Zerto Reviews

We purchased Zerto for our business continuity and DR approach to make sure that workloads are available. We have 1,000 servers but are only protecting 250 of them because they are our core servers. The ones we don't currently protect are Tier three applications.

We have had many instances where VMs were corrupted by an application owner, where they were installing something and did not create a snapshot in VMware for it. Instead of tapping into our backups, with just two clicks, we were able to restore the VM back to its original state. It helps a lot in the day-to-day running of our business.

In some instances, there is data within transactions that I need to recover that might be lost. When using Zerto, I might be losing five seconds worth of data instead of losing ten minutes. That helps a lot. Zerto also helped us reduce downtime and we have been able to recover VMs fairly quickly by just clicking two buttons. Within a minute I would have a VM up and running and ready to go with no issues at all.

The RTO and RPO are the most valuable features. I get six-second snapshots for every single time that data gets replicated. I can go back six seconds past whatever happened. The frequency of the snapshots depends on your latency. It could be as frequent as every two seconds.

The overall management plan could improve. If something happens with the VM on the vSphere side, the error codes are pretty weak. If there was a way to click on something within the UI that takes us to a support page or article, that would be very beneficial.

We have been using Zerto for six years. 

This is a stable solution. Most of the time, the issues that we have had with our ZVM going down are caused by us. 

This is a scalable solution. We deployed it in eight different locations. 

The support could be better. Overall they do have the answers for me when I need them but it takes them some time. The Level 1 support team that I contact first when I call in could be more knowledgeable about products and be able to resolve an issue instead of having to wait for a Level 2 or Level 3 person to assist.

I rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I've seen and looked into the VMware SRM. We also use another company, Cohesity, for our backups. They also have a solution for replication. When comparing these solutions, the RTO and RPO times are fairly reduced when using Zerto to get to a point where we need to be functional right away in an event of disaster recovery.

We have experienced ROI using this solution. It helps a lot when we use Zerto to test out certain applications. It offers a lot of value for our upper management to see how this product helps us in the event of a DR.

The pricing for this solution could be cheaper. They have two licensing tiers. When we purchased it, they didn't have a license for the cloud model. Certain things that I used to get with the basic licensing are no longer available. They are only available in the Cloud. Overall, the licensing model could be simplified. 

I would advise others to test drive the solution themselves. They should play with it, see how it works themselves and try to break it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

It is mainly for disaster recovery of our public-facing website.

I oversee the infrastructure team. I'm the lead for the infrastructure. It is not one of the technologies that I've primarily managed. As an infrastructure lead, I have my hands on every project, and it is hard for me to just focus on one. Especially because it is more of a disaster-recovery type solution for us, as long as replication is going fine and there are no issues, we don't really go in and play with it much.

It does what it claims to do. I can't say whether it improves anything. It is just the fact that we want to make sure our public-facing website is up 24/7, and Zerto gives us the capability of doing that.

It hasn't reduced downtime because we haven't experienced any downtime yet. We've done annual testing to make sure that it is working properly. So far, so good.

The replication is valuable. We have two data centers, and it is replicating from our main data center to another data center. In the event that there is an issue with the first one, it just goes over, and we have the website up and running. It does an automatic build. It keeps our website up and running without interruption. It is constantly replicating. It has the most up-to-date information, at least until the main one goes down, and then it automatically brings up the other one. It is already pre-configured with the network and everything else. So, the website is up and running in seconds.

The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime.

Zerto is more of a set-and-forget-it type of solution. As long as the replication is continuous and there are no issues, I don't touch Zerto. We don't have a lot of workload that needs to be up. We just have our web server and our applications here. Those are two main servers that we get up and running in a disaster-recovery type situation. I can't give any area of improvement from a real-world experience because we haven't had that issue, but from testing, Zerto has been working great. 

It is not something that goes beyond what our use case is for. When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way. When I started working here, my predecessor who was managing Zerto had no documentation. So, I had to take over. No one else knew how to manage Zerto. So, there is just that type of learning process. That's why management wants to standardize on one solution so that it is easier to cross-train, but that's not Zerto's part. It just happens to be our environment and our management style. Zerto as a solution has been great for us.

I've been using it for about three years.

It has been stable for us. We had networking issues that caused the replication to break, but once we had that resolved, replication was seamless again. The
networking issues were on our side.

I don't have much input for its scalability because we only have a maximum of three servers that we need Zerto to bring up and get running as soon as possible, in the event that the main data center goes down.

It has been great. I've only requested support twice. The support engineer that worked with me has been great. I believe it was for the upgrade process, and he reached out to me and informed me that there was a new version that fixed a lot of the bugs from the previous version. He worked with me to get both data centers up to the latest version. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I haven't used any other one. Rubrik just happens to be coming out with a similar solution, and because we use Rubrik, management wants us to take a look at it and do a comparison between the two.

Aside from working with the network team to get all the networking pieces configured, it was pretty straightforward. Installing the agents on the servers and doing the initial replication took the longest time because we have close to a terabyte of data that has to be replicated from one data center to another, but other than that, it was pretty seamless.

It gives us peace of mind. It hasn't happened yet, but it does happen. Based on our annual testing, we are pretty much happy with what Zerto has done or can do.

Zerto is pretty reasonable. I haven't checked to see how much Rubrik is going to quote us for their solution. At least for us, the price doesn't play a big factor in the decision-making because it is a pretty small deployment for our use case.

We're currently evaluating Rubrik because we use that as our primary backup solution, and they just came out with a technology that's similar to Zerto. My managers, the executives, and I are in discussion on possibly looking at their solution and comparing it to Zerto to see which is the right fit for us.

In terms of ease of use, I haven't played with the Rubrik one yet just because they just announced it, but Zerto is pretty straightforward. I went in, and I did all the configuration myself within about 30, 40 minutes.

It is a great solution for what it does, but every company and every department has its own use cases. It is just a matter of evaluating different solutions that are available and picking the right one for your environment. For us, Zerto happens to be the right one.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10 just because it fits our needs for the solution and the environment we're in.

We use Zerto as our primary disaster recovery tool for our most important servers.

Zerto is tremendously valuable. It is the backbone of our DR solution for critical databases that hold the data we can't afford to lose. It provided new opportunities to change how we approach disaster recovery. 

We realized the benefits quickly, but I don't think it became a staple of our disaster recovery until about a year into our deployment. In the first couple of months, we had some hiccups with upgrades. Once they sorted everything out, it truly became a core solution for us.

It enabled us to transition from data recovery based in a physical data center to the cloud and protect VMs in our environment. Our RPOs also improved tremendously. When we first started, only one other product offered the same RPOs that Zerto provides. However, the other product was problematic, and Zerto has been solid. Compared to other DR solutions, it works quickly to stand up the failed server at another site and bring it nearly into full production. 

We used it to migrate a server, which provided a wonderful recovery time. It worked well. Our RTOs improved tremendously. It reduced downtime in most situations and the time spent on DR testing. A DR test used to run probably 48 hours and involved around four engineers. With Zerto, it runs for about six hours and only requires two engineers.

We couldn't find a product that provides the near-zero recovery point that Zerto offers. The closest we could get was another product that had zero data loss. Everything else had a minimum of 15 minutes of replication time, resulting in data loss.

Zerto can also perform test environment restorations that don't affect production. It's also easy to use. It's a set-it-and-forget-it product. Unless you need to make changes to the devices you protect, you don't need to go in except to make sure everything runs smoothly.

I wish Zerto had better file restoration capabilities. We have not been able to use that because of the limitations of Zerto's de-duplication technology. When we used the immutable data copies feature, we had some lag in replication times, so we don't use that anymore. When there is big data movement, it tends to cause some lag.

We've been using Zerto for about three or four years.

With time, it became a highly reliable and stable solution. We were an early adopter, and it had some hiccups initially. I think they've done a great job streamlining it and making it reliable.

The times that I've needed technical support, they've been very good.I would give it an eight.

Positive

Zerto still hasn't replaced all our other backup solutions, but it has replaced two of them. It is leagues above the other products we used in terms of simplicity and reliability. We have another solution to get around Zerto's file restoration and de-duplication issues. We use Veeam Backup and Replication for that. 

Setting up Zerto is straightforward. The documentation was great, and it is intuitive. Integration with VMware is seamless. It's good at running the scripts needed to run in order to work with VMware. We have a 90 percent virtualized environment. 

I think everything can be cheaper. Pricing limited our ability to use Zerto as much as we'd like, but that's not why we haven't adopted it as our primary backup solution.

We evaluated Double-Take, Veeam's replication solution, and Azure's Site Recovery. None could match Zerto's RTO and RPO. The only one that got close was Double-Take, but Double-Take was very problematic.

I rate Zerto eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. It's one of the best solutions for disaster recovery available right now.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery (DR) purposes. We needed a tool to provide a quick resolution during a failure or problem and help us achieve our goals related to our service level agreement (SLA). We needed a tool that would help us in providing the availability of lost services within a specific time frame. We wanted to make sure that in case there is a problem and we have to execute the DR procedure, it is quick, easy, and safe. So, the main purpose for going for Zerto is related to meeting the required parameters for RPO and RTO.

We don't use Zerto for backup purposes. It is used only for virtual machines. We also have physical servers, but we have different tools for backup. 

Currently, we are using it for on-premise data centers, but we also do proof of concept tests with public clouds or hybrid clouds.

It is very good in terms of end-user experience and functionality. The graphical user interface (GUI) is quite simple, and it shows many values related to the status of replication. You can see the current status of a specific application and the health status of infrastructure on the GUI. You can very quickly navigate the application and find very useful information related to the health status of your infrastructure. You can see if the infrastructure is working fine and if there are any bottlenecks or problems that need to be verified by the IT infra department.

It helps us with standardization. It allows us to have a unified DR approach where with one tool, we can meet the DR requirements of different systems with different levels of DR criticality and classification. We have customers for whom the availability of a particular system is crucial for business, and this system requires a very high quality of replication. At the same time, they also have systems that are not as critical. For a unified approach to the DR process, it is better to use the same DR tool for all applications with different levels of criticality. Instead of using different tools for critical and non-critical applications, it is better to use one single tool and have a unified process. Zerto helps us with that.

Different types of integration allow you to provide the tool not only to specialist teams, such as infrastructure teams, but also to the end-users to perform activities like failover, system recovery, and system protection. Service portal integration and automation integration provide a big value in terms of DR activities. You don't have to wait for VMware specialists to perform the DR failover task. You can do it on your own if you have access to the DRaaS portal, for example. DRaaS portal is DR as a service that we have implemented in our own infrastructure, and it is a part of process improvement in our organization.

It has significantly decreased our RTO for failover to the full scope of an application. You can easily measure DR activities for a specific application. If you are responsible not only for your application as an application owner but also need to provide support to many customers at the same time, such a tool is very good. When you are responsible for delivering as per the SLA for RTO to many customers at the same time, it is very helpful because you can perform required activities automatically, and you can also perform them in parallel.

We are very satisfied with the achieved RTOs. We have specific requirements based on the service delivered values and SLA contracts, and by using the tool, we are able to fully meet RTOs for specific applications, a group of applications, or the whole scope of a data center.

During our DR exercises, we try to simulate the worst-case scenario where a complete data center is unreachable, and we are able to achieve the required RTO. Zerto is able to fully meet our needs, and we are able to achieve the required RTO during our normal and yearly DR exercise. We are receiving exactly what we were promised. However, I can't provide metrics or compare it to another tool because we have been using it from the beginning. I don't have the metrics for how much time it would take if we didn't have this tool, but the values that we are receiving during our annual DR exercise are fully satisfactory. So, it is fully sufficient for us.

The time saved in a data recovery situation depends on the specific scenario and the specific system that needs to be recovered. For example, if you have 50 gigabytes built into a machine that needs to be recovered, then with a traditional backup and restore solution, the recovery is very quick and easy. It would take from minutes to an hour depending upon your infrastructure or the bottleneck in your infrastructure. The problem occurs when you have very big systems with 10, 30, or 50 terabytes to be recovered. In such a case, it doesn't matter if it is ransomware or it is an infra failure. Even though the root cause is not the same, the outcome is the same. The fact is that you don't have a working system, and you need to recover the system. Recovering a big system with the traditional approach could take you a week, which is something that businesses do not accept. With a tool like Zerto, I can fail over the system very quickly. During DR exercises, I performed DR activities for systems with many terabytes of data, and it is not a problem to recover that system and failover. I have very good experience with that. During the training or presentation for my customers, I have shown how it works and what are its advantages. One of them is the possibility of a very quick recovery irrespective of the size of the system. The approach is exactly the same irrespective of whether it is an infra issue or a ransomware issue.

The main purpose of this tool is to allow failover between different data centers and different locations. When one site is unavailable, we can start the failover activity and perform the failover task. When a primary location is unavailable, or there is some hardware or logical issue at the primary location, it allows us to resolve the problem. We are able to start services at safe locations. We handle the disaster recovery process, and this is the main function for which we are using it all the time.

The second valuable feature is related to integration. If we want to implement any tool in our company, we want to make sure that it is not sandboxed. It shouldn't be completely isolated from other systems, and it should help other systems to receive feedback. To gain advantages of having tools like Zerto on the board, we want to combine our disaster recovery with other processes, such as incident management or change management. We can integrate these processes using different tools, but usually, the best approach is related to API. So, we can integrate different systems and combine them into a big IT platform, which allows us to achieve more features that are normally not available in the tool itself.

Zerto supports different ways to integrate with or get information from the systems. GUI is one of the options, and technologies like PowerShell cmdlets or RESTful APIs are also very good to exchange data for integration or automation purposes.

We also use Zerto for compliance purposes in case we need to provide evidence. When we perform DR exercises and we have some problems with the infrastructure, we need to prove that some actions were taken. It works very well when we perform DR activities and we want to show external auditors the proof and evidence of performed actions.

It is very quickly developed, and new features are provided quite often. I don't have any input for improvement or a critical feature request at this moment. If anything, a lower price is always better.

I have been using Zerto for six years. 

Its stability is very good. Of course, bugs can be found because this is live infrastructure, which is normal. There are new VMware releases, and there are new operating system releases. If there are some problems with applications, we raise cases, and we get the required support in resolving the issue. So, my experience has been very good.

Its scalability is very good. We can use it in on-prem and hybrid cloud environments. It works well with different vendors.

We are using it for different locations. We are using it for on-premise data centers, and we are also using it for all the production systems that we have. Any increase in its usage will depend on the decision of the company. If the decision is to change the platform and integrate with different vendors, we can choose additional features, but at the moment, we are using only the on-premises functionality.

Their support is very good. We have to meet our SLA, and the infrastructure is very sophisticated and demanding. We have had different cases that need investigation and resolution, and we could always count on Zerto's support, which is available 24/7. I don't have any complaints about their support. I would rate them a ten out of ten. If possible, I would even give them eleven.

Positive

I have not worked with any other tool previously. This is the only tool I have used. 

It was quite easy to implement and start the execution. There were no problems. It took us about three months to implement it in production.

For implementation, we were using the services directly from Zerto's support teams. In terms of the number of people, there were two people from the DR team and two from the infrastructure team, which included the networking and VMware teams.

In terms of maintenance, every tool requires maintenance, and when you upgrade, there are some bugs or issues that need to be resolved. Currently, for the maintenance of the application for many customers, one person is enough. Based on the number of protected systems and sophisticated infrastructure that we have, it works very well. It is not something that we should complain about.

Its price is reasonable. I have not worked with other tools, but as compared to its competitors such as VMware, its price is lower. So, in my opinion, its price is good.

Based on our experience and the implementations that we have done successfully, it is the right tool for protecting small environments and very big environments. It fits the needs of organizations that require a few functionalities, and it also fits the needs of organizations with a sophisticated environment comprising managed systems, multiple integrations, etc.

Zerto provides near-synchronous replication. So, the RTO is near zero. It is not equal to zero. From my perspective, there are some specific IT areas where synchronous replication is a must, but in most scenarios or use cases, synchronous replication is like a trap because you need to have a single connection between two replication zones or sites, which I would refer to as a single point of failure. If you have storage that is replicated between two sites, in certain scenarios, you won't be able to perform failover activities. If storage is broken on the primary location and you have enabled synchronous replication, the replicated data is also sent to the recovery site. So, you cannot perform failover activities because you now have corrupted data at both sites or data centers. We have chosen this tool to get out of this trap and be able to failover but not to the exact point in time when the issue occurred. I have experience working with such scenarios. For a specific group of systems that require synchronous replication, I can have an additional level of protection by having other DR tools, and at the same time, I can provide replication by using tools like Zerto. So, I can enable two DR solutions on one protected system and resolve the issues related to different scenarios.

In terms of reducing the DR tasks, because I have not used other tools, I can't provide the metrics for increase or decrease in time. However, considering that the tool is implemented for the whole scope of our application, we do not have to wait and spend weeks or months preparing for the DR test. We are prepared all the time for any issue. We also perform the unknown data center DR exercise allowing us to choose the test data center just before the DR exercise. I can very quickly start the recovery operations without a long preparation phase. This is one of the main features of a DR tool that should be taken into account for a company. You should have a tool that you can use at any time. You should ensure and be confident of the fact that it will work and not create any problems during the failover.

DR exercises generally should be performed by customers and application owners. That's because they know best what the issue is and how to provide a solution. It requires synchronization of some tasks and allowing more critical systems to be failed over before the less critical ones. To perform a global DR exercise preparation and execution, very less staff is required. Communicating with customers about the agenda and defining the scope, tasks, schedule, and other things take most of the time, but the execution phase is quick. It can be executed by one operator. It can be done by an infra specialist or an application owner, but ideally, it shouldn't be done by the specialist team. It should be done by application owners because they know the best about the issue.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. It is a very good tool, and we have had very good experience with it. We have no problems with recommending it to others.

We use Zerto for multiple use cases. We are using it for disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and data protection. There is an inbuilt feature where we can utilize the Zerto platform in a hybrid model which means we have one instance on-premises and another instance on our cloud for redundancy and for cross integration.

Zerto’s near-synchronous replication works. We have configured near-synchronous replication between two different clusters. One cluster is on-premises, and another cluster is on the cloud. For near-synchronous replication, the value proposition is excellent. We are able to achieve the results for which we procured this solution. Near-synchronous replication is working perfectly. We do not see any challenges with data retrieval, complete replication, and synchronization processes. Everything is working perfectly and seamlessly.

We were able to see its benefits when we integrated it with our HPE GreenLake for DR purposes. It is a SaaS-based platform, so we are able to see the fastest way to recover data and applications. We were perfectly able to meet our recovery point and recovery times objectives through Zerto. On top of that, Zerto is protecting our data from ransomware, cyberattacks, cyber threats, national disasters, or human errors.

We are using a lot of virtual machines on-premises and in the cloud. Our main goal is to protect the complete data that we have in production and non-production clusters with different applications and big platforms.

Zerto is a market leader in continuous data protection technology. Previously, we had RPOs and RTOs in terms of minutes, whereas now, they have changed from minutes to seconds.

Zerto has an inbuilt disaster recovery protection and prevention with continuous replication. Whenever we faced any challenge related to our link being broken or not being able to access the data from the primary data center, all the backups were readily available because Zerto had replicated snapshots. We have not seen much latency or delay in recovery and the ability to get replicated data from different destinations.

We have not had any ransomware type of event. However, during the PoC and testing in an isolated environment, we have seen what would happen in the case of an attack. We could see how Zerto and its policies will take action and isolate that environment within a fraction of a minute or second.

For DR, we were previously using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) but there was a lot of complexity. It was time-consuming. Most of the time, we saw a lot of human errors happening, and we were not able to test our DR activity. By leveraging Zerto for the past 14 or 15 months, we could achieve all of our desired results. There were no human errors. Everything went seamlessly. We are very happy with this solution.

Zerto has had a positive effect on our IT resiliency strategy. With the earlier vendor, we had a lot of problems. Our data got lost in transit during replication, snapshot creation, and recovery scenarios. By using this robust platform, we could achieve our resiliency metrics. The metrics are stable and never went below the benchmark.

Things are working perfectly. Each and every feature is complete with advanced options. It is a simplified DR operation platform. It has great visibility when it comes to protection from ransomware attacks. It has deep analytics features and robust data recovery policies. Everything is good in this platform.

The most valuable feature is the resiliency towards cyber threats for data protection. The main reasons for adopting Zerto are data protection and being able to do disaster recovery for site recovery. We can ensure that if the site goes down, data is available to all the users within a fraction of a second. On top of these, we have the resiliency towards malware and other security threats and attacks. Zerto has an embedded feature to protect our data from external and internal threats.

Zerto is very easy to use. It is very user-friendly. It is a GUI-based platform with a centralized dashboard where we can create policies, snapshots, replication policies, and disaster recovery policies. It is very user-friendly.

Patch management can be better. Although we are doing patch management on the Zerto platform in an automated manner, it can be improved by leveraging some AI-assisted technology. With the help of AI, things are going to be faster in terms of patching the solution.

We have been using Zerto for 14 or 15 months.

Since we deployed it, there have been no critical issues or major incidents. The platform is working as per the expectations. There was no downtime of any production activity. We are happy with the stability and overall performance of the complete platform.

It is completely scalable in terms of adding licenses, subscriptions, modules, and different sorts of features. Its scalability is seamless, and it is easy to use.

I have contacted them multiple times. Their support was good. We got a timely response and a timely resolution.

Positive

We were using VMware SRM previously. We switched from VMware SRM to Zerto due to complexity, cost, human errors, and data protection.

The most important security feature in Zerto is protection against ransomware attacks and internal or external threats. These capabilities were not present in the VMware platform. Cybersecurity resiliency and protection are embedded in Zerto.

Zerto is very easy to use, operate, and administer. It is very simple and easy to create and work on any of the policies and rules. It is easy to extract reports and navigate to the other tabs where we can see the health scorecard and other things. We can see all the things. It is very easy to patch the entire system. Everything is good.

We have a hybrid deployment. We have one instance of Zerto disaster recovery and protection running in an on-premises data center, and then we have another instance running on the cloud. Both are continuously replicated so that in case of any difficulty or problem with one, we can leverage the functionality of the other one. The on-premises one is taking care of the on-premises environment, and the cloud-based instance is taking care of the cloud-based environment.

Its initial deployment was very easy and flexible. We did not face any challenges. The solution is quite simple. It is easy to navigate, easy to use, and easy to migrate, although we did not go with any sort of migration. It was a fresh greenfield deployment, so we had no issues at all.

Its implementation took us about 12 weeks. It does require maintenance. The maintenance contract was already placed when we went with the purchase order for procurement. It was a multi-year support contract. It does require maintenance in terms of patch management, updates, health checks, performance tuning, policy updates, and recovery plans and procedures updates. We have a storage and backup team working 24/7 in this environment.

We directly worked with a Zerto system integrator. That integrator was recommended by Zerto. We also worked with the Zerto team for the complete architecture, framework design, implementation plan, and other things. We did not take any help from any third-party vendor or resource.

We had five to seven people for its implementation.

Its pricing is very competitive. As compared to VMware SRM, Zerto has reduced our OPEX cost by at least 30%.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten as a platform. With the help of Zerto, we have very enriched features for ransomware protection of all our data repositories. It provides great support for disaster recovery and response. Our RTOs have improved after adopting the Zerto platform, so everything is good.

We primarily use the solution for DR purposes. 

It provided an easier way to set up everything regarding DR. We had a small team. There were only four people and one of them was a manager, so we had just three people with one desktop guy. We were looking for a solution that was easy to set up, did not require too much maintenance, and something we didn't have to constantly keep an eye on. Zerto provided that. 

The setup is easy and very comfortable. There are not too many issues doing the upgrades. Maintenance is easy and configuration is easy as well. It's all just GUI-based. You just select the server that you want on the DR and it starts the application. 

Transfers between the data center are good as well. They do the compressions and also the encryption. That way, you are protected and it doesn't consume too much bandwidth.

The interface is very good. It's not too complicated. The interface is way easier than Veeam. You can do everything from the interface - including authorization of DR. 

Its near-synchronous replication is good. We get an RTO of five seconds. They also provide different checkpoints. They maintain a lot of checkpoints, so you can go back in time on the DR side if you want to. Of course, there is a limitation based on how much space you have. 

We noted the benefits of Zerto immediately. Before I joined, the company used to do a very manual process. We started doing a POC with Zerto, Veeam, and Pure Storage. I found that Zerto was easier to manage - and it's cheaper than the rest of them. That, coupled with the limitation of the human resources, we wanted to have less maintenance, less interface, and I found Zerto very, very useful in that process. 

Zerto covers our entire production environment. If something goes wrong, you can use Zerto to recover the server if you want. Mainly, we started Zerto just for protection.

The recovery time objective is good. We've had no issues. If the line goes down, it recovers very quickly since it provides a lot of compression in the data. It doesn't consume much bandwidth.

If we have issues in our database, we can recover the data. We can go back and time and pull out whatever is lost. 

Zerto has helped us reduce overall DR testing in our company. What used to take a month I can do in less than two days. 

It's impacted our IT resiliency strategy. It provides, in terms of DR and data protection, peace of mind. We can get our data back quickly.

They have moved to appliances, and the configuration of appliances is a bit complicated. The appliance is is very complicated to configure by proxy as they move everything to containers, and each container needs to be configured. It's a little bit complicated.

I've used the solution for almost eight years. 

The stability of the solution is very good. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. 

It's easy to scale Zerto. I'd rate scalability nine out of ten. 

I've contacted technical support. I've had no issues with them. They are well-versed and know the answers. 

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial deployment is easy. We create a server and deploy. You just answer a few questions, and you are done. 

Even if a person is new to Zerto, it would still be very easy. As a very small team, we are always searching for products that aren't too complicated. 

The deployment itself might take half a day. It's a one-person job. 

If you add new servers, there will be maintenance. You can also set up reporting if you like. 

When we first deployed eight years ago, we may have used somebody from Zerto. They provided us with help as they were new at the time. If I had to do it again, I could handle it on my own. It's not too complicated. 

The pricing is reasonable and very affordable. 

We did look at the Veeam. We also look at the Pure Storage. Pure Storage also had some sort of replication, however, the RTO was too big. The RTO was around 15 minutes with Pure, and Zerto was providing an RTO of five seconds.

We are end-users. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

When using this with VMware, I'd say it is very easy to set up. I haven't used it with Hyper-V, however, I've heard that Zerto may not develop a version for Hyper-V. 

Our primary use case is for backup and disaster recovery. 

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capabilities. The fact that we can have a clinic across the country backup in as little as 45 minutes is incredible. 

Zerto has enabled us to do disaster recovery in the cloud. This ability is very important because we have over 419 hospitals across the country and being able to quickly get a hospital up in Colorado while I'm in Alabama is impressive. The speed is impressive and it's easy to get it back up.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been fantastic. Coming from our C-suite level and getting reports of how long hospitals are up versus if we do have disaster recovery, the amount of time to recover using Zerto is fantastic. We can have them back up in as little as 45 minutes. I don't have to hear all the bad sides of it, they're very happy when the hospital's back up and making money. 

The other company we used before was Commvault, and we had had multiple issues with them with fragmented backups. Some backups weren't taking properly, and we did have a DR situation with them, and they were not able to recover all the data. That was our big push to find something else, and that's where we found Zerto. 

Zerto's ease of use compared to other solutions is a ten out of ten. 

As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it.

I have been using Zerto for around one year but my company has been using it for about two. 

The stability is a ten out of ten, we haven't had the issues with them like we did with Commvault. I have no complaints.

Scalability is seamless. We're able to add another server and within the hour build on top of that. 

If we're ever out of licenses, I could just send an email out and say that we need to add some more, and it's done. 

Our environment is large. We have 419 hospitals across the country. 

Their support is a ten out of ten. I have not had any issues with them. It's been fantastic every time I've had to deal with them. They've resolved all of my issues. 

Positive

The deployment was easy and seamless. We put in a ticket. They get our new servers added and within an hour we have new deployed servers on the solution.

We see ROI in the uptime of hospitals that had a disaster recovery scenario and how quickly they're back up and making money at those hospitals.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime. 

The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.

It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.

I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.

We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.

Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.

There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.

I've been using the solution for three or four months.

It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.

We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.

The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.

We've never had to contact technical support. 

Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes. 

We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.

We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover. 

The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use. 

We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.

The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.