What is our primary use case?
We use the product solely for disaster recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has helped with zero data loss from a transactional perspective. We have about forty servers in there today and they all serve a core function for our business. With Zerto, it's a matter of just being able to achieve zero data loss in minutes in terms of recovery time. That's amazing, and it really enables our business from a disaster recovery perspective.
The key benefit for us, and why we transitioned to Zerto years ago was really the recovery time. We went from hours to days on some of these applications, to minutes.
What is most valuable?
I like the granularity of the checkpoints. That's been extremely beneficial for us in testing. The near synchronous replication of Zerto is great. Knowing that it's within seconds or minutes allows us to achieve our goals from an RPO perspective.
I like the live failovers.
It's also a very easy-to-use product and very easy to administer from just a time perspective.
We're able to stand up our DR site within an hour if we need to.
We've been able to use it to do kind VM migrations from site to site in the past. Just it doing it behind the scenes allowed us to dramatically reduce any downtime for private cloud to a private cloud or even on-premise to private cloud migrations.
When handling migrations, it's fairly intuitive. There's a progress bar with percentages. Sometimes the timing fluctuates based on bandwidth. However, it's going completely in the background. It doesn't interfere with anything. When you are live, you can cut over with minimal downtime.
It's improved our RTOs. It's dramatically improved RTOs compared to what we had before.
We've had multiple unplanned failovers and the solution worked as expected. It's probably saved us 24 hours per instance.
The product has reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery situations. Before the solution, we had two or three different mechanisms for different types of systems in different applications. Now it's just one click, one interface, and one administrator.
What needs improvement?
When we do failover and failback, it doesn't maintain some of the settings that it should and I don't really understand why that happens. Quite regularly, anytime we do a failover or a fallback, we have to confirm all the settings for each VM. That takes a little bit of time. There is some power shell for that, so we've been able to automate that or at least optimize that. That said, that's my only complaint. Maybe that's a VMware limitation. I'm not sure.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been a customer of Zerto for several years. We started using it around 2017 or 2018.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is good. Of course, from a maintenance perspective, sometimes with the failover, we have to re-sync or set up the settings again for whatever reason. I'm not sure if that is a limitation of the product or a limitation of VMware.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have six or seven users that use the solution, and typically just two or three administrators.
We've scaled in that we have increased our VM count or VPG count. However, if we had thousands of VMs, I'd question the RTO or RPO capabilities at that point. However, ours is fairly small, under 40 VMs, and it has worked well for us.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support has been great. In our last DR failover, we needed to put in an urgent ticket and we got a very prompt response on that. Based on my interactions with them, by far they have the best support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did use other solutions before, however, they were not as comprehensive as Zerto. We moved to Zerto so we could get our RTO and RPO down to minutes. Just being able to do everything with one administrator makes it much easier than before since we were doing some things from backups.
From a desk disaster recovery perspective, Zerto has replaced all legacy backups. From an administration and time perspective, we're definitely seeing some savings there.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment was not very straightforward. We were able to deploy in a matter of hours. The foundational aspects of Zerto are pretty easy, however, managing VRAs and getting the replication going can be a bit more work.
For the initial deployment, we only needed a single administrator.
The solution definitely requires maintenance, just to keep everything up to date. However, it's very intuitive and everything happens very quickly, based on how many VRAs you have. We have three administrators capable of managing Zerto as needed.
We have three sites, either on private cloud or on-premises. They are all VMware-based.
What about the implementation team?
Initially, a consultant assisted us with the base installation.
What was our ROI?
We have not calculated the ROI of the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I was a little disappointed this year with the pricing, especially being a legacy customer of Zerto.
They changed the licensing structure as a result of the HP acquisition. We had a significant increase that was not very well communicated to us and wasn't planned for us and it hit us pretty hard. From a budgeting standpoint, we only got notified a couple of months before, however, we were already in our calendar year. We couldn't plan for it properly due to the timing. It was frustrating for us. The costs were up significantly for us this year. That is definitely something we will be mindful of and keep an eye on going forward. We may need to find an alternative if the costs keep increasing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did explore other solutions, such as VMware and other competitors. However, the ease of use and ease of implementation were good selling points and became a key deciding factor for us.
What other advice do I have?
We have not used the immutable data copies as of yet.
In terms of dealing with threats or attacks, I've read a lot of the white papers, however, we haven't really had to have a need or a use case for that at this point. We're aware of that functionality, however, we haven't had a need to really utilize that, thankfully.
It took us a while to realize the benefits of the product. The initial phase for us was to cover about twenty different servers, which had interdependencies within the application. It was quite difficult. It took us about a year and a half to fully utilize our application or our initial phase of productivity. That said, that wasn't a Zerto limitation. That was the fact that we were changing IP addresses between our sites, so it was more of an application configuration delay. Zerto was ready to go on day one, basically.
We don't use Zerto to support disaster recovery on AWS. We're strictly on-premises hypervisors. We use virtual machines.
We haven't used Zerto's data recovery testing functionality.
I'd advise new users to utilize the failover testing. You really have to make sure the application functions. Within our use case, for example, we have very interdependent applications. Each piece requires lots of communication, lots of databases, lots of other application transactions that are interdependent, and lots of integrations within our application. Utilizing the failover testing was critical for us.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.