Zerto Reviews

We are using it to back up and replicate our critical infrastructure to allow us to replicate back when we are in a disaster recovery situation or a test.

When we were in a disaster recovery (DR) test, we could not pull back the data in a timely manner. Zerto allows us to pull the data back in a timely manner. We also can create better RTOs and RPOs. We wanted an RTO of fifteen minutes and we've managed that.

To be able to replicate back to production is the most useful aspect of the product. It allows us to do a disaster recovery test and recover within eight hours. I couldn't do that before.

I'm also working with near-synchronous replication. It's very important to be able to keep my production and replication in sync.

I like the idea of Zertos being able to block unknown threats and attacks. In fact, one of my machines had a little encryption on it, and it detected that encryption, and I had to go look at it. It was nothing, in that instance, however, it was a neat feature. We could see that it was definitely looking for encryption and malware on our side.

Our disaster recovery testing is a lot easier and is much better with this product. Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems. We're now down to five minutes, well below our original 15-minute RTO goal.

Instead of being up all night, trying to get data back, I would no longer need to stay up all night. I've saved about four hours.

The product is easy to use.

I haven't noted any areas of improvement just yet.

I'd like to see a way to do a one-stop shutdown of replication so I know I'm not missing data and can do my DR test. 

I'd like to get better recovery point objectives and get more data back from our DR site faster. 

The pricing could be a little bit lower.

I've been using the solution for about two months now.

The solution is stable. I have never had any issues. 

I have not tried to scale the solution. 

I have the solution for multiple locations in one department. 

I've had two cases resolved via technical support. They helped me resolve issues I had with the installation. It did take me a few tries to resolve the issues.

Positive

We have used Veeam in the past. It's pretty good for certain things. However, it was hard to get continuous replication. Zerto is much easier to get that constant replication that we need. In terms of speed, for Veeam, it's about an hour right now across our secondary data center. It's not as fast. We moved to Zerto to get more data back from our DR site faster.

I was involved in the initial setup. The initial setup is easy. Veeam had an easier setup, however, once we got Zerto going, it was easier to scale up and test. It's easier to manage in the long run.

The deployment had a bit of complexity. The problem we had was that the VRAs would not install and we had to turn off some security features. The ESXi server was not well documented. 

We set it up in multiple locations in one department.

It took us about three weeks to deploy the solution. 

The maintenance is simple. I handle the maintenance myself. 

We handled the initial setup in-house internally. I managed the process completely by myself.  

It's just been a few months. We have yet to see a return on investment. 

Zerto is a bit more expensive compared to Acronis or Veeam. That said, for us, the pricing was still reasonable. That said, we couldn't do all of our machines. 

We also evaluated Nutanix and Acronis.

We chose Zerto since it has very good integration with HPE servers. It's also an industry standard. Many people are using it. 

I've never used its immutable copies features. I've just discovered the feature and need to look more into it.

I didn't use the cloud while using this solution. I have used the solution to help me protect VMs in my environment. 

I haven't had to migrate data just yet. The solution has yet to help us reduce downtime. It also has yet to help us save time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We haven't had an incident as of yet. While it's saved time, we haven't been able to test all of our machines and all of our servers yet.

At this point, the solution has not reduced the staff involved in data recovery.

This product augmented what we have in terms of legacy backup solutions. It did not replace anything. 

My advice to others is to use Zerto for critical servers and things that need to be watched carefully for malware and encryption. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We have critical servers at remote sites that failover or are replicated to our main data center in case of an emergency. If a remote site has a failure, we can spin up that virtual machine from our data center.

We operate a hub and spoke design with a centralized data center hosting our main instance, reaching out to roughly 78 remote locations. We handle the VPGs through the centralized management console at our data center.

We also use the Zerto to replicate from a primary host to a secondary host in case the primary goes down; we have a kind of cold box to which the solution replicates.

Our final use case is if we are updating a plant's entire server rack, and we use Zerto to replicate the old servers onto the new ones, which results in less downtime.  

The product significantly decreased the time it takes to deploy new servers; we can work on them, build them, and then failover the old VMs to the new server with minimal business impact. What previously took hours to migrate the VMs with vMotion typically takes 30 minutes with Zerto, which is a phenomenal time saving for us. Our plants also have the reassurance that when we replicate their main servers back to a data center, we can keep their business running even if they have a total loss of a server rack or power.

The solution has helped to reduce downtime; we had a situation where a plant had its server fail, and we could failover their server to our data center and had them back up and running within 30 minutes. The required parts for a fix took three days to arrive, but thanks to Zerto, they did not have three days of downtime. Additionally, we just updated our hardware at our plants from HP servers to Dell, and we had to move 10 to 15 VMs per location from the old servers to the new ones. We completed this relatively significant move- roughly eight TB worth of data- in 30 to 45 minutes versus multiple hours, a remarkable reduction of potential downtime. Depending on the plant, downtime can cost $100/minute and potentially much higher if they are into online sales.   

The product helped to reduce our organization's DR testing; we previously used a Hitachi failover or manual VM move, but now we have Zerto VPGs at all sites. We can click the failover button, and it's done about 30 minutes later. It's good not to have to failover manually. Regarding time saved, we can get testing for a plant done in 30-45 minutes, resulting in between two and six hours' worth of savings.

The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days.

The solution is very straightforward, especially after using it a few times. We had users who were daunted by it, but once we walked them through how easy it is to failover, they felt pretty comfortable. Zerto is easy to use and doesn't take long to learn, which is nice.  

We like the near-synchronous replication feature, and it's essential as we want to reduce the amount of data lost during a failover. The RPO and RTO are excellent, thanks to Zerto, and we have some sites with poor bandwidth, so we understand the limitations we're working with. Near-synchronous replication allows us to roll back to a specific hour or minute in case of a failure, which is a great feature.  

One of our primary uses for the solution is to protect VMs in our environment, which has an excellent effect on our RPOs. We had a data breach several years ago, and Zerto helped us quickly get back up. We like it a lot because we can failover within minutes once we detect an issue.  

I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent.

We've been using the solution for over five years. 

Zerto is very stable; we only have problems with sites with poor bandwidth, and there's little we can do to get around that. Sometimes VPGs get outdated because those sites can't copy the data fast enough, but the application is very stable.

The solution scales exceptionally well; we add more licenses when required and keep running. We currently have over 400 licenses.

I recently contacted technical support, and I rate them seven out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used Veeam, Commvault, and a Hitachi solution. We switched because Zerto has a better RTO and RP, and it's much easier to use than Veeam. The Hitachi solution was very cumbersome as it was CLI only, and we had to unmount and remount storage.

Comparing the ease of use with other solutions, Zerto is excellent; once we have the VPG, there's a large failover button which allows our entire team to carry out the function. It's elementary. After showing a team member once or twice, they can operate the tool independently. The graphics and GUI show us the failover progression, so we don't have to wonder if it has taken place or how long is left. The tool keeps good stats and informs us of the step it's on. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, but we operate the solution with one team, our server team. Regarding maintenance, a minimal amount is required to keep up to date with patches etc. We occasionally run into an issue that necessitates upgrading to a newer version; for example, we were trying to move some vast data stores, and Zerto support said we needed to increase the timeout count. We keep fully up to date with security patches, and two staff members are responsible for maintenance. 

We have seen an ROI with Zerto, though it's hard to quantify precisely how much. It saved us a significant amount of downtime, and plants lose money when they're down, so it's a hidden ROI in that respect.

As far as I know, the pricing is around $1,000 per VM, but Zerto is changing the pricing model to more of an enterprise-class license. I don't know if there are any additional costs or fees.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Zerto did not reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery, overall backup, and DR management because we already run a very lean staff; there are eight of us on the server team, and we manage over 3000 servers across the company. On the other hand, Zerto enables multiple staff to do the failovers rather than one of two specialized employees. 

None of the time saved in DR testing has been allocated to value-add tasks because the time saved occurs outside our regular business hours.

Comparing the solution's speed of recovery with other disaster recovery tools, Zerto is excellent and rapid; we can restore everything in the VPG simultaneously. A tool like Commvault is single-threaded, so we would have to restore VM by VM, which is very limiting. VPGs are excellent because we can restore everything within them and get on with life.  

We have not used the tool for immutable data copies; we use our pure storage.

When we had a ransomware attack, the solution didn't initially save us time as they attacked our Zerto environment and took it down. Once we had it back online, we could speed up the recovery, and we've since hardened the product with additional security.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and backup of our application server.

Zerto's ease of use is moderate.

The near-synchronous replication is good.

We use Zerto to help protect our VMs.

Zerto improved our recovery point objective, but to achieve long-term data retention we had to invest in additional local storage.

From an IT resilience perspective, our UK-wide implementation ensured a swift recovery, solidifying the strategy's effectiveness.

It has enabled disaster recovery in the cloud. This is important from a software recovery perspective to keep things running.

The most valuable aspect of Zerto is the recovery speed.

The recovery processes of large datasets in the Cloud have room for improvement.

The backup functionality can be improved.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We used various solutions in the past including Veeam and Quest AppAssure.

We came to the end of what we could do with AppAssure so we moved on to Zerto.

The initial deployment was difficult. The deployment took a couple of weeks and required around four people.

While Zerto excels in disaster recovery, its backup capabilities fall short. To ensure proper data protection, we require a separate backup solution alongside Zerto for disaster recovery therefore the price for Zerto is high.

In our search for a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, we considered both Veeam Cloud Connect and Zerto, ultimately choosing the latter.

I would rate Zerto seven out of ten. It only works for virtual machines, not physical ones. This means we need separate software for physical machine backup, which adds complexity and cost.

Zerto's recovery speed falls in line with what we've experienced from other disaster recovery solutions.

Disaster recovery testing was prevented due to security restrictions. Our policies don't permit creating a sandbox environment that interacts with Zerto.

Four people are required for the maintenance of Zerto.

I recommend Zerto for disaster recovery purposes.

We implement Zerto as a part of a Disaster Recovery process for our valuable customers, in various environments. Most of them consist of two sites owned by the same customer, connected with campus or wan link, but both using VMware virtualization platform.

Recently we realized a dedicated infrastructure in our Datacenter, then started to propose to our customers DRaaS using those resources as a recovery site and including dedicated 24x7 support. 

Few customers use the public cloud (Azure) as a recovery site: we could only implement and configure the solution or fully manage it because we are also a Microsoft Gold and Tier-1 partner.

Zerto helps reduce downtime in a wide number of situations because it can bring up an entire environment of 40-50 VMs in minutes. 

Zerto helps to save time in a data recovery situation too. Some customers experienced VM or database corruption: using the solution's checkpoint feature, the data recovery happened within five minutes or less. A normal restore would probably be two to eight hours depending on if we had to restore from disk/tape and need or not need to apply logs.

Zerto is great at DR testing. We can spin off critical VMs or an entire environment pretty quickly and have users test against this copy with no production environment impact.

Its overall impact on our RTO has been great. It took a few hours in a very complex environment. The customer was very impressed with Zerto when we started with the PoC and then put it in production. It is great.

Zerto has reduced our downtime. Customers have minimal downtime. 

We have been enabled to automate tasks with Zerto. Staff can now be dedicated to other tasks.

A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site.

Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time.

Zerto is also a very easy product to use.

We started using it a few months ago for immutable data copies for a few customers on multiple repositories like HPE.

Zerto's ability for blocking unknown threats and attacks is key in our disaster recovery process. It's the technical solution where we implement all the data. It is also the recovery plan for our customers.

We have tried experimenting implementing Zerto with the the disaster recovery site on cloud. We use an Azure. It's very useful. Zerto has enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center.

We've only used Zerto two or three times to migrate an existing data center to a new one because the hardware under the machine was from a different brand. We used Zerto because the environment is quite complex and the migration using other tools did not fulfill the customers' needs. Zerto is very good at data migration.

One of its best features Zerto is the ability to maintain the data of multiple VMs using Vipro Protection Group. We can aggregate multiple VMs in a workload for specific services. They are protected at the same time. 

It's very easy to manage and monitor our DR plans with Zerto. It's very easy to learn and operate. It's easier than VMware. 

Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this.

Now we are testing version 10 which include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: we expect more from these features for superior hybrid cloud security.

Reports could be useful for customers. I would like to have a report that shows the latency for every single internal VM. it would be useful for troubleshooting.

We started to evaluate Zerto about three years ago, then we implemented it for our valuable customers who need affordable solutions in their disaster recovery processes.

We haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers, especially with the new "appliance" mode. It just runs.

Zerto is a very scalable solution. We can create as many protection groups as customers need for their environment even as they growth. 

Our customers are mostly medium to small sized enterprises. 

We use Zerto Quick Start service for the first installations and we use it in very complex environments: great. 

We are very satisfied. We had to use it at the beginning to understand the implementation process and what we needed to do. 

They are quick and professional. 

Positive

We previously used Veeam (B&R + DRO) and VMware (Replication + SRM), but they could not offer all the features of Zerto.

We also sometimes still use VMware Disaster Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with VMware Backup and Recovery. 

The implementation is very straightforward.  Must be considered security and lay out the network infrastructure to be more efficient.

But from the standpoint of installing and deploying the product, it's very simple.

Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model.

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish: with Zerto you could combine resilience, mobility, and protection into a single software-only solution. It's hardware and hypervisor agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure.

We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Datacenter and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests, and still keep customers' production environment up and running. 

We have recently introduced the immutable data copies feature, because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then this is still a bad situation. The ability to look at the data that is being replicated in real-time and scan it, in conjunction with immutable data, and putting that into a vault, would be a great benefit. 

The 3-2-1 rule isn't so important for us when it comes to disaster recovery. We consider the backup process and then the disaster recovery process. We treat them as two different workloads that we could implement to our customers to solve different issues.

The majority of our customers use it in a hybrid environment, but they prefer to use disaster recovery in their own data center. In some cases, we provide disaster recovery as a service, where the disaster recovery site is in our data center.

Doing a proof of concept is the best way to implement and sell Zerto. The customers don't always trust our advice but when I start with a POC in their environment, they see it's benefits. 

In my previous company, I used it for disaster recovery. We protected our critical workloads in another data center where we would replicate our primary workloads.

In my current company, we're in the middle of a data center consolidation project and we're using Zerto in two ways. First, we're migrating the workloads we had in one data center to another, about 250 servers. It took us about three months to complete the migration. We had to schedule all of our moves and work with the business to validate that the services were fine and accessible, once they were moved to the other data center. We've completed the migration and a data center has been shut down, and we're working on building disaster recovery for our primary workloads in Azure.

The main benefit is that we are centralizing our disaster recovery solution. Before, we were doing replication for some services and RecoverPoint for other services. We had a mix of tools for disaster recovery and we're trying to simplify that process with a product we can use for both. We're even contemplating using Zerto for backups as well, because we use other tools for that. But the main focus is having a specific tool, Zerto, that we can use to achieve our disaster recovery goals for on-prem services.

We also have a big push to move our DR solutions into Azure as a result of a decision from our upper levels to use Azure as our primary solution for building applications. That has allowed us to reduce costs and consolidate from three data centers to one, with our disaster recovery solution in Azure. Our focus on one tool has made it simple. We're still working through that process. Whereas the failover solutions in Azure are somewhat the same as any other data center, building out the rules and requirements for firewalls is a little more complex. We have some third-party vendors that are helping us design and build out our security into Azure.

Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery, your recovery point can be 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, our recovery point objectives are in the seconds. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto. We don't have to run incremental backups every half hour or 15 minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well. It's essentially just a shutdown and reboot of a VM.

Near-synchronous replication is incredibly important for us because we have transactional applications that work on financial and transactional databases. The fewer the number of transactions that are potentially lost, the better it is for our organization. It means we don't have to go through rebuilding those transactions. It limits the amount of data that we could possibly lose in a disaster recovery situation, amounting to just a few seconds' worth.

The near-synchronous replication with Zerto has enabled us to reduce our RPOs to two seconds instead of hours and, sometimes, days.

And Zerto really improves RTOs for moving applications. You're not waiting for restores to happen. In some cases, if you have large amounts of data on the order of hundreds of terabytes, it could literally take you a week to recover certain applications, especially if you're pulling the data down from Azure or offsite storage. Zerto greatly improves the amount of time that it takes to recover. And you don't have to do one at a time. You can move over a large chunk of servers at once and get those recoveries running and mounting in your disaster recovery environment. It's a lot quicker than running a restore from a restore product.

In addition, the solution reduces the amount of downtime we have in applications during migration. We had a large number of servers, including some critical production applications. But we didn't have to find windows where we could have those systems interrupted for a short period of time. A few minutes of downtime, compared to having the application down for hours, helped move our migration project along. We moved about 250 servers in a three-month period, and we didn't have any issues with any of the applications related to data or the like. We had two instances where there was an issue related to licensing but they were our only issues when moving these applications.

The auto-connect feature is valuable because we can set the amount of time that we delay before committing a move from one location to another, giving application teams time to validate that the move went well and everything is working before we commit those changes. That gives us the ability to roll back to the same point we were at before we shut things down, if needed. 

Another nice aspect of the product is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. And once or twice a year, we'll do a live test that is more like what would happen if we lost a data center.

Zerto is also a very easy product to use. Although I've used it before in other environments, we introduced it to some engineers on our team and, after a couple of hours of training to go through the product, it's fairly intuitive. It's not something that takes a five-day training course to understand. You just drive through the checkboxes to build a protection group and that's pretty easy to do. You don't really have to understand coding or the like. It's GUI-driven, so it's fairly easy for an engineer to create protection groups.

You can use Zerto as a backup product, but in the discussions that I have had with them about the product, they don't really sell or talk about that feature as much. So I would be interested in improvements related to using it as a backup. If I could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where I need to recover something, that would be helpful. It has some of that functionality, but it's not something they promote a lot. They should point out the benefits of using Zerto as a backup and recovery product instead of just a DR product.

With Cohesity, we keep a limited amount of backups, about 14 days. That way, we can recover an individual server within the same site or we can restore data or databases that we need, in a non-DR way. We use it for typical day-to-day backup and restore. If we could use Zerto in a similar fashion for everyday backup and recovery scenarios, that would be another area where we could consolidate into a single application.

At my old company, I used it for several years, and at the company I'm now at we've been using it for about a year.

It has been rock-solid. I haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers. It just runs.

It's really scalable. You can create as many protection groups as you need, and a lot more than we have in our environment. 

We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload.

Our experience with their tech support has been good. I have never called them with an issue that they couldn't resolve fairly quickly. 

I did call them a few times on some migrations that we were doing off-hours where certain aspects of the migration didn't work, particularly on the reverse protection. I always got a callback within 30 minutes and most of the time it was quicker. The support has always been great.

Positive

One of the main issues was handling large data migrations. It wasn't feasible to do a big-bang move where we could move everything at one time, so we needed to schedule moves. We were able to at least replicate the information and work through a schedule for the migrations quickly. One of the major things we were trying to adjust was having to schedule the migrations and working with the team to validate that everything was functional. We were also looking to minimize the amount of time that that service would be offline during migration.

In addition, we use a combination of tools. We were doing replication with RecoverPoint, and straight backup and restore with Cohesity. While we still use Cohesity, we did get rid of RecoverPoint and we don't use VMware Site Recovery Manager because we're not recovering from VMware to VMware anymore. Cohesity does certain things and Zerto does certain things very well.

The implementation of the migration was very straightforward. The implementation of disaster recovery into Azure was a little more complex. In part, that was because of the way our company built our Azure subscription and the rules we have in place for installation and dividing things and networks within Azure. 

But from the standpoint of installing and deploying the product, it's very simple.

We did it in-house, but we did have a Zerto engineer run through the installation into Azure with us because we did run into some issues related to permissions in Azure and some of the custom roles that are defined. We also worked with an engineer from Azure to help us, mainly around the identity portion in Azure.

On our side, it was just me and one of our other engineers involved.

We have seen ROI on the migration project which didn't require a whole bunch of people involved. We rotated two people who were able to facilitate the migrations when we scheduled them in the evenings. Sometimes, we would do up to six or seven migrations in an evening. 

The main thing that held us up a little in that project was the validation process required by the business. If we had been able to just run through it, we probably would have completed it a lot more quickly.

Still, we didn't require a lot of resources to do it. It was just one engineer to handle a migration and the applications teams to validate. We didn't have to go outside the company to hire services to help us with the migration. That was helpful from a cost perspective.

Pricing is one area where there could be some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting.

Others in our organization have raised the issue of how it's licensed, where you need one for every VM you're protecting.

We looked at RecoverPoint and Site Recovery Manager in VMware, but they just didn't fit the type of scenario that we were looking to set up with replication and recovery into Azure. We couldn't really find too many tools that were doing it in a way that was not too intrusive. There are ways you can migrate things into Azure and run them, but there's a technical process that you have to go through to make it happen. 

We were looking for a solution where we wouldn't have to flip all the switches for Azure. We wanted something straightforward that was much simpler to use. Zerto was really the only tool that we could find to do it. Others that we looked at briefly just didn't do what we wanted to do, so we didn't spend too much time on them.

Recovery with Zerto is a little more straightforward compared to other solutions, and the amount of time it takes is fairly short. You can recover with Cohesity fairly quickly, but there are a bunch of other things that you need to do, depending on how the recovery is done. If you're mounting a new virtual machine from a snapshot, which would give you a fairly quick recovery, you would still have to re-synchronize that data to keep it as a replication, and that takes some time. 

Zerto is just a more straightforward solution. You're getting pretty much the same server restored in under a minute, which is the time it takes to reboot, sync, and bring it back online. Other tasks you have to do, when bringing something up in another data center, like re-IP the machine, can be automated in the Zerto replication. It makes things easier.

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for a migration tool, this is a great migration tool that will help you move workloads between data centers. It's agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure.

And you have to look at whether you're moving a large amount of data or a large number of servers. Think about how much downtime your business can afford for moving those applications. If you're looking for something that can move an application with minimal downtime, this may be a solution for you. Or if you're moving large amounts of data, but you don't want to be down for the whole time you're restoring or moving, a synchronous product like this may be a solution for you.

We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Azure environment and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests into Azure, and still keep our production environment up and running. We've tested certain workloads failing over into Azure, including a standard Windows or Linux box, and specific things like SQL Server, Oracle, et cetera. It has been going well so far and we're at the point where we're defining our protection groups and security in Azure for all of our critical workloads.

We have not yet used the immutable data copies feature, but I was just at a conference and had some meetings with Zerto, some of the product professionals and engineers, and that is something that we are strongly looking into. That's because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then you're still in a bad situation. Putting the data into an immutable repository is something that we are definitely looking into. Especially in the industry that we are in, cybersecurity is a big issue.

We have also not used it for blocking threats and attacks. But the ability, in conjunction with immutable data and putting that into a vault, to look at the data that is being replicated in real time and scan it, would be a great benefit. We do use some of the best-in-class tools for that kind of protection, but this would just be another layer to help with that. It's an interesting feature and another tool that would add a layer to our cyber protection.

Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in backup and DR management. We have a pretty lean team. We try to cross-train our employees on the different products that we use. But Zerto did help to simplify the process because we can get people trained on it. They can assist in covering for other people in the group when they're out. The training only takes a couple of hours to go through the tutorials.

We are failing over approximately 250 systems. In many ways, this could impact 3,800 insurance agents across 11 states. 

There are two sites: the source site and the production site. Those are failing over to another data center about 150 miles north of my location.

When we went from the original DR plan that we had with Double-Take to SRM, we were able to fail over in an hour and a half. We did all the storage groups in bundles, and we are like, "Wow, this is unbelievable. This is awesome." Then, we went to Zerto, and it was like, "Oh wow, we can pick and choose how we want to do this." So, Zerto provided us with a lot of value. 

We went from testing in a week, e.g., we would say, "Alright, we are going to set aside Monday through Thursday to test all the apps which have been deemed 'need to be tested', and make sure for DR purposes that they are working correctly." We went from that to a day. We can do it whenever we want much easier than before. Instead of having to do it in a group, you could have it where there is scratch space and all the things that are needed, where all the changes and deltas are being cached. Now, we can do a small group of people anytime that we want, or whenever. 

We haven't done it all in a day. Our plan is to have it fail over where we can get it done quickly enough in that morning, e.g., if we have all the testing, testers, and developers lined up, then they can test and we can have it done all in one day.

It has reduced staff stress. We are not big on cutting staff because we run pretty thin. We have even seen growth in the amount of staff involved in backup and DR management. There will be two leads going forward, sharing the primary duties.

The most valuable feature is the failover testing and being able to do that in a granular fashion. We can pick and choose what we want to fail over and at what time, then how quickly it fails over. We fail them over into a bubble, which means our developers and other testers can go in and do whatever they want. They are not impacting production outside of the bubble.

The reporting function is a big thing that we like. Our upper management and execs are always like, "Hey, we need to report about what you did." So, we can print out a report that is 200 or 300 pages long, and go, "Here you go." It was a little overwhelming the first time they got it. They were like, "What?" I am like, "You asked for a report. This is the report."

For the last three years, I was a secondary admin. We got into a situation where they were like, "Hey, you're the lead. You need to immediately be the lead." I was like, "Okay, alright." So, I was able to go in and create the protection groups and replication servers. We run VMware so we were able to push that out to the hosts, uninstall and decommission stuff. I was able to get that squared away within a day or two. It is very easy to use. If I can do it, anybody can do it.

The Zerto’s near-synchronous replication is very important. We used to say, "Hey, if we don't have this and if the building blew up from a gas leak, then what would we do?" Now, it is not just disaster recovery, but there are departments of insurance requirements for federal requirements going, "Hey, do you have a disaster plan in place that will successfully run? Can you provide me with those reports?" It also checks that box since we have requirements that need to meet for customer data. They need to be able to retrieve that data, either at the running site or production site. Or, in the case of a disaster, we will need to provide them with that information. So, it checks multiple boxes.

You can create a VPG and put anywhere from one to 17 servers in that group. We build them one by one. If something changes in VMware, it would be nice to be able to go in and change that VPG, having it update without messing up. When you change them now, it only applies to the copies from the points when you changed it. I wish it would purge that older data from the past. Right now, we have to build a new VPG, which is not a big deal as it is just a few screens. 

We have been in the Zerto world for four years, and I am the lead on Zerto now.

Stability-wise, I would probably give it 10 out of 10. It is very stable. If there is something not running correctly, then it is an outside factor. It is either the admin or a connection to the other site. With the dashboard, it will show you that you have this many protection groups built. Everything is an individual green square, but when there is a problem, then you will see red. It is very simple. If it has a problem, you will see something. I have not dealt with a problem where Zerto is just not working. It is usually user error or sort of outage. It is reliable.

As far as Zerto replication and DR purposes, it has not caused us any outages.

I have answered stuff for Zerto before, and they are like, "Why do you like it?" We say, "Because it works." For so long, we had stuff that didn't work for so long, and this solution works.

As long as you have the license to protect the VMs, then you can scale it as big as you want. 

We are currently protecting 325 VMs. We have plans to expand in the future.

My dealings with the technical support have been top-notch. They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We had Double-Take and were replicating to a site with SunGard, then we swapped. It was kind of a nightmare for us to get it working the way that we wanted. I am sure it is a great product, but the way that we needed it to work was just not working. Then, we went to VMware SRM, which worked great and went off without a hitch.

We then wanted something with a quicker recovery point objective (RPO), and that is when Zerto came in. They allowed us to failover in a granular fashion. We could pick and choose how we wanted to fail over in DR tests. That is a big part of our DR testing. Enterprises want to be able to know that they have a successful test and can run in a failed over environment, so the test is 50% of that. The other half is, “If we had to declare a disaster, where would we be?” The RPO is two to three seconds with Zerto. I have talked to people with Unitrends and several other companies who say that you can’t get an RPO that low, but that is what we have. Today, it is very fast today.

When we need to do our DR test on a specific day, Zerto has allowed us to be able to do that in granular fashion. With SRM, you had to fail a group of servers over. While that may have changed, at the time you could only do them by storage volumes. With Zerto, it didn't really matter. It has been like, “Which ones do you want to fail over? Do you want to do just your SQL servers?” This has allowed us to have a more granular approach to testing and DR testing. It ensures that we can do it in a certain way and confirms that our actual DR plan is a good plan.

We didn't have anything that worked for so long. I think Zerto kind of showed up and was in the great spot where they couldn't be any worse than what we had.

I was not involved in the initial setup. This has been kind of thrown in my lap, and it has not been a nightmare at all.

The prior admin hired services for updates. Going forward, I will probably do them myself.

We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%. I am not saying that the products I mentioned earlier are bad products. They just didn't work well for what we wanted.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our RPO. It is a double-edged sword where our RTO and RPO have allowed us to almost not miss a beat. In a DR test, we are more staging and moving systems over, and this is more of a tactical approach. With some of the moves that we are making with SQL and using blue-green environments, I don't think we see a problem at all. We feel very good about it. 

We bought it through a reseller.

We are very fortunate because our budget is pretty big, and I am not making that up. Staffing may be a little thin at times, but as far as budgeting what we buy, the price for this solution has not been so outrageous that we don't buy it.

I think there is a support cost.

I was a big proponent of using SRM because I manage the VMware environment. Being a VMware product, I was more in their corner. So, it was mainly between SRM and Zerto. We also might have looked at Rubrik.

With other vendors that we used, we would sometimes start on the weekend, e.g., on a Saturday morning at 6:00 AM, then we would go through at least Thursday of the next week. It would be a long, arduous process. Sometimes, we would go only two days because we could never get past a single spot, then the entire test would be a failure. With Zerto, it has reduced our DR testing time drastically. It went down to where we think we can do a test in a single day. We were able to pull it off last year in two days with failover and failback tests as well as reports.

Zerto provides ease of use when building out jobs, then having them failover as you want, one by one or selecting five or six VPGs at a time. One of the big things that we do is with SQL. We want our databases online before doing any testing. There also needs to be domain controllers turned on for people to be able to log in. It is like, "Alright, we are going to fail over the domain controller." Next, they go, "Alright, we are going to fail over our SQL stuff." Before, when we had those SRM groupings, it would be a bit harder. You had to wait for everything to finish. Now, it is granular, where you can pick and hit one by one what you want. The database administrators can go in, and say, "Alright, we are online. There are three more that just came online." They are able to test it, and it just works. Having something that works was a big thing for us.

It has not replaced any of our legacy backup solutions. We use Veeam for any backups or system restores at this point. So, Zerto's role is just for DR.

We have luckily not had to use Zerto in a data recovery situation for ransomware. We have had one instance where we were in a spot like that, which was about two years ago, and we were able to restore it back with Veeam.

Until the last few cases, VMware support is some of the sorriest support that I have had.

I would recommend Zerto because it works. You will need to do a PoC first though.

Immutable data copies are something that we are looking into. For example, if I have a recovery point of two, nine, or 10 seconds, then we get hit with some sort of ransomware attack or something like that. We would like to have immutable data that is unchanged. So, we are looking into this feature now.

I am sure it has enabled us to do DR in the cloud, but we are not a big fan of putting that stuff in the cloud. We are not a fan of putting it on somebody else's computer if we can put it on our computer. We have been very happy having a DR site approximately 150 to 200 miles north of our main site. We are kind of running it in our own hybrid cloud at the moment.

As far as testing, there are probably 70 people who test.

I would give it a nine out of 10. It has done what we wanted. We have been very satisfied with it. We are Zerto fans.

We use Zerto to replicate our VMware VMs. We have two data centers in our company. We use Zerto to make sure these virtual machines which are VMware are replicated in the other data centres.

We also use Zerto as a backup tool for Windows files.

Zerto is already a leader in its field. I have seen the benefit of knowing that everything is protected. We've only started a disaster recovery program in the last year after running Zerto. The business is now understanding that recovering from the traditional backup software does take a long time, and it's very complex. 

Using Zerto, I am the only department that can recover in minutes. The database team takes hours, the IBM platform takes hours as well. So time saving is what we see the most of Zerto.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is very important. It's the reason we're still with Zerto. We collect blood in many hospitals, and some of our data centers are in hospitals with power grids that are not as good as commercial buildings. So, we do have servers that will crash. The servers are in the hospitals for latency reasons. And when a server crashes for any reason, it could be a chipmunk eating wires. We need to have another server with no data loss so that the clinics can keep going without having to do a whole bunch of data entry.

We don't use SAP HANA with Zerto, but we use SAP HANA with an Oracle database. These databases are replicated at the hardware storage level, not with Zerto.

Zerto has very little effect on our RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives). As long as we have the disk space, it works well. We currently have a one-hour to one-day RPO and are extending it to about four days based on recommendations.

The continuous replication with a low recovery point objective (RPO) is crucial for us. 

We have mission-critical applications that, if we lose data, we lose a lot of money. Zerto's low RPO ensures minimal data loss in case of a disaster.

Zerto has the ability for us to suggest features, which we do often. We do see some of these features come to life. Better alerting is something that I feel is critical. 

If you turn on the alerting of the on-prem appliances, it bombards your inbox over everything. It's too much. We had to turn that off. We use Zerto cloud analytics for alerting, and we just moved the Zerto ten about a month ago.

Some alerts, such as when one of my virtual protection groups does not have at least one day of logs configured. We find that after we do a disaster recovery failover test we recreate the virtual protection groups. Some of our junior systems admins won't specify. We need seven days of journal logs. So an alert for that would be handy.

We've been using Zerto for over eight years.

It's excellent. The product has been solid for the entire time we've used it.

We use Zerto to protect approximately 300 VMware VMs.

We have not grown Zerto in many, many years. We're likely going to double it. It should not be a problem because it's essentially almost agent-based. I feel that it can grow. We're not a very big client, so I don't know how big it can scale, but I feel that it can.

I rarely need to contact the customer service and support. The product is very good. When I have used their support, I've never had to escalate a call.

There's nothing bad about the support. They are responsive and helpful. A 10 would mean having an experience so exceptional that I would have to tell my family about it.

Positive

Zerto was deployed before my time, so I wasn't involved in the initial deployment. However, I have been involved in upgrades, which are very simple. 

I appreciate the ability to open a case with Zerto support for assistance. For our recent Zerto 10 upgrade, we also had help from Zerto Professional Services, which is a feature that management likes.

Zerto can perform disaster recovery in the cloud, but our company is not cloud-ready yet.  We do not have the governance We are still trying to figure out if we were to fail over an application, is the application team aware that they will have to pay additional funding out of their call centers. So we are at a governance stage right now of planning for recovery in the cloud.

We have two active-active data centers that replicate themselves at the VMware level. We use Microsoft Azure.

We used Zerto Professional Services to assist us with the Zerto 10 upgrade. It was a great experience. The upgrade was done in about 15 minutes for both sites. They were well-prepared and knew exactly what they were doing.

We don't see ROI in terms of direct financial ROI, as we only started our disaster recovery testing about a year ago. However, based on client satisfaction and our decision to double our Zerto licenses, we see a return on investment in terms of overall client satisfaction.

We have a licensing team that manages it, but it seems to be fairly easy to use.

We looked at Veeam and NAKIVO.

The business realized the importance of quick recovery and minimal data loss, which are the main reasons why we chose and continue to use Zerto.

From an end-user interface where you use your mouse to click, Zerto is definitely the easiest. However, for the monitoring piece, where my developers have to use the APIs, Zerto is much harder than the other tools that we've used.

Zerto's recovery is the fastest, hands down. Compared to NetBackup, which takes hours, Zerto's recovery is a matter of minutes. We also use a tool similar to Veeam called NAKIVO for non-mission-critical systems, which has a one-day RPO. Nextiva is close to Zerto in terms of recovery speed, but Zerto's interface, orchestration capabilities, and ability to run scripts make it the top choice for us.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. There's nothing that compares to Zerto, nothing that works as well as it. My only complaint about it is the alerting. There are a lot of alerts that come through, and they are legit alerts. It's excellent.

I use it for yearly disaster recovery testing.

The main benefit we see from Zerto is that it helps to meet our disaster recovery objectives.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is important and impressive.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment and has improved all over RPO. 

The speed of recovery with Zerto is extremely fast. We're able to perform disaster recovery testing on dozens of VMs within an hour or even half an hour.

I like its fast recovery, fast RPO and RTO, ease of use, easy interface, ease of deployment, and that it's always available.

I would like for Zerto to improve reporting, provide more data on individual VMs and their performance, and maybe expand into backup with the ability to scan for malware or offline scanning.

I have been using Zerto for over seven years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support are excellent. 

Positive

We previously used Commvault. It used a lot of scripting and configuration to make disaster recovery happen, and it was slow, with a low RPO.

We haven't tried disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We only use on-premises recovery.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was straightforward. 

We previously used or evaluated other backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

We compared Veeam and Commvault against Zerto.

We chose Zerto because of its performance and ease of use.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because there's always room for improvement.