Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto for server migrations between data centers during the role swap that we do. We use it from a recovery standpoint as well.

We currently do not have disaster recovery to the cloud. We go between our data centers. That is what Zerto helps us accomplish.

Zerto works very well. We have not had any faults while using it. We are a financial institution, so we have to make sure the systems we have are available with very minimal downtime.

It has helped out a lot in man-hours. It has saved us a lot of overnight work. We can literally change our production servers in a matter of minutes to hours. Rather than having to do this gradually or a couple of weeks in advance and have several teams and business partners involved, we can literally do it live on the same day.

Zerto is probably one of the faster ones in terms of recovery. You can just go into the console, and because it is always replicating over to the other side, it takes minutes.

Being able to do our recovery and being able to migrate between data centers during the role swap is valuable just because of the amount of time it takes. It takes 55 hours or so. Right now, we are doing this in a VDI environment. We are going to experiment with it as a proof of concept because we have a thousand machines that we have to move and do all the assignments. Zerto would lessen that down by a few hours, and then we can use some scripts to do everything on the Horizon's side. We have not done it yet, but we are hoping to reduce it down to about 3 hours instead of 55 hours. We will also be able to manage our host better and be in a better recovery state. If the host happens to go down, we can quickly recover.

It is very user-friendly. There is no wondering about what a feature does. It is easy to use.

If they already do not have it, they can have some APIs for the Horizon environment. Instead of having to use some scripts to get around, they can make it a lot more user-friendly for integration.

We have been using Zerto for two years.

It has been very stable. We have not had any issues while using it. When we need it to do its job, it is always dependable.

It scales very quickly. We can set up a whole new environment in an hour. We can get the server setup and all the VMs that are required for it to function in an hour or two.

I have not used their support. My peers had to use it. They seem very responsive and knowledgeable. 

The other DR tool that I have used is from Symantec. It was an old-school recovery tool. It was back in the day when it took a whole day to get things back up.

It was deployed before I joined the company.

Its price is fair. It is very cost-effective compared to the cost of the labor for your workers and associates. 

We selected Zerto over others primarily for the ability to replicate and help with our role swap. It cuts the downtime of the production systems by a large volume. This way, we can meet the deadline and not have that much client impact. In the financial side of banking, you do not want bad performance.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but it definitely makes your life a lot easier.

We use Zerto as a DR tool. Instead of having to have a duplicate DR server, we can add a system to BPG and point it to whatever our DR site will be and replicate it for customers.

We also use it for migration planning. If we need to move VMs from on-premise to Azure or back, or it was built in the wrong place, we can easily move it over. 

It reduced the time for DR tests from the infrastructure side. Being able to get our work done in a matter of a couple of minutes so the app teams can get to work and can do their testing has been significant. 

Before we would have to use a backup recovery tool to restore it to a LAN, which could take hours at times, depending on the solution that was being used. 

The replication features are most valuable. It's fast to set up a BPG and get a system added. This aspect is very important to our business. Being able to provide customers with a very fast DR experience, whether it's for a test or live case scenario, and being able to provide the ability to move systems to Azure for cost savings or migrations, saves our ops teams a lot of time.

We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs. 

We would also like to have a native plugin for VRA built by either VMware or Zerto. That way there's actual support for it and we're not on the hook for trying to figure out what happened if it breaks.

We have been using Zerto for four years.

The only problems we've had stability-wise come from upgrades.

This is a scalable solution. The only challenge is that there's no way to manage it centrally at the moment. If you have 30 vCenters, you now have 30 appliances and you have to remember where everything is, which can become a pain point when it comes to trying to find where this VM is being replicated and what BPG it's in. 

The support for this solution could be improved. It is challenging for staff who actually understand the product. We had issues where we ended up spending hours and sometimes days on the phone, only for us to figure it out on our own.

They're very personable and fine to work with. It seems like technical expertise is lacking. I would rate them a five out of ten.

Neutral

I haven't used too many other disaster recovery tools. We used standard backup solutions and Zerto is significantly faster. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use it for DR, that is, for VM replication between two data centers, using it not only for replication but also for orchestration.

Zerto provided better overall DR coverage and more consistency.

I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously. 

It's a lot easier and more straightforward for a VM administrator because he can know that this VM goes in this group or gets this tag, for example, and that it's now in a DR group and is taken care of. I don't have to worry about all the backend details. It's just simplified.

In terms of ease of use, the benefit of Zerto over SRM is the fact that it doesn't rely on a secondary backend product, with having to have the right storage groups with RecoverPoint or something else with multi-tier architecture.

It's still too early to compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions. We've just started the DR tests to understand the time difference. However, from what I've seen so far, the speed of recovery is similar but more consistent with Zerto. We don't have situations where we've missed this or that.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery situations by a single person. Now, we don't have the backend storage person who has to keep an eye on it anymore. With a different solution, we would have needed two people.

There's one feature that SRM had that Zerto doesn't have, and it's one that we've been asking for. With the orchestration part of the failover, with our DR and our primary sites, the IP addresses are almost identical. The only difference is one octet. With SRM, we could say during a failover change. With Zerto, we keep hearing that it's coming, but we haven't received it yet. It's a feature that would be very beneficial. It would reduce the time a little bit more.

I've been working with Zerto for about two years.

The stability seems fine. I haven't seen any issues with it thus far.

For our organization, the scalability matched our needs. Between the data centers, we probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 VMs.

From what I have seen, the technical support has been very good. They've been very responsive to my team.

We previously used SRM. Zerto is a little bit more mature, has a better feature set, and is more aligned with the features and functionalities that we need.

We have seen an ROI from the perspective of a reduction in hardware and a reduction in the number of people trying to focus on the tool sets.

It is less expensive than the full solution that we had previously, but at the same time, it's not an inexpensive product either.

We evaluated Cohesity and other solutions.

Overall, Zerto is a very good product for us, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We have customers who come in for DR as a service, but we also do inter-cloud DR.

It has brought customers into our cloud, since this was a barrier to get in. We have used the migration model a lot to bring customers in. We just brought in a customer from Microsoft Hyper-V into our VMware file. That would have been a difficult challenge if we did not have Zerto as a tool.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime with several customers. For example, we had a customer who had many of their VMs encrypted. They had about 40 to 60 terabytes worth of data. To recover that from backup would have taken days. We were able to bring them up at the DR site, getting them up and running, within hours. This would have cost the customer millions if they had been down. As a title company, if they would have been down, that would have disrupted a whole title industry, where people are trying to buy houses. If you can't get the title for the house, then you can't move forward. Other people wouldn't have been able to sell their house. There would have been a ripple effect. So, that was huge.

It has definitely helped our customers reduce their DR testing. We can do failover tests live in the middle of the day and generate a report, and they are comfortable with it. 

Journaling is by far the most valuable feature. We have used it several times for customers who have gotten ransomware and had to do a rollback. Having the right time period was important. Some of them had their backups encrypted. So, they didn't encrypt the Zerto machine seven days previously, and we were able to bring that back up.

I have been using Zerto for about seven years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. All the workloads go on hosts. So, in order to grow, you will need to have more hosts anyway.

From the relationship standpoint, we have never had a local rep in South Bend, Indiana. It has always been somebody in Boston, and there is not a lot of communication. That is one of the big things. We would like help driving the business and talking to our sales people as well as more involvement from them. We could really utilize it more, drawing more customers in, but we need help with that.

I would rate the technical support as seven out of 10. Where it becomes difficult is if Tier 1 can't help you, then it takes a long time to get to Tier 2 or the development side, if something is beyond their capabilities.

Neutral

We use VMware High Availability, which is one of the options in our cloud. It is a less expensive option. So, we have customers who want that. Also, we have tried Veeam Backup & Replication, which is not cloud-native, so we don't use that. However, a company, whom we acquired, was using it. So, we tried it out.

Zerto is a lot easier to use. It has a lot more features, as far as orchestration, than VMware High Availability. The reallocation of IPs and the networking part of it are not that great in VMware High Availability. Plus, the retention that you get with Zerto is better than High Availability. Veeam didn't get into that much, and there is no orchestration into the cloud. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. The wizard that you run through is just very straightforward. If it is a DR-as-a-service customer on my end, then I am just deploying it as sort of a cloud connect, which is very easy.

I deploy it for all our customers.

We have absolutely seen ROI. Over time, we make money off of the CPU, RAM, and storage of Zerto usage. We benefit that way.

In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing.

I would rate Zerto as nine out of 10.

We use Zerto for data migrations. We use it to move our virtual machines from one location or data center to another and eventually, we then switch that over to DR from our facility in one state to another. It's for the migration of existing VMs.

Zerto has improved my organization by allowing us to do several VM moves. It simply allows us to bring a server back up on the new side, which looks like a reboot of a server. It's a virtual move to the new stage, so it goes from existing VM host to new VM host on the other side.

It has reduced downtime for the servers that we migrate over. By how much is a hard number to put because we do a big group of them together, so we're able to group the move as opposed to doing more one-offs.

The amount the downtime would cost my company would strictly depend upon which servers we were moving because some don't really cost the business. There are others that would cost the business for having to be up as much as possible, 24/7.

The Move feature is the most valuable feature because it allows us to move the VM from our old environment to our new environment with minimal disruption.

It's extremely easy to use. It's pretty self-explanatory as you run through setting up your VPGs for your protection groups and then to do a migration or a test failover.

Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have.

We have been using Zerto for three months. 

So far, the stability has been great. We have not had any issues with that.

Only two of us work on it and we're both system engineers.

We do not need dedicated staff for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

It's being used to move a total of around a couple of thousand VMs, so I don't have any issues with scalability.

Currently, we aren't planning to expand capacity because we have a total of around 500 agents to protect, so until we get the true DR, we will have to evaluate if we need to expand that. We will primarily only be using it for DR and any server migrations we may need to do from one system to another.

Their technical support has been very good and prompt to get back to us with answers.

We would either use a Veeam or VMware solution, but we haven't had a real DR product outside of Veeam.

We find Zerto to be the most beneficial right now in helping us migrate from one data center to another data center for the testing environment. And for future capabilities, for a true DR scenario.

I would say it's a lot more simple to set up and maintain than VMware and Veeam.

Replacing these legacy solutions has saved us on the costs needed to manage them.

The implementation was really straightforward and easy. We worked with one of their support engineers and we got it up and running really quickly. The deployment took around one hour. 

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. It was about getting the server manager and server up and then walk through the installation steps. We followed their guidelines.

I'm not sure if I can put a dollar amount on ROI but the biggest return is time to actually get things set up and then begin to migrate virtual machines over to the new environment.

I'm not 100% sure about the pricing because I wasn't as much part of the pricing part of it, but it fell within our budget. Its features and price are good compared to the options we were looking at.

We also evaluated Rubrik and a solution from Dell. The main advantage that we found was that Zerto fit our current need for migrating from one environment to another better than others, and its good standing in the community where there are a few products.

My advice would be to plan out your Move groups and work with your business to get everything validated so you can back up on the other side.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

Implementing failover to a secondary data center is crucial for ensuring business continuity in the event of primary data center loss. This strategy involves automatically redirecting operations and services to the secondary data center when the primary one becomes unavailable. This not only minimizes downtime but also enhances overall system reliability. 

The failover process requires robust synchronization mechanisms to ensure data consistency between the primary and secondary data centers. Regular testing and monitoring are essential to validate the effectiveness of the failover mechanism and identify and address any potential issues proactively. 

In summary, failover to a secondary data center is a strategic measure to safeguard against disruptions, offering a resilient solution for maintaining seamless operations in dynamic and challenging environments.

Zerto has significantly enhanced our organization's resilience and data protection capabilities. Its real-time replication and failover features have played a pivotal role in minimizing downtime during unexpected events, ensuring business continuity. 

The platform's automation and orchestration capabilities have streamlined our disaster recovery processes, reducing manual intervention and accelerating recovery times. 

The point-in-time recovery options provided by Zerto have proven invaluable in mitigating the impact of data corruption or accidental deletions. This has bolstered our data integrity and provided a safety net against unforeseen data-related issues.

The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization. Conducting live failover tests allows us to validate the effectiveness of our disaster recovery setup in a controlled environment. This feature ensures that all components are in place and functioning as expected, providing confidence in our ability to respond to real-world disruptions. 

Additionally, the ability to choose a specific point in time for recovery down to the seconds is crucial for data integrity. This granular control allows us to roll back to a precise moment, mitigating the impact of data corruption, accidental deletions, or other unforeseen issues. It adds a layer of precision to our recovery process, minimizing potential data loss and enhancing overall resilience.

The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers. Currently, the process is largely manual, and introducing automated failovers after a certain time threshold would enhance efficiency and responsiveness. Automated failovers can reduce the dependency on manual intervention, allowing for quicker and more proactive responses to disruptions. In the next release, the inclusion of scheduled or automated failovers would be a valuable addition. This feature would empower organizations to set predefined parameters and triggers for failovers, ensuring a timely and automated response to potential issues. It not only streamlines operations but also adds an extra layer of reliability to the overall disaster recovery strategy.

I've been using the solution for six months.

We did not have a solution before.

We had great help from the company in terms of setting up our environment.

We implemented through a vendor; I'd rate the experience ten out of ten.

Anything is the worth the cost for virtually no downtime. Time is money.

We did not evaluate other options.

It is a great solution overall, however, it could use some upgrades with automation.

We use the solution for replicating VMs from our on-site VMWare sites to both Google Cloud and Azure clouds. This allows us to feel confident not only in our disaster recovery capabilities but also in testing applications from our on-site data center to isolated cloud instances where there won't be any IP address or domain name system conflicts.  

The continuous backup gives us a better point in time recovery. It also reduces the amount of bandwidth to move the Zerto VM data from site to site, and we like that.

Zerto has improved our organization in several ways, particularly in the realm of disaster recovery, data protection, and business continuity.  

With Zerto's near-zero recovery time, our critical applications and services can be quickly restored, minimizing the impact on business operations.  

The data replication ensures that there is a consistent and up-to-date copy of the information. This helps protect against data loss and ensures data integrity.  With Zerto's single pane of glass, it's easier for IT administrators to monitor and manage their disaster recovery and data protection strategies. This has led to more efficient operations and reduced administrative overhead.

Zerto supports multi-cloud environments, allowing our organization to replicate and protect our important data across different cloud providers and sites. This flexibility has benefited our businesses with our diverse cloud strategies and our on-site data centers in different locations.  

Zerto helped our organization meet compliance requirements by ensuring data protection and recovery strategies align with our regulatory standards. 

Additionally, Zerto has incorporated security features to safeguard the replicated data.

Zerto needs to improve its documentation. It seems like some documents are copied from other older documentation, with misleading screenshots or incorrect steps.  

This can be confusing when newly introduced to a product or in a crisis situation such as a disaster recovery test or a true disaster recovery. The documentation needs to be revised, reviewed, and registered to be correct. Perhaps Zerto should consider an outside consultant to review and approve any documentation that is released.

I've used the solution for about a year.

It's very stable, and we have had no issues.

it does scan well and does what it claims to do.

Support needs to be more flexible.

Neutral

We have only used vRealize.

The documentation was confusing and, at times, incorrect.

We handled the setup in-house.

I don't any ROI information.

I'd advise others to start small.

We also evaluated Veeam.

We use Zerto to verify the information being transferred from one data center to another.

When a site is down, we can continue to use the other site thanks to Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication is extremely valuable because it ensures we can continue working.

The move action between the app and data center is great and we can see the benefits in minutes.

Our RPOs are performing well thanks to Zerto.

Migrating data using Zerto is easy.

Zerto helps our users collaborate during data migration.

Our RTO using Zerto is good.

The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature.

I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is extremely stable. 

Zerto is scalable.

I have used the technical support of Zerto several times and they are good.

Positive

Though I wasn't part of the initial deployment, the procedure is relatively simple. Manager rollout is the first step, followed by CPG installation on VMs by the CPG teams and subsequent network configuration verification.

Four people are required for the deployment.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

Zerto is a good solution for transferring data between centers.