Zerto Reviews

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's very critical for us. For example, with SQL, we used to use Always On to protect databases at the database level, to give us high availability and DR. But now, in Azure, we don't do that. If we wanted to do that, we would have to have a SQL Server on the protected site and another up and running on the DR site and those machines would always have to be up and running. To save on costs, instead of using Always On, we're now protecting the VM as a whole, thanks to Zerto.

It's also the main tool that we use for our annual DR tests for all of our production applications. Once a year, for one week only, we do a failover of those critical production applications from the primary site to the DR site and we let them run there for that week. Zerto does the failover and the DR site becomes the active site while everything replicates to the former primary site. Once the week is over, we do a failback and Zerto is the main tool that we use for that, and we repeat the whole process. We're then good for the whole year. Zerto is protecting those VMs.

Another advantage is that Zerto has decreased downtime for us. It could have been a situation where we were down for weeks because of something that Azure did on their end. Even though Zerto has a partnership with Microsoft Azure, sometimes Azure makes changes that are disruptive. There was one change that affected our ability to replicate our critical workloads and it was a rough one. For that week, Zerto found a workaround because they were not getting any progress on resolving the situation from the Azure team. Zerto applied the workaround in their code and we were good, but that was a rough situation. Zerto goes out of its way to help its customers. We've had issues but Zerto has been very responsive.

The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick. Our SLAs are 24 hours, but Zerto could do what we needed, on-prem, in seconds, and in the cloud, in minutes. Zerto is way ahead of what our SLAs are.

Sometimes we do failover tests to make sure that we will potentially have a successful failover or migration. It's very flexible and does its job very well. And one of the things I love about the product is that whenever you do a failover, it gives you the ability to either commit or roll back. Some of Zerto's competitors don't have that ability, at least in Azure. That's critical for us because after we have DR tests on a weekend, we have users sign off on their applications that everything is fine. If something isn't right, we can always roll back to how everything was right before we started the DR test. And if everything is working great, then we commit.

Since we are primarily in the cloud now, Zerto definitely needs to update its platform. When we were decommissioning one of our on-prem data centers and going to Azure, there were issues. And with Azure, it's still limited in the way we can manage our resources there. Zerto hasn't quite kept up to date with how certain elements run within Azure.

In Azure, there is something called resource groups. You cannot create a resource without a resource group. You can apply tags to resource groups and that tagging information is very critical to our company because we now have 95 percent of our production environment workloads running in the cloud. We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group.

When it fails over, it uses the name of the group that you created within Zerto. The VM is failed over with no problem in a reasonable amount of time. But the problem then becomes that the resources are part of a resource group that has no tags. It does not follow our naming commission for resource groups and then we're stuck. It's not as easy just renaming the resource groups.

These components are very critical for us but they are missing in Zerto. They're aware of it because we've had feature-request meetings with our Zerto account team. They're working on it for the next release and have mentioned that they are going to be making improvements to the product. But for now, it's lacking.

Also, a downside with Zerto is that there is a lot of management overhead when running it in the cloud. On-prem, we used to have one Zerto management appliance, but in the cloud, we have about 20 to manage to protect our VMs. Zerto has mentioned to me that, for the next release, they're building it from the ground up and it will be much better in the cloud, with more cloud focus.

Because of the experience that I had with Zerto running on-prem, where we only had one appliance in each of our data centers, I deployed one in Azure as well. Little did I know that there were limitations and that more appliances had to be deployed because of all the replication of the traffic and the number of VMs that we were trying to replicate. But Zerto stepped in and helped when it came to that.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

They're very helpful. They always want to understand your situation and, even if they're not sure, they do their best to help and fix the problem. 

For on-prem, there were always references, but for the cloud there is a bit of a knowledge gap. I would always get workarounds, fixes, or KB articles for on-prem, but the cloud implementation is where the documentation is lacking. But the team does its best. It depends on who you get. Some know Azure, or cloud, and some still lack that knowledge. But if they don't know, they get the right person on the call.

Positive

We were a VMware shop on-prem and we were migrating to the cloud from on-prem VMware to Azure, so the tool that we were using to protect VMs through DR would no longer work. We used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for years when we used to be solely on-prem. 

We started looking for a product to help and, at the time, Zerto was the one that stood out among the competitors, and it was a solid product, so we started using it. Zerto is definitely a more effective product. It is a lot quicker when bringing our VMs up on the DR side, and even when we do a fallback. And Zerto is a lot easier to use than VMware.

The initial setup was not straightforward.

And maintenance is required for upgrades when there are newer releases, especially when it comes to Azure. There are newer releases that contain fixes and improvements and we do update the version of the Zerto appliance. They are running on Windows Servers, so we also have to patch the operating system. In Azure, there are a lot of SKUs with different pricing. Depending on the utilization of a VM, we sometimes make changes to the family types to save on costs at the VM level.

I did it with our Zerto account team, which included our sales engineer. Just the two of us were involved.

Zerto saves us a lot of time. One team member alone can handle the DR test using Zerto, whereas before, when we used SRM, at least two or three people were involved from the VM perspective and from storage. VMware was integrated with our NetApp environment and that meant at least two or three team members were involved. But with Zerto, just one person uses the product for a DR test.

We looked at Azure Site Recovery. We were close to going with it. It did have the ability to do resource group selection, but there were two showstoppers at the time that prevented us from going forward with it.

When we were looking at Azure Site Recovery, it seemed that it had a better cost per VM, but Zerto was not that far off. And we were more comfortable using Zerto to protect our VMs than the other products we were testing.

My advice is that if you're in the cloud, you really should test the failover of your VMs. If tagging is not a key component, you'll be fine. But if it is, that is a huge problem. And expect a lot more management overhead when it comes to managing Zerto in the cloud.

In terms of our RPOs, Zerto is consistent. From time to time, it may run past our SLAs, but that's because there are network or VM issues. And that happens very rarely. It almost always meets our RPOs.

The ease of moving data varies on the size. A good thing about Zerto is that it does give you a little chart indicating the step that it's at in the replication process.  But even if it's a small VM, it does take some time, including setting it all up and starting the synchronization. It's not instant.

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.

I am a solution provider and Zerto is one of the products that I implement for my clients.

Most of my customers use this product for disaster recovery purposes. Some of them use it in a local, on-premises environment, whereas other customers use it in the cloud.

We have assisted some of our clients with on-premises to cloud migration. These were customers that had an established local environment but wanted to explore the cloud. For these clients, it is a cloud-based DR implementation.

There are four or five customers that did not want a cloud deployment, so we have implemented the DR site on-premises for them.

If the client is given the choice, typically they prefer a cloud-based deployment. CDP technology is becoming the new norm, even for the backup industry. However, there are some instances where it is not an option. For example, in some situations, they cannot use cloud-based storage due to legal and compliance requirements.

Some of our customers that are making a digital transformation cannot afford to lose hours or even minutes of data. As such, I think that cloud-based disaster recovery is the future and the customers understand why it is much more important for them. Together with our reputation, I see this as a game-changing situation.

Most of my customers are interested in DR and do not know much about the long-term retention capability. Our last three deployments already had a backup implemented from the integrator and didn't need an overnight one to avoid the loss of data. We discussed this with them and explained that this product offers much more than what they are using it for. We pointed out that it was a two-in-one solution but they continue to use it primarily for DR.

Our customers find that the interface is really easy to use. It gives you a great deal of flexibility for the administrators, as well as for the end-users to a certain extent. Overall, with respect to ease of use, this product scores the highest points in this area.

The functionality available in the console is not complicated and is easy to use, especially for DR failover. It just works.

It offers a high level of compression, which is very good. My customers and I are interested in this feature primarily because it saves bandwidth.

The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. This is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum.

I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version.

We have been using Zerto for between three and four years.

Based on the number of support calls that I get from my customers, where we have done the deployment, issues arise very rarely. From time to time, we get calls because the allocated space is running out. Otherwise, it is pretty much stable.

Even the situation where the allocated space runs low is rare and I haven't had this type of call in a long time. The reason for this is that I take precautions during deployment. For example, I check to see whether they have too many workflows. I know what it is that we need to do including how many VRAs we need to deploy and what the configuration should be. Over the past three to four years, I have only had to deal with four or five support tickets. Apart from that, I haven't experienced any problems.

I do not have a great deal of experience with scaling this product because all of my customers have only a few hundred VMs. I know that Zerto has the capability to go beyond 5,000 or 10,000, but that is something that I've never experienced. My understanding is that it is very capable at the data center management level.

In the initial phase, I leveraged technical support, but then I completed the deployment.

During the PoC, there were one or two times where I had to contact them to deal with issues. I am pretty happy with how they respond and how they follow up compared with the other vendors that I work with.

I don't have much of a complaint with respect to support.

I have been working with Zerto since version 6 and the most recent one that we deployed was version 8.5. Approximately six months ago, our customer that was using version 6 was upgraded to version 8, because version 8.5 was not yet released.

I also have experience with Veeam but Zerto uses a very different technology to perform the backup and change tracking. Veeam leverages the VSS technology for the volume set up, which will do the job but it is not ideal. Zerto has taken one step ahead by utilizing the Journal technology, which is the main difference that I can think of between these two products.

Prior to working with Zerto, many of my clients were using the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) feature, which comes built into the product, based on their licensing. I have also had a customer who was using Commvault and others that were using NetBackup. These are typically the enterprise-caliber products that I expect to find.

One of my customers is using Veeam and because of the difference in price, with Zerto being more expensive, they did not switch. My customer felt that Veeam was convenient and the price was more tolerable. This is the only instance where my customer did not transition to Zerto.

The customers who switched have done so because Zerto provides the lowest RPO and RTO. It is one of the main points that I emphasize about this product because it is very important to them. There is also a saving in bandwidth, which is something that my customers are concerned with because they typically don't have fancy high-speed connections. The compression is superb and really helps in this regard. These are the two primary selling points.

For us, this solution is not difficult to deploy. For a complicated environment then you have to do careful planning but otherwise, it is not hard to deploy.

Typically, if everything is well in place, the deployment will take between one and three hours. In cases where the customer's environment is very complex then I might need a little bit more time. I would estimate that it would take six-plus hours, after careful planning and ensuring that all of the resources are in place.

The installation takes less than 30 minutes; however, the customer environment increases the time because we have to do things like open ports on the firewall. We tell them about these preparations in advance but we always end up doing some of the work ourselves. In situations where the firewall has already been properly configured, I can normally complete the installation and configuration in one hour.

I have two customers that use the cloud-based deployment on Azure but the majority of them use it in a local, on-premises environment.

The main challenge that I face with this solution is the price. All of my customers are happy with how this product works and they like it, but unfortunately, in the market that I represent, Zerto is expensive when compared with the competition.

Another issue is that Zerto has expectations with respect to the minimum number of devices that they are protecting at a given price range. I understand that this is an enterprise product, but unfortunately, price-wise, it is really tough when it comes to the TCO for the customers in the one or two countries that I represent. Apart from that, everyone understands the value, but at the end of the day it comes down to the price being slightly higher.

Pricing is something that I have discussed with the regional head of sales in this area. I have explained that you can't have a price of 25 million per year in this region, and in turn, have requested a lower price with different models for corporations. Unfortunately, I have not received a positive response so far.

With the separate backup product expected to be available in the next release, in a way, they have already done what I was expecting to offer to our customers. They have also announced some features that are really interesting. Right now, I'm waiting to get the new products in my hands.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is that if the system administrator has basic knowledge about networking and storage, then setting it up and deploying it will be easy, and not an issue at all. They just have to be careful and take the appropriate time to plan properly, especially in a complex environment.

In summary, this is a stable, enterprise-grade product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Zerto for DR purposes, we replicate what's critical to continue business. We replicate it from our headquarters to another state, a DR site. If something happens to the headquarters where we are located we could run the continued business from the DR site with Zerto.

It improved the way we function because we know that in the event of a disaster, we can easily recover our state of being in a rather quick amount of time. If there's malware, for example, we can go back to a point in time, up to five seconds before the malware started, and start production from that point on, undoing all the damage that the malware did. The ability to do that is a very good feature. It has replication and DR, but at the same time, if something happens with malware and it compromised your backups and compromised your offsite remote copies, you have that third option of saying, "We'll go to Zerto and see if we can reverse back from that point." That's pretty comforting.

If we need to fail back on work we would absolutely use Zerto for that. We'd probably do that first before we tried the backups. It's easier to do that than to try to look for the backups. 

Zerto decreases the amount of time spent trying to get everything back online. That's the most important part. If something happened, I could just go back. It would take me around 15 minutes to locate something and launch it fairly quickly. If you're doing it from a backup, you're probably going to look for a good backup, launch it, then it's got to set up. So you're looking at an hour, maybe, if you're lucky. It's a big difference.

We once had a server and there was some software and one of the controllers in the software wouldn't boot up and we did not have a copy. It was a brand new server, so we didn't have a backup copy of it just yet. We used Zerto to go back. It was in Zerto, but it wasn't on backups yet. We were replicating it just in case and we used that to restore the server back. I called support who walked me through it fairly quickly. The whole thing took around 15 to 20 minutes. It was easy. If we had used a different solution, it would have taken us an hour or maybe two. We would have needed to find the backup and then mount it. We would then launch code or a bunch of series of Wizards. Zerto is always running so if we need to get something, we just highlight, and then we go to more, and whatever we want to do, it's right there. We don't have to turn it on. We don't have to get it going. It's always running. Backups are in a stopped state, so we would have to get it going first, then look for something, then mount it, and then do whatever we're going to do. There are four steps there, versus with Zerto where it's, "Oh, it's in this VPG," go to more, it gives you all the actions you could do, clone, delete, copy and you just do it.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery because it's only two people who manage the Zerto platform. It's mostly me. I do about 80% to 90% and then 10% is my supervisor. He's more into the meetings anyway. We require two people.

The replication is the most valuable feature. It's almost like a tape recorder. You can rewind if you need to, if something bad happens. You can rewind the tape and your production begins where your tape left off. Where you want it can be replayed for such a purpose.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. For replication purposes, it's definitely better than Veeam. Veeam doesn't do as good a job as Zerto does when it comes to replication. The other alternative would be to just have backups somewhere. But even with backups, you lose a lot of time because you have to set it all up. With Zerto, you failover, you just click a couple of buttons and you run from the other location.

It's very easy to use. Every morning I go into the dashboard and I can tell the health of the VPG groups. If there's a problem or anything, I'll see it in the active alerts. So the dashboard is pretty simple. There's a status that tells you if the RPOs are falling behind, or from what you set it to, there's a reminder that tells you when to do the failover test. I like that. If I'm going to add a server to a VPG, I just go to the VPG section of the menu, find our group, select it, and then edit it, go to VMs, and there it is. It gives it to me side by side. It tells me what is unprotected on the left, and then this is protected on the right. I can move from unprotected state to protected state or I can remove something that's in a protected state to an unprotected state. It always tells me at the dashboard from the bottom, how many licenses I have, and how many I'm using. I don't go over my license count where I might not be protected. It's pretty easy.

We've never had a situation where we had to go to Zerto for downtime. It's just protection, but we haven't had the situation where we've had to failover. Hopefully, we never do. It's like car insurance. You want car insurance, but you don't want to get into an accident.

The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere. It's prolific. So with Zerto, you have to find it within the Zerto application. Hopefully, as they grow, it'll be more out there on the net. Same thing with Microsoft. If you look for a problem with Microsoft, you're going to find millions of articles on it, maybe it's just because they've just been around for so long. I'm hoping that one day Zerto is just as prolific and can be found everywhere.

I have been using Zerto for two years. 

Zerto is very stable. There are very few errors. I just don't see any errors. The only one time we had an issue with it was with journals. We were filling up too much and we called support and they walked us through it. We found out that we were replicating a temporary drive and it's not good practice to back up temporary drives because they constantly change when it's not even necessary. So we removed the temporary drives and we never had that problem again.

I'm a system administrator.

If you were doing recovery from a backup, you'd probably want at least two people looking through backups quickly to speed up locating them. You might need somebody to set up a mount server to mount the backups on. You can get away with three people but you might need three depending on how urgently you want to get going. It depends.

For DR management, if I was with another solution I would require more people. If you have a Dell EMC, they have storage administrators that that's all they do. And so that's a dedicated position. I'm a system administrator, which means that I do the storage, I deal with the servers. It allows me to do a lot of things, not just one thing.

Scalability is excellent. We have one here, we have the one there. I know we could add another ZVM, another location, or another DR site if we wanted to. That's been in the talks for a long time. It's on pause now because of COVID-19. But if at some point we decide that we want to add a secondary DR site that is geographically opposed to where we are now, then we could replicate one, two, and three at the same time. It's got good potential to be increased.

We have about 20 to 50 servers in Maryland and we replicate all the critical, essential ones that would be required to continue to run business to North Carolina. Everything is virtual, which helps us out. We have one Zerto virtual manager here, we have a Zerto virtual manager in North Carolina, and we do failover every six months just to make sure that it works. As a matter of fact, we have a failover test coming up that we have a test of failover to make sure that it's continuing to work.

The support is very good. I've used them before. When we had the journal issues, it was easy to resolve the issue.  We've done upgrades on the versions and they've always been very responsive. If I do a P1, which is critical or they do a P4, which is just information, they respond fairly quickly. 

We've used Veeam for backup. Before Veeam, we used Unitrends, which is even worse. It didn't work. 

Zerto's good for DR replication. I don't think anybody does it better. Veeam is good for short-term backups. It doesn't do well with the replication part at all - even they say it. I've spoken to reps who agree and say that Zerto's better at it than they are.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You set up a ZVM here and there and tell it the direction you want it to replicate in to. You can create an EPG to the journal that goes attached.

Because we were setting it up in the middle of things, it took around one month. 

We did have a strategy of how to put those servers here, build servers there, and IP addresses we were going to assign to it. We did have some sense of where we were going to put things.

We used the reseller who helped us with the deployment. They were great. It was easy. No problems with it.

We bought it through CTI.

I think we do see ROI. We need a defensive posture to protect ourselves.

Pricing is okay. You don't use Zerto to put all of your servers in Zerto. The purpose of it is you take what is absolutely critical to continue running your business, whatever servers are in your business continuity plan. Those are the ones that you put in Zerto. Then you'll be fine in the licensing because if you just buy 200 licenses or 300 licenses and you're backing up a utility server or any server that's not essential, then your bosses are going to think you're spending too much money. But if you just zero in on what's critical and back that up with licensing, you'll be fine.

There are no additional costs that I'm aware of. We have the licensing fees that come up and then that's it, as far as I know.

We had a couple of proposals. We had the one from Veeam but we realized really quickly that it doesn't work for replication. The other alternative would have been to save the backups to the offsite location, have servers there, and load backups at the server location. That takes a lot of manual labor so we decided Zerto would the best option.

We don't know what we're going to do for long-term retention. We use it for DR purposes only. But we are still looking at the long-term retention and what to do with it.

I would say if you're looking for true DR protection with minimal recovery time, then Zerto is probably going to be the one. If the objective is minimum time to recover, then this is the product you need to buy. If you want to spend time trying to set up again in a disaster, then there are a lot of things out there and for ransomware too. We have about a five-minute window where once data is compromised beyond five minutes, it's useless. So we need to keep the window to about five minutes. Because of that, Zerto is really going to have to do that at this point in a cost-effective way to recover. 

I like Zerto. You learn different things as you use it more and more, so you become more competent with it as you use it. I know that if you do have an issue, as with most other vendors, the easiest solution is to provide the logs as soon as you can, and then they're better prepared to respond if you do it that way.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. 

We have servers in Houston and we have servers at a DR site, we need to be able to make sure that they're replicated in some form or fashion. That's what we use Zerto for, to replicate between our primary site and our DR site.

The biggest improvement for us was going from a possible 24-hour lag on our backups to real-time lag. With the hurricanes here in Houston, buildings losing power, and so on, it was nice having the ability to just go flip a switch and we're live with current data as opposed to we're live with what happened yesterday.

Zerto has helped to decrease the number of people involved when we need to failback workloads. It's a much smaller number. It's time-consuming because of the way it works, but it's not overly overbearing. Instead of taking a better part of the day or two to get everything up and running, it really only takes us three or four hours. It has also decreased the number of people we need. It would take three or four of us to bring up servers, make sure they're all running, test them, and all that stuff. Now, it takes one person to bring them all up and then there's a couple of us to test it, so we have half or less of what it used to take. 

We've never had a ransomware issue. The reasons for our failover has typically been natural disaster caused.

Pretty much all of the features are valuable. The biggest thing we use it for is replication, so the ability to set up our virtual server, set it to replicate, and Zerto handling everything else is the biggest feature that we like.

The continuous data protection is great. We love it because we can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product.

We currently don't use it for long-term retention. It's something we may look at in the future, but that's not the product we're using for that.

Zerto is very easy to use once everything's set up, which isn't difficult. It takes a little bit of time to make sure all the network stuff is all set up properly, but once everything's set up, using it day to day is very simple.

Zerto has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. Our DR is to a physical data center. We don't put our data in the cloud.

For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool.

We have been using Zerto for five years. 

Stability is great. The only downtime we have is during upgrades and patches. I really haven't had any problems with the platform or stability.

The time it takes to update or patch depends on the size of the patch. Major upgrades take a little bit longer, but I mean, it's typically a couple of hours at the most. It's not a huge thing.

Scalability has been great. It continues to grow as we grow. I haven't had any problems with it.

Zerto is being used 100% across our environment. 

We've got about 11 servers doing backups in the 20 to 25 terabyte range most of the time.

Only I work with Zerto in my company. 

The two times that we've contacted technical support, we didn't have any problems. They've been helpful. They made sure we got the issue resolved and did very well with it.

We previously used Veeam. We switched because of real-time backups. Veeam was a point-in-time backup. We said, "You're going to back up at this time." It took a snapshot and backed it up. Zerto just continually backs it up and makes sure that we're currently up to date and matching the server at your primary.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery to the DR site. We still use Veeam for our backup disk-to-disk local for file backups.

Once Zerto is set up and running it is much more hands-off. You don't really have to do anything. You just log in to check, make sure everything's going well, and you're pretty much done. With Veeam, I feel like I have to check in a little bit more often, make sure the backups are running properly, making sure all the files are there, and everything like that. There is a little bit more checking to do on a regular basis.

I don't know if we would have failed over with Veeam because of the amount of time it took and coming back online at the primary site. I don't know that we would have failed over, which would have been probably five or six days of downtime. If we had failed over, we'd probably have lost two or three days in one direction, and probably another two or three days coming back to the primary.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a little while to make sure we had everything connected right, and that it was going to the right place, but it's no more difficult than any other setup for something like this. I didn't find it difficult at all.

If you don't include seeding and you only include the setup and deployment, it only took us a day or two of planning and then another day of actually implementing it. The seeding took a while, but that's to be expected.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we were using a different product back then, which wasn't as up to date and live. We were just backing up at night, so we had a nightly snapshot that was being transferred to our DR site. Our strategy with Zerto was to get us to more of a real-time backup solution at the DR site and make sure everything was good. That was the entire purpose of going with Zerto.

We used a third-party integrator for the deployment. We used Centre Technologies and they were great. We've used them for other stuff and we didn't have any problems with it and never have.

The one time we had the failover and run at the DR site, instead of having two or three days of downtime, we really had less than one day of downtime. If you measure that in how much money we were able to make that day, it's around $200,000 to $300,000.

We are on the lowest license because we don't exceed the number of servers for the base license, so I don't have a lot of information about licensing. The price of it was comparable, if not better than what we were paying for Veeam. I have no problem with the pricing at all.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing. 

Make sure you know how long it's going to take to do your initial seeding. If you've got a lot of data, and you're doing it over a pretty good distance, just make sure your pipe is big enough for the initial seeding. Once the seeding's done, pipe size doesn't matter, but the initial seeding can take a good amount of time over a small-ish pipe if you're replicating a lot of data.

For our largest servers to seed can take a full week or to 10 days for one server, for our large file server to seed is about seven terabytes, but we don't have a huge pipe at our DR site. We negotiated to increase the pipe size temporarily while we were doing the seeding, and that reduced the time drastically on how long it took to seed. I can't really give a number or what to look for. I would just have that conversation with Zerto about how long a certain pipe is going to take. How long is it going to take to seed using whatever pipe size based on the amount of data that they have.

Make sure all of your notifications are set up well when it fails. It takes a little tweaking and making sure that everything is set up right, but when you want to make sure you're notified if you get outside your SLA on how long the backups are trailing, making sure all that's set up properly is key.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

I use Zerto for replications for my DR site.

It allows us to have effective backup and recovery.

It hasn't helped anything directly, however, it does give us peace of mind to have a backup we can rely on.

The ease of use, ease of setup, and the dashboard, which is quite user-friendly, are valuable features. Zerto is very impressive and much more resilient. It's very easy to learn. Within a day a user can get up to speed.

It makes us more resilient overall.

The near-synchronous replication is impressive. We have around seven-second RPO times. Our RPO used to be 24 hours. It's drastically reduced RPO.

We have our own data center that we replicate to, however, we're actually in the process of changing that to replicate to a cloud environment.

We've reduced downtime by 90%.

We've been able to reduce DR testing time by 75%.

The speed of recovery is 90% faster.

Zerto works great. The pricing could always be lower.

I have been using Zerto for probably about seven years.

The solution is very stable. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I'd rate scalability nine out of ten.

I use Veeam for backup and replication. With Veeam, I only had the 24-hour replications.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Implementation probably took just a couple of hours. We had two users involved in the setup, and we have it set up in two locations. There are two people who work directly with the solution. There is a bit of maintenance in terms of updating. They are pretty easy and quick.

I haven't saved any costs since I haven't had a disaster.

The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

It's way better than anything else on the market. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I would rate the solution to other users. It works very well. 

We've used it for disaster recovery. We also use it for file recovery. We extended our journal to more days, so we were able to back up a more detailed timeline. We recently did migrations. 

One of the biggest benefits is the migration. We had to move out of a data center very quickly. We were able to failover to our disaster recovery site and run our full production there for almost two months. We then fail back over to the production site using Zerto. 

The ease of use and the ability to quickly recover our workloads is very simple and easy.

The near-synchronous replication is great. It allows us to failover and run production.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been excellent. 

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions is night and day. We use Veeam for backups and the amount of time that it takes to recover is so much quicker mounting with Zerto. That's why we extended the journal so that we could capture a few more days and make it easier for us to recover files.

The amount of storage that it takes up for the journals could use improvement. Outside of that, it's been great.

I have been using Zerto for five years. 

They're very stable. We had been with them for a while before HPE acquired them, and they're still going strong now. We haven't seen a lot of big changes in the way they operate, so that's always a good sign.

Support is great. Every time we have an issue, which isn't very often, they're very responsive. We get in touch with somebody very quickly and they help us through it.

Positive

We use Veeam and we've used Datto. We chose Zerto for its ease of use. It was simple, and then we found out once we got it in-house how valuable it was. We just extended it from there.

We used Veeam, and we switched because Zerto was a lot easier. From implementation to actually protecting our VMs, it was so much easier.

Zerto is on top. Zerto is the best out there. 

The initial setup was easy. 

We worked with Zerto on the deployment. 

We have definitely seen ROI.

We had to move out of a data center very quickly. The data center we were in filed for bankruptcy, and we had two months to move out. The ability to flip over to our recovery site in one day, and then being able to ride that until the next time we came back up, then move all of our data back to the new data center was huge for us. That would have cost us a lot.

The initial pricing seemed a little high, but once we got into it and found out what it could do and how it benefited us, it proved itself. We didn't feel that it was too far out of the ordinary. We've increased our licensing to cover our entire environment whereas before we're only covering critical servers. 

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. When we started using it, it was very easy to use. It was easy to implement. Throughout the years, it's continued to be that same way. They've proven themselves. We've had the data center move, we've had failures, we've had different issues that happened in our environment, and they were able to meet all of our needs. 

I have a main data center with a few virtual machines running. I am protecting my mission-critical VMs on a disaster recovery server that I have outside of the data center. This ensures that I have protection. If something happens with my main data center at any moment, I have a copy, and that copy is at a remote and physically separated site for disaster recovery.

By implementing Zerto, I wanted to lower the RTO and RPO. Previously, the time to restore those mission-critical VMs with the traditional backup application took too long which impacted my business. That is why I decided to evaluate and then keep Zerto to protect my mission-critical VMs. It helps to lower the time to recover when something happens with one of my data centers.

Zerto is very easy to use. I did not have to attend a multi-day training. Online training is available from Zerto. It is very easy to use in my opinion as compared to other solutions.

Near-synchronous replication was the reason why I evaluated Zerto. I then decided to use Zerto because it works effectively. It is different from the other solutions in the market. Because I did not know that technology, I evaluated it, and I found out that it effectively works. That is why I decided to use it. I am a fan of Zerto.

We have a faster recovery time. I am lucky that until now, I did not have to use it in production effectively. That means that I did not lose access to my first data center, but it gave me peace of mind. I know that if something happens, at that moment, I know what to do to recover and to fail over to that second data center. There is peace of mind for sure.

We use Zerto to protect virtual machines from VMware to VMware. Our RPOs went from hours to seconds. That is a huge improvement.

Before using Zerto, I had an issue, and we had almost a day of downtime. I had to put a lot of energy and time at that moment, not being able to do my regular job. Since moving to Zerto, I never had a big downtime, but when I evaluated Zerto and ran the tests, failovers always worked. I have not had to use it in production so far because everything has stayed online until now. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Zerto has definitely helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. Previously, the procedure to do the testing took several hours, and now, it is all automated. The nice thing is that the testing is automated. It is a part of the solution itself, and it is very easy to perform.

Zerto has enhanced our IT resiliency a lot.

I do not have many regulations to follow because I am not in finance or health care, but it simplifies my work because it clearly shows me what I have, what is supported, and what is protected. Zerto definitely enhances my visibility.

There are two main things that I like. One is the fact that my recovery time is now much lower effectively. It is also very valuable that I can test it. There is a possibility to test that failover. At a regular moment in time, I can run that test and see if it effectively works when I have a major issue in the future.

I am switching to another HPE offering called HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery which is using Zerto technology in the backend but has a lower entry point. The native Zerto implementation is optimal for larger environments. My environment is rather small since I do not have hundreds of virtual machines. The initial Zerto offering was for a larger environment with more than 100 VMs. At that moment, it was not that easy to talk to HPE to get a good price. HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery uses the same technology, so it is a really good technology, but the entry point is much more interesting for me. They have lowered the number of protected VMs. That is why I am now evaluating HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It is always available. So far, I never had any issues. It is very good. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is definitely scalable, at least in my environment. I do not have the biggest environment, but based on what I saw when HPE initially presented the solution and all the new things that I see in it now, it is a very scalable solution. Why I prefer this solution compared to Veeam, for instance, is its scalability. I am convinced that the way it works with journaling makes it much more scalable than other solutions.

So far, I never had to call support because I never had issues with the platform at all. Until now, everything worked fine, and I never had to contact support. This is through HPE, and I expect the HPE support to work like before and provide the same experience for Zerto.

Positive

I am still using Veeam, but with Veeam, I was never able to go up to a few seconds of RPO. Zerto is much more scalable and flexible as compared to the Veeam solution, so I am using Zerto for the short-term retention and protection of my data, and I am still using Veeam for the mid- and long-term retention of my data.

It is for on-prem to on-prem DR. I am not using the public cloud for DR.

It took less than a day to set it up. It was very easy to deploy. In less than a day, everything was set up in two data centers.

In terms of maintenance, it is self-maintaining, so I do not have to put a lot of time into it. It is part of my testing. Every two or three months, I do a failover test, and at that time, I also check if everything is working fine and if any new updates need to be applied. When there are new updates, which do not happen that often, it is very easy to deploy the updates.

Only one person was involved in its deployment. It was just me. To set up and maintain it, there is just me. I do not need several people because it integrates with my compute and my storage. I can see my hypervisor. Technically, there is one storage person who is responsible for all this.

We are a small company. Zerto is being used by one team, but there are two physical buildings. Here on-site, we have our main data center, which is highly available with multiple servers, and on our DR site, there is just one server. It is one big server where we have copies of the mission-critical VMs that we are protecting.

It is hard to measure because I have not had a real disaster since I have been using Zerto. If I consider the time while testing the procedure, it went down from hours and days to less than an hour. I see large gains, but it is hard to say in the percentage. It is effectively much better.

I think the price is fair for what it is offering. It gives me the peace of mind that my data is protected. It is worth the cost.
It is like insurance for a car. You do not get the value until you have an accident.

I am now evaluating HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery, which is using Zerto in the backend.

I would definitely recommend Zerto. I have really low RPOs of seconds since I started using Zerto, and it works effectively. That is why I love Zerto. It does what it should be doing.

I like the tool because you can go from anywhere to anywhere. I am currently using it for on-prem to on-prem DR, but it can go from anywhere to anywhere. It shows the flexibility and the scalability of the tool. It is a no-brainer to evaluate Zerto because you can also go perfectly to the public cloud from your on-premises so that the public cloud is your DR site. I did not use it myself, but you can even use it as a migration tool for migration from an old environment to a new environment. It is a very flexible tool. That is why I was impressed with it and how HPE integrated Zerto into its portfolio. It was a smart move to do the acquisition of Zerto.

I recently started looking into the AI insights that was added in the latest version. Need to evaluate further but it looks very promising from what I can see now already.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.