What is our primary use case?
We're using it for site plate replication and fail-over or disaster recovery. We're primarily using it to replicate between the data centers that we own and operate.
How has it helped my organization?
We've had a few disasters where we've had a site go out and we've had outages or hardware failures. However, with a single click, we can have all of the failover and when the other sites come back up, it can auto re-replicate in the reverse direction so there is no extra manpower required. Whereas, normally, we would be spending hours and hours cleaning up from the failover event.
What is most valuable?
We enjoy the simplicity of not only configuring replication but failing over with a single click and then having it automatically reverse replication. We've had other products such as Veeam, and their replication works, however, it's very cumbersome to configure. When you failover, there's a bunch of work you have to do after the fact to reverse the direction and to restore the VM and how it names it and which environment it shows up in.
In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window.
The solution is very easy to use. It's very straightforward. You don't really have to do a lot of reading through the documentation, or things like that. You can basically scroll through the menu and figure it out.
We have not had ransomware, so we haven't had to deal with that, however, we definitely had a disaster recovery issue we had where we had the fail-over site stop unexpectedly. It did save us a bit of data loss, whereas, normally, we would have lost six hours' worth of customer data. In this case, it was seamless. We lost seconds' worth.
The solution has reduced downtime. It has done so a couple of times. There could be some cost savings there. It's just not something we calculate.
What needs improvement?
The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product. Zerto can do backup, and yet it's really a disaster recovery product. It would be great if they could improve upon the backup functionality, or continually improve. We've seen some improvements, however, if they continue improving upon that it may eventually eliminate the need for the other product.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. The only issue we had was a DHCP issue where we didn't static a couple of the DVMs, which is the agent for each ESX host, and we were having a few gaps in replication when the IPs would change, however, we've stacked those and that has resolved that issue.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We find that it's very easily scalable. The resource overhead is very minimal so it's really easy to scale up the environment and the product kind of automates the process for you. You select where you want it, hit install, and it handles it for you.
About five people use the product in our company. We have some system administrators, we have a couple of programmers and we have a DBA.
We have around a quarter of our environment replicated with Zerto. It's mostly our critical infrastructure.
We may possibly increase usage over time.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is good. I'd give it an eight out of ten. They're pretty quick to respond. They are almost always able to resolve my issue. I have no complaints. I only had a couple of support tickets, however, the experience was pretty good.
That said, their web portal is a bit clunky to navigate. For example, putting in a request, knowing where to go, or pulling up documentation or upgrading information wasn't quite as intuitive as it could be.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are still using Veeam mostly for backup tasks. We use Zerto for site recovery.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.
The installation was simple. There are lots of guides and information. There are YouTube videos. They had training classes that were free that you can go to and they have a little lab environment. Even without the assistance offered, the way you install it is very straightforward and very simple. Really anybody can run the installer and have an idea of what they're doing right out of the gate without really any training.
Deployment took around a day.
We did have a specific deployment plan and we were able to execute that in about a day. Getting all the sites set up and then the VMs replicated was fast.
We have five people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance.
What about the implementation team?
We didn't use an integrator or consultant. We just did it ourselves.
What was our ROI?
There's not a direct ROI as it's being used as an insurance policy. The only time it really benefits us is when something bad happens.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's reasonably affordable. Obviously, cheaper would always be better, however, it's not out of the expected range. We are just paying by VM. It's my understanding there are no extra fees.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I can't remember the companies off the top of my head as it's been a few years since we've done it, however, we evaluated five or ten different options that were popular at the time. Some of them were integrated with hardware. Some of them were software only.
In the end, it came down to Zerto due to simplicity. It's very simple and straightforward. It removes all the overhead of management and knowing what is active or what's the standby copy. It handles all of those pieces for you.
What other advice do I have?
We're probably on the latest version or one version behind.
We very lightly use the product for very specific things. We have a couple of things that are very high data rate, very high IO, for which we cannot use traditional snapshot-based technology and we are using that to do a long-term backup.
The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We have maintained exactly what we had. It's simplified it so it's possible to have a reduction, however, we haven't done any reduction from that.
The biggest piece of advice I could give is if you want the best-in-class for failover and replication, as well as ease of management, there is no better product that I've seen so far. Whether hardware or software combinations, this has been the simplest deployment and it just works.
I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
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