premises from Azure, I needed to convert it back to a VMware VM. It was running as a Hyper-V VM in Azure, but I needed an ESX version or a VMware version. At the time, Rubrik did not have a method to convert it back, so this left us stuck.

There are not a lot of other DR solutions like this on the market. There is Site Recovery Manager from VMware, and there is Zerto. After so many years of using it, I find that it is a very mature platform and I consider it easy to use. 

The initial setup is complex. It may be partly due to our understanding of Azure, which I would not put at an expert level. I would rate our skill at Azure between a neophyte and the mid-range in terms of understanding the connectivity points with it. In addition to that, we had to deal with a cloud service provider.

Essentially, we had to change things around, and I would not say that it was easy. It was difficult and definitely needed a third party to help get the product stood up.

Our deployment was completed within a couple of months of ending the PoC. Our PoC lasted between 30 and 60 days, over which time we were able to validate it. It took another 60 days to get it up and running after we got the green light to purchase it.

We're a multisite location, so the implementation strategy started with getting it baked at our corporate location and validating it. Then, build out an Azure footprint globally and then extend the product into those environments. 

We used a company called Insight to assist us with implementation. We had a previous history with one of their engineers, from previous work that we had done. We felt that he would be a good person to walk us through the implementation of Zerto. That, coupled with the fact that Zerto engineers were working with us as well. We had a mix of people supporting the project.

We have an infrastructure architect who's heading the project. He validates the environment, builds it out with the business partners and the vendor, helps figure out how it should be operationalized, configure it, and then it gets passed to our data protection group who has admins that will basically administrate the platform and it maintains itself.

Once the deployment is complete, maintaining the solution is a half-person effort. There are admins who have a background in data protection, backup products, as well as virtualization and understanding of VMware. A typical infrastructure administrator is capable of administering the platform.

Zerto has very much saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud, rather than in our physical data center. To do what we want to do and have that same type of hardware, to be able to stand up on it and have that hardware at the ready with support and maintenance, would be huge compared to what I'm doing.

By the way, we are doing what is considered a poor man's DR. I'm not saying that I'm poor, but that's the term I place on it because most people have a replica of their hardware in another environment. One needs to pay for those hardware costs, even though it's not doing anything other than sitting there, just in case. Using Zerto, I don't have to pay for that hardware in the cloud.

All I pay for is storage, and that's much less than what the hardware cost would be. To run that environment with everything on there, just sitting, would cost a factor of ten to one.

I would use this ratio with that because the storage that it replicates to is not the fastest. There's no VMs, there's no compute or memory associated with replicating this, so all I'm paying for is the storage.

So in one case, I'm paying only for storage, and in the other case, I have to pay for storage and for hardware, compute, and connectivity. If you add all that up into what storage would be, I think it would be that storage is inexpensive, but compute added up with maintenance and everything, and networking connectivity between there and the soft costs and man-hours to support that environment, just to have it ready, I would say ten to one is probably a fair assessment.

When it comes to DR, there is no real return on investment. The return comes in the form of risk mitigation. If the question is whether I think that I spent the least amount of money to provide a resilient environment then I would answer yes. Without question.

If you are an IT person and you think that DR is too expensive then the cloud option from Zerto is good because anyone can afford to use it, as far as getting one or two of their criticals protected. The real value of the product is that if you didn't have any DR strategy, because you thought you couldn't afford it, you can at least have some form of DR, including your most critical apps up and running to support the business.

A lot of IT people roll the dice and they take chances that that day will never come. This way, they can save money. My advice is to look at the competition out there, such as VMware Site Recovery, and like anything else, try to leverage the best price you can.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees for the product itself. However, for the environment that it resides in, there certainly are. With Azure, for example, there are several additional costs including connectivity, storage, and the VPN. These ancillary costs are not trivial and you definitely have to spend some time understanding what they are and try to control them.

I looked at several solutions during the evaluation period. When Zerto came to the table, it was very good at doing backup. The other products could arguably instantiate and do the DR but they couldn't do everything that Zerto has been doing. Specifically, Zerto was handling that bubbling of the environment to be able to test it and ensure that there is no cross-contamination. That added feature, on top of the fact that it can do it so much faster than what Rubrik could, was the compelling reason why we looked there.

Along the way, I looked at Cohesity and Veeam and a few other vendors, but they didn't have an elegant solution or an elegant way of doing what I wanted to do, which is sending copies to an expensive cloud storage target, and then having the mechanism to instantiate them. The mechanism wasn't as elegant with some of those vendors.

We initially started with the on-premises version, where we replicated our global DR from the US to Taiwan. Zerto recently came out with a cloud-based, enterprise variant that gives you the ability to use it on-premises or in the cloud. With this, we've migrated our licenses to a cloud-based strategy for disaster recovery.

We are in the middle of evaluating their long-term retention, or long-term backup solution. It's very new to us. In the same way that Veeam, and Rubrik, and others were trying to get into Zerto's business, Zerto's now trying to get into their business as far as the backup solution.

I think it's much easier to do backup than what Zerto does for DR, so I don't think it will be very difficult for them to do table stakes back up, which is file retention for multiple targets, and that kind of thing.

Right now, I would say they're probably at the 70% mark as far as what I consider to be a success, but each version they release gets closer and closer to being a certifiable, good backup solution.

We have not had to recover our data after a ransomware attack but if our whole environment was encrypted, we have several ways to recover it. Zerto is the last resort for us but if we ever have to do that, I know that we can recover our environment in hours instead of days.

If that day ever occurs, which would be a very bad day if we had to recover at that level, then Zerto will be very helpful. We've done recoveries in the past where the on-premises restore was not healthy, and we've been able to recover them very fast. It isn't the onesie twosies that are compelling in terms of recovery because most vendors can provide that. It's the sheer volume of being able to restore so many at once that's the compelling factor for Zerto.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is to get a good cloud architect. Spend the time to build out your design, including your IP scheme, to support the feature sets and capabilities of the product. That is where the work needs to be done, more so than the Zerto products themselves. Zerto is pretty simple to get up and running but it's all the work ahead in the deployment or delivery that needs to be done. A good architect or cloud person will help with this.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that it requires good planning but at the end of it, you'll have a reasonable disaster recovery solution. If you don't currently have one then this is certainly something that you should consider.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.