Zerto Reviews

We have Zerto as an emergency backup if we were to lose electricity or compute.

I purchased Zerto because I wanted to get a return to operations and to minimize the downtime.

The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover. 

Zerto is the best of breed when it comes to providing continuous data protection.

It has a number of features rolled together. So when we need to failover, it does it successfully without a lot of stuff that we have to tune underneath the scenes. We use Zerto for the short-term retention of the data.

I would rate its ease of use as an eight out of ten. It has made it a lot easier for us to failover. Usually, in the past, we had to manually go and bring things up and this automates it.

The solution decreases the time it takes and the people we need when we need to fail back or move workloads. It saves around eight hours and one person. We had started off with two to three people.

It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes but we haven't used it for that.

We haven't had something where we had to recover data using this product, but I assume it would reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery situations.

It has helped to reduce downtime in testing but we haven't had a serious issue where we had to switch over and use it.

The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed.

I have been using Zerto for about a year. 

We found Zerto to be pretty stable.

We haven't had problems with scalability.

We don't really have users. We just have data that we move over which is basically the size of the campus.

We need at least one full-time employee to run it.

It's used for all of our failovers so it's in 100% usage.

I have had a little bit of experience with their technical support. I don't have any issues with them.

The ease of use, compared to other products, is much better. Zerto is all-encompassing. 

We had to work on it for about a week to get it running the way we wanted. It took so long because of the fine-tuning. We could have set it up within three hours or something just as a test to see at work, but not necessarily do everything we wanted to do.

The time it took to sync the data up took a little bit longer.

We'll probably see ROI in around three years. 

The pricing is more expensive, but the functionality is what we wanted.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing.

We also looked at Druva. We liked the flexibility that we get with Zerto. 

You'll be happy with Zerto.

The biggest lesson I have learned from Zerto is to be patient. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We use it for DR and general backup. We have snapshots or shadow copies with Microsoft and we do Zerto backups to our other locations so we can always get the data back.

We bought Zerto, in the beginning, to migrate a very important system of the airline from a co-lo that was managed by the co-lo to our on-prem. As an airline, you can't be down because you could cause a ground stop. With Zerto, we were able to migrate all those things across to on-prem without touching anything or losing any time. We took very little downtime.

Also, we've run into some situations where, for some reason, Windows has lost some of the files. I have been able to fail it over to our other data center and they were back up in 10 minutes.

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus other disaster recovery solutions is vastly better. Whereas with the others, I'd have to spin through a lot of stuff and find things, with Zerto I can scroll back in the GUI, find the one I want, and restore it. If that's not right, I can destroy it and go back a little bit more in time.

And our being an ultra-low-cost airline, we don't have staff, so it helps in that way.

It has also helped our DR testing because we can fail over the main part that runs the airline within 45 minutes. The first time, it took me an hour and a half. The second time, it took about an hour. The last time I did it, it took about 45 minutes. That's within the timeframe of one hour where we don't have to do a ground stop.

Moving the VPGs from one location to another is a valuable feature. You just click on it and move it and it's done. We have a stretch VLAN between our data centers so it's really easy: this is IP here and the same IP is there. So if something happens or somebody wants to test something, I can fail it over.

Another aspect that I use a lot is that I can fail it over into its own little bubble and I can install software that I want to test to make sure it doesn't break something. I can do that and then roll it all back.

If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens. 

The other thing that I've run into lately is that when I've done a whole bunch of upgrades to systems, so they're offline, they get stuck in a pending state. You can never get them out so you have to delete and start all over again. It would be nice if they could make it a little simpler to figure out what's wrong.

I have been using Zerto for about six years.

It always just runs. I don't have to worry about it or keep checking it. It just does its thing.

It's very scalable. Fortunately, we bought a bunch of licenses when we first bought it and we've been growing into those licenses over the years. It has been very scalable for us.

The technical support has been good, although I've had a couple of situations where they've said some things that were totally inaccurate. But you have that in all organizations.

Positive

Since I started with this airline, we have gone through two other solutions. Zerto is the third and we've stuck with it for quite a few years.

One of the other solutions was a direct product that dumped everything to a storage area in the cloud and it never was consistent. The other was a Dell application backup that no longer exists. That was just too limiting and its backup was never consistent.

Zerto is much easier to use. Once you get the concept down of what it's doing, it's really easy to bring up backups, restore backups, move things around, and test things. It's very easy.

I had one of their sales reps in Colorado help me through the setup. Then we just took it over.

The ROI is in "funny money." It's my time and how long something is down or how long it takes somebody to restore something, and that is much faster.

The pricing seems really good. We're an enterprise customer, so we get all the bells and whistles.

We evaluated a couple of things, but one of our co-los was actually using Zerto so we looked at it as a result. That is what led us to buy it.

We were able to replace most of VMware SRM with this solution. It allows us to failover individual machines or application clusters with ease. The one thing that it does not do nicely is a full site failover. We have never needed that aspect though (only for testing).

We have leveraged the individual server failovers a number of times, and it has saved us a lot of man hours (doing things such as rebuilding, fighting viruses, or forcing more servers to failover than we wanted). It has been a phenomenal addition, and proved its worth in the pilot phase, when it saved us from having to rebuild a machine that was included in our pilot trial.

Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate. The solution is well worth the money invested.

The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards. Within a VPG, you can do great failover timing as well as ordering and scripting, but if your site contains many VPGs (as mine does), then it is difficult to manage failing over between sites, especially if you are at the site that was impacted.

None. Even the upgrades are speedy and easy. 

None. As long as you have the licenses, it goes smoothly.

I have contacted their vendor support in regards to backup performance of SQL databases. They provided me with adequate instruction and background information to be able to adjust my environment to better suit Zerto's processes. It's been smooth sailing since.

VMware Site Recovery Manager. We changed from this vendor because we hit the 75 license threshold and were forced to consider the conversion to Enterprise. We searched the marketplace and Zerto was a great fit for our needs.

It was straightforward and easy. I was able to install it myself without any help from Zerto.

In-house was all that was necessary. It only required one engineer to work for about two hours to install everything, and then a week to configure and protect the entire environment. This will vary depending on your link to your DR site.

The cost is steep, but once you experience recovering a single server along with its granular restore times, you will see that the cost is justified.

We evaluated Unitrends.

Make sure that you understand the limitations of any software before you dive in. Make sure you document your use cases and have the vendor show you how it can perform those tasks.

We have three locations. We replicate circularly around all those locations for all our VMs. This is for DR.

We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management.

Luckily, we haven't actually had to do a full failover. We have tested it many times, and it proves out okay, but we don't have to spend a lot of time managing it.

Our insurance companies provide assistance with staff or boots on the ground. Whereas, using Zerto has allowed us to act very quickly with just our current team. We can fail over and switch over to our disaster recovery site, instead of having to bring in a bigger team.

It is amazingly simple to use, monitor, look at, and utilize. It is great for that.

We would like more mobile options. If we are at a restaurant or out and about in our normal daily lives, we would like to be able to interface via our mobiles.

I have been using it for about five years.

Scalability is simple. If you just add more virtual managers, then you are good to go.

Our customer rep, success manager, and engineer are great.

Luckily, I haven't had to use the technical support that often. The times that I have, it has been fantastic. They quickly had me where I needed to be, which is top-notch and good.

I would rate them as eight or nine out of 10. Nobody is perfect.

Positive

It gives us peace of mind. Before we had disaster recovery and long-term retention protection against ransomware, it was one of those things that kept us up at night.

We previously used VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Veeam for backup. Zerto is way better and more friendly. Zerto's interface, simplicity, and reliability are definitely better than SRM.

When we were using SRM, it didn't have a web interface. Zerto's web interface makes it easier to navigate. When we used SRM, it was an actual application. It was a bit clunkier and a lot more difficult to use. However, it has been awhile, so it might not be a fair comparison at this point.

The initial deployment was pretty simple. The implementation took less than half a day. It has been awhile, but it was very seamless, easy, and did not take very long. We were up and running pretty quickly.

Zerto was involved with the initial deployment. We paid for their Professional Services, who walked us through the whole thing. It was very simple.

Our technology committee established an RPO and RTO. We beat those times with Zerto. We have a 30-minute RTO and we can recover within seconds. We have far exceeded any expectations so far.

From the simple point of not having to worry about whether or not we are protected in the event of ransomware or disaster, it is worth the money.

The pricing seems fair.

We looked at other solutions around five years ago.

I would recommend buying it. It is easy and simple. It works. It is all the things that any administrator would want. You don't need to spend a lot of time messing with it and you can sleep at night.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect.

We use it to protect VMs. Disaster recovery is our use case. Our compliance requires that we need to simulate a DR exercise every six months if we are protecting a VM. One of the features of Zerto is simulating a disaster recovery exercise in case of failure. We fail back the VM to the DR site, and when the event is over, we fail it back to the production site.

We are using one of the newer releases, but we are still six months behind.

It meets our SLAs for RPOs and RTOs.

• Replication
• Failover and failback for DR

It needs more documentation and automation features. I would like more documentation on designing an environment and network operations. On the automation side, I would like automation to clean up the environment in cases of a failed DR effort. An API interface to perform the DR exercise would also be nice.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

It is stable. We have had no big problems. 

There have been a few minor upgrades.

It is scalable. From a few hundred to 5,000, it has been pretty easy to scale, not only horizontally, but also vertically.

Zerto is protecting a couple thousand VMs.

The support is very good with quick response times. They are helpful. If you open a session, they will take over and immediately solve your problem. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

We have used SRM and Veeam. 

Zerto is a better product. It has more modern features. It is easy to use. It also has a good interface with command line for scripts.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The solution is easy to implement. You implement it and it starts working out-of-the-box. There is not much configuration required. It takes a couple of hours to have it up and running, protecting you.

We deployed the system ourselves.

We have seen ROI with the RTOs, RPOs, and speed of recovery.

Using Zerto, you can have your VM up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is flip a switch, then you are good to go.

For speed of recovery, Zerto is faster than SRM. SRM takes more time and needs some manual effort. Veeam is pretty good and on par with Zerto.

Do a PoC. You can compare it with other products, like SRM and Veeam. Then, you will see that difference. It is good to have the solution working in a lab. Or, engage Zerto who can assist you in building a lab for it.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We've been using it to consolidate data centers. We have 13 hospitals and two main data centers and a cloud presence. We're trying to collapse everything. We've been using Zerto to move the workloads over to our primaries.

It's allowed us to save a lot of money by collapsing a few data centers. We have been able to evacuate the hardware in the one data center in our virtual environment, and then shut down and get rid of all those hosts. And it has saved us time in our failovers, from collapsing data centers to our primaries. It enabled us to do that on the fly.

One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end.

The syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

It's pretty stable.

I've never had to use the technical support.

We use VMware SRM pretty exclusively for our disaster recovery stuff. SRM and Zerto are very similar in the way they work. Zerto enables features that SRM doesn't give us and that's why we purchased it.

Also, it takes half as much time to failover with Zerto as it does with SRM. Every six months we do a failover of our Epic environment from one data center to another, and we use SRM for that. We've been using Zerto for failovers from one data center to another for data center consolidation, and those seem to happen a lot faster than SRM.

We've definitely gotten our money's worth out of it for what we've been doing. We have been able to close three data centers so far.

We looked at Veeam, but that was a long time ago.

Virtual server replication, as well as a level of backup, to our disaster recovery site.

Zerto is the key to our DR strategy. With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection. Zerto has made it possible to have different hardware (processor and storage) at each site.

• Hardware independent: Being able to replicate between two different sets of storage and processors.
• On the fly IP address changes: During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers.

I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit. 

Zerto is very stable.

No scalability issues. We have added additional licensing over the years and haven't had any issues.

We have not had to use technical support too much, but we have always found the technicians helpful and knowledgeable. 

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy. We were able to start replication within minutes of the initial setup.

Zerto support helped us install and implement it initially. They were very knowledgeable.

We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable. 

We did not evaluate other solutions.

For the most part, we are very satisfied with Zerto and its features. 

There are many valuable features. However, the one that sticks out the most is the simplicity of the process to protect or migrate a virtual workload.

It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome.

Zerto has changed how we think about protecting virtual workloads. It has enabled us to think about real time protection with full replication that provides checkpoints every few seconds and enables quick (< 10min) recovery times.

Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site. This is good stuff.

We have been using the product for more than two years.

Zerto is stable and works as expected.

Zerto scales as you scale your virtual environments. It simply and quickly protects virtual workloads.

Zerto’s support is good. They are quick to contact you back and get working on any issue. This is hard to get from other vendors.

I have been performing DR/migrations/replication for over 15 years. I changed during a bake-off of different products based on:

• Speed to setup and run
• Low to no dependencies
• Simple to use (easy to operationalize)

Zerto simply is the tool for protecting any virtual workload. I have set up and protected:

• DBs (DB2, SQL, Oracle)
• Many apps (Wintel and Linux)
• Virtual appliances.

It is extremely simple to set up and use.

The Zerto setup was straightforward. It is one of the simplest tools I have ever deployed to protect virtual workloads. It works hand in hand with VMware features such as DRS/HA, so there is no issue when your workload moves around.

Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical.

We evaluated PlateSpin, Recover Point/Recover Point 4 VMs, VMW SRM, Veeam, and VMW converter.

Put it in place as it will become your default tool for VM protection and replication, hands down!