Zerto Reviews

We use the product solely for disaster recovery.

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.

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. 

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.

We've been a customer of Zerto for several years. We started using it around 2017 or 2018.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Positive

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. 

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. 

Initially, a consultant assisted us with the base installation.

We have not calculated the ROI of the solution.

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.

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. 

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.

Its primary use case is for disaster recovery of 10 servers that we have in-house.

The testing of failover and failback is critical to any company, especially if they're certified in some platform like we are with ISO 27001. It is a necessity, and one of the main reasons I purchased Zerto.

Live replication and up to the second type of failover are valuable. The fact that we can do test failovers and failbacks is important for our ISO certification.

More user support would be best for me because I'm not in the product all the time. So, having strong support is probably the most important decision on any products that we buy.

The price is another thing that they definitely need to work on unless it has changed. I purchased mine a while back. 

When it is up and running, it is just always running, but because we're changing our infrastructure, basically, everything has to be destroyed and rebuilt.

I know it is scalable with the backup solution. I don't understand why that wasn't there early on, but it is neat that they've added that functionality in there.

It has been a long time since I've worked with them. So, I would rate them a 7 out of 10.

It is rare that I have to contact them. We are in the process of redoing our VMware infrastructure. We have to reinstall the whole product, which we haven't done for a long time. So, I'm not that familiar, and we're probably going to have to pay for services where I would like that to be handled by support to help us.

Neutral

It has been quite a while, but we used to use Double-Take to replicate some servers between offices. Zerto is much better at doing that functionality, and that's why we switched. 

The ease of use is definitely better with Zerto. The data recovery with Zerto is very fast. You just push buttons for recovery and flip back.

The initial setup was straightforward, but I had a team, probably from Zerto and not the consultant, that helped us with the installation. So, I had somebody right there holding my hand, and it was very easy to do.

That's hard to say because we haven't had a catastrophe. If we have a failure, hands down, I can't complain about that, but we haven't had any incidents.

Even though there is a fast speed of recovery and ease of use, I haven't measured the time savings and resource savings with Zerto. That's analytics, and we're not that detailed. We're user support focused.

It is very expensive. It is overpriced. No doubt. What held us up for many years from committing to buying it was always the cost. That's also why we only have 10 licenses.

We probably looked at other solutions, but I don't recall what they were at this time.

I know that they have a backup now, which they didn't have when I purchased originally, but we don't use that today. It may be something we'll look into. 

The solution is great. I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.

Our primary use case is disaster recovery.

We have Zerto deployed on-premises at both our primary and DR locations.

In general, Zerto helps us with our DR plan because it makes things so easy.

Zerto does a very good job of providing continuous data protection. I've been very impressed and would rate it an eight out of ten. Especially when it comes to DR testing, it is very easy to work with and we are able to recover our infrastructure at our DR site within a matter of minutes.

When we have to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved in the process. I've used other solutions and I haven't seen anything that compares to what it can do. It is difficult to estimate the exact time saving because it depends on the workload.

Realistically, you could have a single admin responsible for the restores, whereas with other solutions, depending on how big your environment is, it would take more people. In our environment, it would take upwards of five people to restore our core infrastructure and by using Zerto, it reduces the number of people by about half.

With respect to DR management, Zerto has reduced the number of people involved in the process. I wasn't at the company when they used the previous product, so I'm not sure by exactly how much.

The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time.

It's very helpful for DR testing because we can recover VMs in an isolated bubble and prove our DR methodology.

Zerto is very easy to use, which is one of its big selling points. It takes just a few clicks to restore a VM, which means that it's easy to train somebody to help in a DR situation.

We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work. However, I cannot recall the specific details.

I have been using Zerto since I started with the company two years ago. In total, the company has been using it for approximately four years.

The stability has been very good. I can't think of a time that we've really had any issues that we didn't cause or something maybe with an update. We're running it 24/7 and I can't think of a time that we've had any major issues with it.

From my perspective, Zerto's scalability is very good. We have 60 VPGs and 122 virtual machines that we're using Zerto to replicate to our disaster recovery site. This will grow with any new infrastructure that we build. Any new servers, depending on their RTO or how soon we need to recover them, would be put into Zerto. Potentially, we will add some, although I'm not aware of any major growth at this time.

Our operations department monitors the dashboard just to confirm that our RTO and the VPG health look good. There are perhaps five people in that team, who are watching the dashboard.

In my team, there are three of us that use it, although we don't look at it daily. It would only be if we get reports of an issue or we need to adjust a setting or something like that.

Overall, on a day-to-day basis, there are probably about five people that use it.

I have not personally dealt with the technical support but I know about the experience that my coworker has had. They are typically very helpful and provide good responses compared to other companies in the industry.

Zerto was recently acquired by HP and there is some concern in our organization about what might happen to the technical support, seeing as they were bought out by a bigger company. We're hoping that it doesn't negatively impact the support that we receive.

I have used Veeam in the past and it's similar to Zerto in certain aspects. They both have their pros and cons, but I would say from what I've seen, I like Zerto. It just seems to be a little bit more user-friendly in the UI. Functionality-wise, they're similar. I think Veeam would be one of their main competitors.

I have also used the older product by VMware called Site Replication Manager. It really doesn't compare to Zerto.

I have been involved in some of the Zerto setups and from what I have seen, they go very well. It seems that it is pretty easy to perform the initial setup.

It takes about an hour per site, or per server to upgrade it. 

We deploy and upgrade the solution in-house.

It's usually two people that are responsible for maintenance but it could be four people on the team.

I believe that we have seen a return on our investment. The return comes from time saved in manpower, for example. From what I've seen, it's worth the cost.

I've also heard comments from my coworkers to say that it's an expensive product but it definitely makes you feel more comfortable in a DR situation.

I have not been directly involved in the pricing and licensing. My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price.

We don't use Zerto for long-term data retention and I'm not aware that there are any plans to do so. We use Zerto in tandem with our backup solution, just to be safe. That said, we have used Zerto for recovery in scenarios where we couldn't find the particular data that we were looking for in our other backup solution. 

We have not experienced any ransomware incidents or other situations where we needed disaster recovery. However, Zerto would definitely save us time for that. Depending on the situation, it could save the number of people involved as well.

Although we have not had to use it in an actual event, it helps us in terms of regulatory and audit compliance. If we had a real event, we would all feel more comfortable that we'd be able to restore or be in a better position to have our infrastructure restored in a small amount of time.

We have not yet looked into using Zerto for DR in the cloud but in the future, we're going to look at the option of doing so.

My advice for anybody who is considering Zerto is to do a proof of concept or a trial. I'm not sure what the vendor has available in this regard but I would advise trying it out with a small number of virtual machines.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery and migrations. We have two primary sites that we replicate to. If there are on-prem clients we replicate back and forth between those two and then we replicate our off-prems to them as well. We use on and off-prem as well as Azure. 

We actually have rescued a couple of clients that have had disasters on-prem due to weather or data center outages. One of our clients had left us for a cheaper provider and before our disks and retention points expired out, the cheaper provider had a flood in their data center. We were able to restore the client using the old restore points back into our data center, which was a huge win for us because it was a fairly large client. That client has worked with us ever since then. 

Zerto saves us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We've had a couple of ransomware incidents with clients in the last year and a half. I've worked on ransomware issues before when Zerto wasn't involved and it was much more complicated. Now, with Zerto, it's at least 50 to 75% faster. We're able to get a client up and running in a matter of an hour, as opposed to it taking an entire day to build or locate the ransomware and rebuild from shadow copies or some other archaic method.

It decreases the time it takes when we need to failback or move workloads because we use disaster recovery runbooks that we work with our clients to maintain. Anybody at our company, at any given time, can pick up this runbook and go with it so we can assign one or two techs to the incidents. They work with the client and get them back up and running quickly. We're 50 to 75% faster. It's now a matter of hours as opposed to days. In an old disaster recovery situation, it would be all hands on deck. With Zerto, we can assign out a technician or two, so it's one or two techs as opposed to five to 10.

There has been a reduction in the number of people involved in the overall backup. We have the management fairly minimized. There are only two primary subject matter experts in the company, one handles the back-end infrastructure and one handles the front-end, that's pretty much it. We're a fairly large company, with 500+ clients, so it's been stripped down, so to speak. 

From what I've seen, we do save money with Zerto, especially for long-term retention like the Azure Blob Storage. We had a recent incident where a client had to go back to a 2017 version of a server that was around three to four years old, just to find a specific file, and it only took us an hour to locate the proper retention point and mount it for him and get him back what he needed.

The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage.

We also use it for migrations into our data center. We bring in new clients all the time by setting up Zerto in their on-prem and then replicating to wherever their destination will be in our environment.

We've also used Zerto to migrate to the cloud.

Zerto provides continuous data protection. I'd give it a 10 out of 10 as far as that goes. The recovery points are very recent, generally five to 15 seconds of actual production. It's very convenient.

It's also fairly simple to use. Zerto does have some quirks but they have worked those out with recent releases. They're really good about listening to feature requests. We're actually a Zerto partner at our company, so they take our feature requests pretty seriously. Zerto is one of the easiest disaster recovery products I've used. We use Veeam as well which is much more complicated to set up in the back-end.

Zerto seems to keep up with what I think needs to be improved pretty well.

One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table.

I have been using Zerto for three and a half years. 

Stability is pretty good. It's gotten better over the years. It's kind of 50/50 between features that have been added and our understanding and usage of the product over the last three years. But it's definitely gotten better.

It's highly scalable. That's one of the things we like about it. We can empower clients. I have one client that's migrating from his on-premise into one of our private clouds, and we have enabled him to do so. We set up the environment and we're enabling him to build VPGs and migrate them as needed without our interaction at all. This is bringing in tons of revenue. It's super scalable and it seems to be not just easy for us to use, but easy for us to enable a client to use it as well.

Technical support is astounding. I've said that to Zerto technicians and I've said that to clients as well. Being in my role, I work with a lot of vendors, a lot of different support, and Zerto is off the charts as far as skill and ease to work with. It's been wonderful as far as that goes. Zerto was some of the best support I've had across vendors.

Before Zerto, there really wasn't anything that was as good as Zerto, so it was a game-changer.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

For an off-prem client, I would send them a welcome letter that details what they need to do on their end with the server. I would send the download package, everything like that. If the client is immediately responsive, that could be done within an hour, but then some clients take a little longer. Once they have the infrastructure set up on their end and the VPN is set up, I can have a Zerto off-prem implementation replicating into one of our private clouds within an hour or two hours maximum, even for a large environment.

A client was migrating into one of our usage-based clouds, so it automatically bills by the resource pool. The more that they put in there, the more we gain. We've probably increased the input to that environment 10-fold. It's a 10-time multiple of what we invested into it, just particularly for that one use case because he's growing so rapidly. Every time he brings over a new client, it adds to the billing which is hands-free for us. We've enabled him to do it.

Pricing is fair. For the license that we have and the way that it's priced, it is pretty simple and it's not over-complicated like some other platforms. It would be very beneficial to have some sort of training or even just documentation around every component of Zerto and how it should be built or there should be suggestions about how it should be built. It would help newer companies that are adopting the platform to have a better opportunity to grab all the revenue upfront.

Journal history was one of the things that we didn't take into consideration when we implemented Zerto initially and we lost a lot of money there. We talked to one of the reps after that and found out that some clients do roll in the cost of this journal and some clients actually charged separately for it. Zerto has made it easier to plan for that lately with Zerto Analytics, but it's still a gray area.

There aren't any additional costs in addition to standard licensing that I'm aware of. 

We still use Veeam in the environment but the recovery points aren't as robust. They're a lot thinner. You can get maybe an hour or the same, but you can't get five-second production. We used Veeam and the old active-passive standard of building a server in each environment and replicating to it.

I've actually pushed us to use Zerto for our backups with the solutions team for quite a while, since version 6.5. I don't think they plan on doing it just because we already have two other backup offerings and they don't want to complicate our Zerto infrastructure. From my understanding, we're not planning on doing it. But with every release, it gets so much better and it's just a matter of time before we revisit it.

My advice would be to follow best practices when it comes to back-end infrastructure. We have made some changes specifically to track certain things like swap files and journal history. Previously, we had everything going to production data stores and now we have dedicated journal data and restore data stores for swap files, which helps us to thin out the noise when it comes to storage. Storage implementation is very important. 

Make sure to go through all the training. The training on MyZerto is free, very straightforward and it's very informative. That's one of the things we didn't do initially but it wasn't really as available as it is now.

I would rate Zerto ten out of ten. 

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory. 

Before Zerto, we used another solution that caused database crashes and did not offer certainty regarding disaster recovery. Zerto is more configurable and stable.

A DR site reduces downtime, especially with full VM backup and online synchronization. Zerto accomplishes this without affecting network efficiency, as synchronization occurs at specific intervals.

Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent.  

Compared to other solutions, the speed of recovery with Zerto is faster. Our last backup solution, Data Protector, was very slow, but Zerto is rapid even in file retrieval. 

The solution helped reduce our organization's DR testing; it's hard to say precisely how much, but Zerto does faster DR testing than other products.

Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster. 

The platform measures the right speed of storage devices and gives an alert on the VPG if there is latency, but the nature of the alert suggests the solution isn't meeting the SLA. However, this shouldn't affect the health status of the backup. It should provide an express report that we should enhance our hardware rather than express latency as a threat to the backup capability.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is acceptable, we experienced an issue once, but the backup time is speedy.

The solution's architecture supports business owners to expand their disaster recovery capabilities as their infrastructure grows. Additionally, Zerto's ability to integrate with various cloud platforms and on-premises environments further enhances its scalability, offering a flexible and robust solution for organizations with evolving needs.

Customer support is one of Zerto's best aspects; the support is excellent, and we can quickly get through to them. I rate them ten out of ten. The support staff are very kind and always solve a problem. I feel secure knowing I have access to such good support.

Positive

We previously used Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is easier to use and more straightforward to configure. 

Zerto replaced our legacy backup solution, Data Protector. This not only saved on the cost of the old product but also provided more stability and security to our company. We now have a new backup methodology, and it's a significant upgrade.  

I carried out the initial setup with support from Zerto, which was very straightforward.

The only requirement for maintenance is monitoring the solution and updating versions.

I have 20 years of experience in IT, so I was well-positioned to carry out the deployment myself, with the assistance of Zerto support.

We have seen an ROI with Zerto. 

The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable.

We evaluated many other options but found Zerto the best, especially for our HPE environment. It's the most stable and straightforward tool, and even those with limited experience can operate it.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable.

We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly.

I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.

I use Zerto for disaster recovery and data protection.

It is very easy and user-friendly. You do not need too much knowledge about it before you navigate around it. It is not complex. It is easy for users to use.

We can see its benefits from time to time. Every time we use it, we keep seeing the benefits of Zerto.

We have seen a positive effect on our RTOs and RPOs. We will keep using Zerto. We do not have any plan to change the brand.

Zerto helps me save time. It helps do things slightly faster. 

Zerto has helped me with my time management. It helps me save time. It makes my work easier. It is easy to navigate through.

I find it to be the best. It has had a positive effect on everything I do in my daily activity.

Zerto is easy to use and user-friendly. It is not complex, so I find it easy to use. I do not need to have much knowledge about it before using it.

Its price should be improved.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

I have had a crash once or twice.

I feel it is very good because it supports virtual machines.

I have not contacted their support.

I have not used any other solution. Zerto is the first one.

It was easy. I have not tried any other product, so I cannot compare it with others. This was my first time using Zerto, and I found it to be easy.

It did not take much of my time. It probably took two to three days, but I am not sure because it has been three years.

I had a little assistance with the deployment. It was not just me. We had three people involved in its deployment.

It needs to be maintained. You need to check whether any user or anything else requires attention.

They should adjust the pricing because I feel its price is too much. If they reduce the price, there will be more users and customers.

If you have not deployed it before, you should seek assistance before the deployment.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

We use Zerto for offsite disaster recovery. We have over 70 VM servers, several of which are our mission-critical servers that are replicated to our VMware hosts at an offsite location. 

We also replicate our Citrix environment and Disaster Recovery Zen App servers with Zerto to our offsite location as well. Most of our servers are Windows-based operating systems. However, this doesn't matter because we are replicating the VM servers. Further down the line, we may invoke extended retention for some of our more important servers.  

It gives us peace of mind that our data, servers, and environment are protected. We can easily restore VMs quickly and have confidence that the replicated data will be current. 

We are able to show proof in tests, reports, and live data to our owners, showing that our most sensitive data and servers are being replicated to an offsite facility, and we can restore it in case of a natural disaster or from our system being compromised by ransomware. 

Our IT staff can easily navigate through Zerto and test failover, see if there are issues with replications, and create offline copies of the data. 

Being able to test our VPGs and prove that our disaster recovery setup is in place and functional. 

Our business owners can be assured that our data is protected, and in case a serious problem occurs, they know that we will be able to recover easily. 

Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed. We also use Zerto to make copies of our VM servers for our offsite Citrix Zen App Servers. Zerto has helped simplify the process of disaster recovery setup and made the tasks more efficient for our IT Staff.

Zerto could add text alerts if there are critical problems and alerts if changes affect our replication. We do receive emails, and they will alert us to issues that we are having with VPG SLAs. 

I don't have any complaints about Zerto, and I hope they continue to develop new features. If they had classes on using Zerto, that would help with onboarding new IT staff. They may already have them, and I am not aware that they do. Overall, Zerto works out great, and they do a good job. 

I've used the solution for five years.

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

Positive

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time. 

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication. 

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.