Zerto Reviews

We use it for storage and replication. In our organization, our team is responsible for the disaster recovery process.

Before, we were able to test about 16 virtual machines in production. Now, we can do the same exercise with 180 virtual machines, in less time. And previously, we needed our whole team to execute the manual process with Hitachi. Now, we use half that number of personnel in this exercise.

The speed of recovery is definitely better with Zerto versus the previous mechanisms we had. It has helped to reduce downtime without a doubt. On two occasions when we used Zerto for recovery, we reduced the downtime by about 80 percent.

We had an issue with change configurations in a database and we couldn't roll back those changes. We used Zerto to recover the state of the virtual machines to 10 minutes before the changes.

It has also exceeded our expectations when it comes to RTO.

The replication and recovery features are the most valuable. We have been able to recover files with Zerto. First, we enable the virtual machines on the recovery site and then we navigate to find the file that we need. On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem.

It's an excellent tool for the replication of VMs.

We had some issues with replication, especially on Linux, but we have already resolved them.

I would like them to enable more backup configuration features. I'm not sure if Zerto can give us immutable files for ransomware protection. That could improve the backup.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

The stability gets a high grade from me. I don't recall any issues.

Our principal site is located in one city and the recovery site is in another city. They are connected by an extended LAN.

In terms of scalability, it is good because, on the two occasions that we have done the upgrade process, they were "hot," meaning we didn't need to turn off our servers and that's very important for us. We always have our tools available.

We have opened cases on several occasions for update processes and for issues that we had at a moment when we were doing an exercise and replicating a VM to the recovery site. Their response was immediate and they were very efficient in coming up with resolutions.

Positive

We didn't have any previous backup solution.

The pricing is a little more expensive in comparison to other tools.

Knowing the backup options that Zerto has, we could be using it to back up our entire company's virtual machines, but we are just using its replication and backup for some virtual machines, but not all of them. That's because we are limited in terms of our license. We are only replicating about 30 percent of our virtual machines, those that have been identified as the most important for the organization.

We checked out Veritas Risk Advisor and Veeam.

It is meeting our RPO expectations and we are happy with the RPO.

We have approximately 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. Those Hyper-V machines are being used and converted to VMware. We use Zerto for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. We are also considering using it for DR purposes. 

Our prod environment runs on-premises and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. Our development runs on machines and hardware. In the event of a DR event, we would shut down dev and bring up our secondary copy of production. We hope that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

Zerto offered us massive time saving and consistency. We have a consistent outcome every time we complete conversions. We move from one platform to another with different loads being moved each time and Zerto's results are consistent each time.

We convert 30 to 50 VMs from Hyper-V to VMware on a nightly basis which has resulted in saving time as this is good throughput. Zerto also helped to reduce downtime. If we were to do this manually, we would have a lot of downtime to shut down those VMs on Hyper-V to be able to do the conversions.

The ease of the conversion moving from Hyper-V over to VMware is the primary reason why we chose Zerto and is its most valuable feature.

There has been one pain point that we have run into. We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that.

We have been using this solution since the start of 2022. 

This is a stable solution that offers consistent results. 

From a DR perspective, we use a few solutions. We have multi-site data centers in our environment along with Cohesity. We use Cohesity from a backup and DR perspective.

If you're in the middle of conversion between different platforms, regardless of if you're moving from on-premises to host it or from one environment to another, Zerto is agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution.

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

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

We have seen ROI from a time-management standpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 use the solution for a couple of functions. One is cyber recovery, and the other is backing up all our infrastructure with the server.

The most valuable feature is the recovery. For example, in our financial operations, we eliminated two other vendors and reduced our costs. 

Having DR in the cloud is crucial for us. We use it as a third copy to ensure stability and protection against cyber-attacks, giving us a clean copy in the cloud. This helps protect our VMs, and our RPOs are close to zero. 

The recovery speed is much faster and less complicated than it was. 

The knowledge base could be improved. Sometimes, it's finicky, especially when moving storage around. We've had to redo entire processes, which was time-consuming and resulted in data loss. This has happened multiple times, and despite following support steps and contacting support, we often had to resolve issues on our own.

I have been working with the product for a year. 

The solution can scale well if you have the needed storage. 

We received conflicting answers and resolutions to the same question depending on who we spoke to. Despite this, Zerto is stable. One of the key challenges we faced was during infrastructure moves, such as moving data or personnel. In these cases, we often had to rebuild our VPGs.

Neutral

We used Site Recovery Manager for VM replication and Veeam for backups. Zerto outperformed these products. 

Deploying the solution involved a learning curve. The knowledge base had conflicting data compared to other vendors. 

HPE helped us with the deployment. Our overall experience with them was good. They answered our questions during virtual sessions. However, we encountered some customer service issues, as the resolution could vary depending on who we spoke to.

We have seen ROI by eliminating vendors and thereby saving costs. 

Zerto's pricing is comparable. Each product has its ups and downs. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.