Zerto Reviews

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. 

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.

I use Zerto to store and protect my files. Whether I'm working on a project or just need to access old files, Zerto ensures everything is safe. This makes it very convenient, as I can easily access any information I need with just a single click.

Zerto is effective at blocking unknown threats and attacks. We might consider using it on the business website as well, but it's important to understand how it might impact our operations. It helps with blocking threats, which is certainly valuable. So, in terms of its effectiveness, I'd say it's close to 99% guaranteed.

Zerto has helped our organization block threats, is user-friendly, is effective in storage, and inspires users.

Zerto's Cloud disaster recovery is impressive, and recovering most of our data can be relatively straightforward. However, it requires careful planning and understanding. Navigating the recovery site is crucial, so ensure we read and comprehend the instructions thoroughly before clicking anything. This way, we'll know which box to choose and where to click to achieve our desired outcome.

It is easy to migrate data using Zerto.

It helps reduce downtime.

It has helped reduce our disaster recovery time. Before Zerto, we needed ten people for disaster recovery and now with Zerto, we are down to three. 

Zerto is truly inspiring. Sometimes, when I provide information and receive it back, it can be remarkably refreshing and motivate me to get the most out of it. There might be instances where I initially think something isn't applicable, but then I try it out and say "wow" as I realize I am getting something positive from it. it becomes quite inspiring and brings out my best creative potential. Witnessing these features makes me naturally want to explore and create more.

The performance was generally good, but occasional lag disrupted the flow, leaving room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for four months.

While Zerto is stable, it can sometimes be slow to retrieve the data we need.

Zerto is scalable.

We used to complete tasks manually, which consumed a lot of manpower, before adopting Zerto.

Zerto is affordable.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

No matter what we choose to do, there will always be potential positives and negatives. When aiming for the best outcome, focus on visualizing success and avoid dwelling on negativity. However, even while striving for the positive, acknowledge that occasional setbacks like technology issues or unexpected problems might occur. Don't get discouraged in the present; trust that Zerto will ultimately lead to something beneficial and fulfilling.

We primarily use the solution for data replication. We have it in Oracle. It helps with disaster recovery. We have a primary and secondary server and the data can move between the two thanks to Zerto.

Right now, I'm having issues with delays when archiving. We're facing issues with RPU and getting 20 or 30-minute delays. That's a bandwidth issue.

We do rely on the replication capabilities. When our one system went down, we were able to immediately replicate. 

It's a reliable solution - if we have great bandwidth. It offers near-synchronous replication. This is very important. We're a fintech company relying on Zerto for disaster recovery. We tend to only use the replication features.

We use the solution for immutable data copies. The 3-2-1 rule is very reliable. 

We can use Zerto to help protect our VMs.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. We have virtual protection groups and haven't had any issues. Our production server does need to be replicated in real-time, and everything else can be replicated whenever we like. 

It only takes five to ten minutes to switch over or failover.  During data migrations, our users can continue to collaborate just fine. It's fine and fast. 

The RTO is good. If a machine is storing more than two to three terabytes, it takes longer than ten minutes, but any time the storage is less than that, it takes ten minutes or less.

Our downtime is minimal.

We've saved a lot of time in a data recovery situation. 

We do switchovers from time to time to test DR. We do switchovers every three months. It only takes half an hour. It saves us about one hour at least. We can allocate the time we save to any other activity or task. 

It's reduced the number of staff needed for DR by three or four people.

The solution did replace some legacy solutions. It replaced small backup solutions. It's helped us save on the costs needed to manage them. We've saved around two resources so far. I'm not sure how much those tools cost. However, we needed four infrastructure and two or three database people looking after those. Now, we don't need to.

We don't have great bandwidth. When we don't have good bandwidth, it doesn't work so well. 

We're not fully satisfied with the support team.

The first time, it's difficult to migrate data. However, after that, it becomes easier. 

They need to give more options, such as more archiving options. 

The company has been using the solution for around one year. I've used it for three months.

The solution is stable, from what I have seen.

We have around 100 direct Zerto users. We have around 30,000 to 35,000 end-users. We have 10 production servers, Linux machines, five development servers, and five Unity servers. 

It is very scalable. We can scale up to 200 machines and have maybe around 80 right now. I'm not sure if we will scale more in the future. 

Support has dropped off. When I joined the organizations, they were very active. 

Positive

We also use Oracle. I used it in my previous company. In this company, we use HP, and it works well with Zerto.

Zerto is very easy to use, and the GUI is very comfortable. We can configure, replicate, and sync right from the GUI.

We have Zerto on an HP machine. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

Maintenance is necessary, and we have two people handling maintenance tasks. 

The solution is worth the cost. Having disaster recovery is necessary. If we ever suffer from a hardware failure, we can easily replicate in one click. 

The solution is a bit expensive. 

We did not evaluate other options. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

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.

Right now, we use it just for disaster recovery.

We have always had a centralized data center. Therefore, if we were to lose connectivity or power, then access to county resources would be cut off until that issue is resolved. If there is a hurricane, it would be the same thing. If we lose power, then we would be down until something comes up. With Zerto, I can quickly get us up and running at the disaster recovery site, provided it is still operational.

For most use cases, the failover time is a handful of minutes, if that. A single user can run the system.

Zerto will reduce the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. As of now, we have been lucky. We have not had to deal with this type of issue. However, it will require less people going forward. So, I can dedicate people to other tasks in a situation like this.

Disaster recovery would initially require four or five people to handle just the server side. This has now been cut down to just one person.

It provides great continuous data protection. The RPOs on things are in seconds.

We have been using it for two years.

We haven't had any issues. It literally just runs. Once you have it set up, you just leave it alone.

As long as I have the resources and licensing, I can keep going from a scalability perspective.

The tech support on my latest issue wasn't so great. I had to figure a lot of stuff out myself. It could be that I had a Level 1 tech who was new or something, but it seemed like the tech was spitballing, which does not help me.

In previous instances, the technical support was great. They were able to get me up and running fairly quickly.

We didn't have a solution like this before that allowed for disaster recovery. Everything was restored from backup, then we had to wait. So, if something went south, then we would need to restore from a backup. I saw the Zerto product was literally one button click, then I can failover to a disaster recovery site and keep going. That was amazing during the initial review of the product. It was just easy.

We started looking at how long it would take to restore from a backup. Rebuilding that infrastructure would take hours, if not days, as opposed to having the ability with Zerto to do a single click, then we are up and running at another site.

It is being used in conjunction with our legacy backup solution.

It was actually fairly easy to set up the solution. Installing it, creating the VPGs, and adding the VMs to it was fairly straightforward.

Working with support on the line, we deployed Zerto in a couple hours.

It is about $1,000 per VM, so it is pricey. However, the cost and time (the manpower cost) that it would take several members of IT to restore a backup and every individual piece of the virtual environment would easily exceed the pricing cost.

If we had to trigger it, downtime would go down to whatever the RPO is at that time. Right now, our RPO average is between four and 10 seconds. This is a big cost saver for us. Anytime certain systems are down within the organization, money is lost.

The only negative part that I have seen so far has been the cost. It is kind of pricey, but you get what you pay for. Zerto is a lot faster than other solutions and you get enhanced performance.

Eventually, we will expand solution use. While there are some competitors in the market, I don't think any of them get to the ease of use and speed that Zerto has. Even Veem has CDP, which is similar, but it is not as fast, user-friendly, or worry-free.

Veeam CDP was still fledgling at the time of our evaluation. It existed, but wasn't that great. It wasn't anywhere near as robust as Zerto. Commvault had something similar as well, but even their solution doesn't do disaster recovery as quickly as Zerto.

It is important that it has both backup and disaster recovery. As I am looking for a backup and recovery solution, I am looking for something that can do everything.

The solution was bought to help with the mitigation of ransomware.

Right now, we are still in a physical data center. We haven't looked at their solution for going to the cloud. That is something which is coming up. Eventually, we will make the switch over. Right now, we are working on a new backup and DR solution. So, that will go hand in hand once we are done with the on-prem.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10 based on the way that the product works.

We mostly use it just for disaster recovery. We also utilize it for our quarterly and annual DR test.

It is on-prem. We have a primary location and a DR location.

Since we are at a bank, there are certain protocols in place where we need to have RPO and RTO times of two hours or less. Zerto does a great job of setting those times and alerting us if those can't be met. We have our help desk actively monitoring that. It is extremely helpful that Zerto lists what is falling out of compliance in regards to RPO and RTO. It has been great in that regard.

If we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the number of people involved by half versus companies of similar size who don't have Zerto.

We have had patches that have broken a server. We then needed to have it right back up and running. We have been able to do that, which has been a huge plus. 

The real-time data protection is the most valuable feature. We are able to quickly spin up VMs instantly. 

We have also utilized it, from time to time, if our backups didn't catch it at night. If something was deleted midday, this solution is nice because you can use Zerto for that. 

I would rate Zerto very high in terms of it providing continuous data protection. We have had multiple instances that took days with our old DR test (before I was at my current company) and DR tests from other companies where I worked that didn't have Zerto. Now, we can realistically do DR tests in less than 30 minutes.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. If 10 is absolutely dummy-proof, I would give the ease of use an eight.

It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default. However, we have done it with other things. It is pretty handy.

I would like it if they would really ramp up more on their PowerShell scripting and API calls, then I can heavily utilize PowerShell. I am big into scripting stuff and automating things. So, if they could do even more with PowerShell, API calls, and automation, that would be fantastic.

I have been using it at my company for almost four years. My company has been using it for six years.

I would rate stability as eight and a half out of 10.

I would rate scalability as eight out of 10.

We monitor and use it every day. Our current license count is 150 VMs. I could definitely see us increasing that license because we keep adding more VMs.

As big as our company is, we don't have a very large infrastructure sysadmin group. I wouldn't say that Zerto has reduced our staff in any kind of way, but it definitely has helped the small amount of people that we have.

We have around 20 people using it: 

• Our core admin group is four people, including me. To put that in perspective, we have a $10 billion bank and our core infrastructure team consists of just those four people. The core admin group does administration, creates VPGs, and executes the main day-to-day operations. 
• We have a few users who are just monitoring it only. This is a read-only role. 
• We have our help desk, which is basically read-only, but they actively monitor RTO and RPO every day, all day long. They leave up the dashboard on a huge TV and just keep an eye on things.

I would rate the technical support as nine and a half out of 10. I thoroughly enjoy the fact that they are located in Boston, and you feel like you are talking to someone just like you. They do an excellent job of following up and escalating anything that is needed. I rarely have to call Zerto support, but I am confident that anytime I need to, then it will be resolved.

We stay in close contact with our main local rep.

My company never used anything quite like Zerto. We still use things for backup and recovery, such as Dell EMC Avamar, which used to be NetWorker. We also use RecoverPoint for applications, but it is not at all the same. There is actual real-time recovery. It is kind of a different animal.

I have had to redeploy it a few times with data center changes and such. We went from your typical data center to Cisco UCS Blades to VxRack, a VMware Dell EMC product. With that, I had to deploy it from scratch.

It was pretty straightforward. There is plenty of very easy to follow documentation when it comes to implementing it. There is also a lot of training provided so you can understand it before you implement it. Those two things make it pretty easy.

Just to stand it up and get everything going, that took an hour or two. The overall implementation was over the course of three days, because our core is heavily utilized.

We had a ZVM Virtual Manager on our production side and another on our DR site. Most of our data is replicated from production to DR. We do have some that are in the DR replicating back, but not a lot. Our main concern was between both sites, because we don't have a very large pipe. Even though Zerto's compression is pretty good, we didn't want to send that data all back over. Our main priority, when we set it up again, was that we were able to retain a lot of the data at our DR location and remap it by using preseeded disks, which was huge.

At least two staff members are required for deployment and maintenance. Whenever an update is released, we try to do that fairly quickly. For quarterly updates or major releases, we try to stay on top of them. Then, whenever we deploy new systems, applications, or servers, depending on the RTO and RPO, we add Zerto to those. That is daily, depending on how much workload we have and how many servers we are deploying. Those two people add those groups and such configuration into Zerto.

From an implementation standpoint, just follow the guide and check their support page for things. Worst case, reach out to support if you have already paid for it. It is pretty straightforward.

Zerto has helped reduce downtime. We have had servers go down and could easily spin them back up at our DR location almost instantly. Instead of taking an hour, it took a minute.

On average, it saves us three to five hours a day.

We pay for 150 VMs per year. It is not cheap.

Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well.

Zerto did really well with presenting their solution to the management here, really getting people involved, and helping them understand what and how it could be used. At the time, their real-time recovery was pretty far above anybody else available, and even still somewhat.

Other solutions would take an entire workday to recover our core infrastructure. With Zerto, we are done within an hour for all our major systems.

As far as the GUI goes, Zerto is more user-friendly than a lot of other products, such as Avamar and Commvault. It is fairly easy to use, but I think the GUI interface of Zerto is pretty far above the rest.

We use Avamar, and I don't see Zerto replacing Avamar for the simple fact of retention and how expensive the storage is. Using an RPM storage is pretty pricey, especially to try to rely on that for a long retention of seven years, for instance. 

When it comes to purchasing, I highly recommend Zerto all the time to friends that I have at other companies. 

It is just for DR. We keep an average of three days of retention, e.g., journal history of three days. However, it is not always the same for all products. We don't really keep it for backups. That is more of a convenience thing.

Currently, we don't utilize the cloud. It may be an option in the future. The cloud was a bad word for our bank for a long time, and that is starting to change.

Biggest lesson learnt: DR tests don't have to be so painful.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.