Zerto Reviews

We use it mainly for our disaster recovery, so we replicate our production VMs between our data centers.

The solution meets our high availability and disaster recovery needs.

The disaster recovery reviews itself and it has the ability to fail over within seconds and get new machines up and running on a new data center in a matter of minutes.

It's pretty easy to use. It depends on how detailed you get into the product. If you get real detailed into the product with some of its backup capabilities, it can get a little bit more detailed, for example. However, for the disaster recovery piece itself, it's it's pretty easy to use.

The near synchronous replication is effective. It works really well. The replication and the RTO, RPO times are pretty much the best in the industry.

We saw some benefits right away in that we were understanding that we were now highly available. We also started to see more and more benefits as time went on.

It helps protect virtual machines in our environment.

Our downtime and our ability to replicate happen within seconds. We've seen other products that take about five minutes. Now, we take seconds to get things back up and going. Therefore, the loss of data is virtually nothing. We've been extremely happy with that. 

It's helped reduce downtimes in pretty much any situation. We've had instances where a data center or a cluster in a data center was down or we were having problems with it and being able to have that replicated data being able to be spun up within a matter of minutes. It's significantly helped where if we didn't have that ability, we were probably looking at at least three to four hours, if not a day, of downtime. We're talking about the difference between minutes of downtime versus hours to potentially days.

With Zerto we haven't had any any actual instances where ransomware or anything like that actually comes up. We do yearly testing where we'll fail over an entire data center. While we haven't had any malicious incidents, we've had success with conceptual testing.

Zerto hasn't necessarily reduced the overall testing in our organization. We still have to do the testing. That said, it's reduced the time in which it takes to perform that testing. So, we still have our requirements to do yearly testing. However, it's at least reducing the amount of time it takes. Before, the testing would take an entire weekend and multiple departments in order to complete it. Now we're finishing our testing in a matter of hours. We're knocking off quite a bit of time with Zerto - plus hours of time in order to complete testing.

Zerto is now our resiliency strategy. We're able to replicate all of our data and be able to bring up an entire data center within a matter of minutes, which has become our go-to for our resiliency within both of our data centers.

Recently, they started forcing everybody to use a Linux-based appliance for their z/VMs. That appliance has been extremely touchy and, in some cases, problematic. However, there were Windows-based z/VMs prior, and we never really had issues with them. But now we're running into problems where certificates aren't able to be imported for things like LDPAPS and SSL. We've run into actual downtime with the z/VMs recently, which is new to the Linux app appliance. Overall, the appliances had some bugs, and they've not been as reliable as they were in the past.

I've been using Zerto for a little over 4.5 years.

There are the no real lag issues, We've only had a couple of instances where the system has been down, and wasnew since our Linux appliance install. Overall, it's been pretty reliable with the caveat that the new Linux appliance has had some downtime. Prior to that, we hadn't had any. 

Scalability's been good. There's a couple of instances where they could allow for some more local replication, however, scalability has been good.

I quite frequently contact technical support. On most things, they have been pretty good. The issues that we've had with that z/VM, those tickets can take quite a while. I have one ticket that's been open for about four and a half months now. They're still trying to figure out some of the bugs within their system, which has caused some tickets to take longer than they really should.

The quality of response has been pretty good. Maybe 7  or 8 out of 10 are quality responses. They're they're pretty good, pretty knowledgeable. Again, there are some instances where they're still learning the system as well, or there's something new, and it's a little bit odd; however, other than that, their answers are typically pretty spot on and pretty well documented.

Neutral

We used to build products by Nutanix. Their RTO times were much higher. That's about the only solution that I've used at least recently.

I wasn't part of that decision making process. Zerto had been onboarded by the time I came on to to the team here.

The deployments have been pretty easy as long as you have your network topology figured out. If you're just starting up a brand new appliance, and you're running through a setup, signing IPs , et cetera, you have to make sure that the z/VMs can talk to each other. It's a pretty easy process.

Usually, for the setup, we have the SME, which is me, and then a backup to be a second pair of eyes, however, a lot of the work is been done just by myself.

In terms of maintenance, there are updates that need to be applied. The certificate imports need to happen depending on expiration dates. There also is their key cloak integration for authentication, and that requires some upkeep as well depending on how you're signing permissions and what you're signing permissions for.

I've done redeployments myself, for example, when we switched over from Windows to Linux to z/VMs. That was all in-house. At the time when they did their very first deployment, they had used a third party vendor to assist with that. We've not needed them since. 

I don't have any visibility on the pricing. 

We're a Zerto customer.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

New users need to understand the product prior to deployment and make sure that they're taking the time to whiteboard this out. Your VRAs are going to take up a good amount of space. So users need to understand that when you're replicating data over, you are making a second copy of that data, and understand what your test scenarios are going to be. You need to understand if you need things like a test environment to actually be within Zerto since that will be taking up more space. Overall, people just be aware that the Linux appliances still have to have their bugs worked out. For first-time users, especially, I would keep those deployments as simple as possible to start.

We have multiple plans across the US. We use Zerto to transfer VMs from one plant to another plant, from east to west.

Zerto is a really great fallback software that gives us the redundancy we need.

Overall, the solution is really efficient. Zerto really helped us prevent the delay in bringing up the VM once it transfers because we wanted to ensure everything works.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication works great. We've had some issues before trying to synchronize VMs across long territory ranges, but Zerto did everything we needed it to do. Zerto's near-synchronous replication is extremely important to our organization. Our production line to uptime is almost 99.99%, so the near-synchronous replication really helps out.

We use SAP HANA with Zerto.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. The solution helps with recovery and ensures that we can transfer our VMs when we have a host failure. We have plants all over the US, and Zerto has really helped us keep everything running at almost 100% capacity.

Because of its near-synchronous uptime and recovery, Zerto's speed of recovery is ten times better than that of other disaster recovery solutions like Veeam and Commvault.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto's ease of use is pretty straightforward. I'm really excited to see how GreenLake has integrated Zerto and made it even more seamless.

It would be good if we could store a snapshot of the images coming through so that we can always go back and have a vision history.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

Zerto is pretty stable software, and it's always been up when we needed it.

I don't see any issues with the solution's scalability. We have 100 plants across the US and hundreds of other plants worldwide and have never had an issue adding any hosts or notes to the tool.

We deployed the solution through a consultant.

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

Zerto is really good software. It has all the features that I need. I love Zerto's integration with GreenLake, and now that we know more about it, we'll start utilizing it more. Zerto synchronized our VMs and delivered reliability by ensuring our hosts in different plants had a reliable backup.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

A lot of use cases involve how we effectively manage our DR and make sure there's not a lot of manual effort. On the business side, we proved the solution worked and showed the analytics on the DR report afterward. Those are the requirements.

At one of the banks I worked for, we used it for our merger and acquisition to replicate a legacy application that was no longer supported. Rather than try to rebuild it, which would have taken days or weeks, we could use Zerto to replicate it to our data center and join it to our domain. That was one of the biggest use cases we have had. 

Another use case is for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and to migrate service to a public cloud.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is great. Not a lot of solutions can do that, and most organizations don't know that Zerto can do it. Once you have that near-sync capability, you can see how much more you can recover and be more resilient. 

At the end of the day, we're trying to protect our data and not put the company at risk, whether it's from a cyber attack or just any sort of DLP data loss. 

In financial services, data is paramount: protecting it, making sure you don't lose it, and integrating it. Having that near-sync ability is useful to any organization.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. It really increased how many points in time we can recover, and not only the time to do it but where we want to do it too. 

Generally, we choose a point in time because they're simulated tests and controlled. In the event of a true disaster, I'm sure I'd utilize one of the closer points to have more recent data, but it's good to have that option. Luckily, I haven't had to use that option.

It's night and day. With other solutions, you're locked into specific RPOs and RTOs based on how that solution works. Zerto gives us the flexibility to choose which we want to use and recover effectively.

The main valuable features are the fast RPO and RTOs we could achieve and the analytics behind that. 

In my role these days, I have to make sure I can prove to the executive team as well as the business lines why we chose this solution and how it can help us.

One of the projects we're working on is DRaaS service. Once that's implemented, we'll test that solution. The whole premise of using Zerto is to replicate one-to-many and then test that scenario.

Zerto should continue adding new features. When I used it at the other bank, it wasn't good with replicating VDIs and automation. They've made a little more advancements in automation and scripting since then. 

At one point, it was custom, requiring professional services. Now, Zerto has more built into its engine that will help with the failover of virtual desktops.

I was an early adopter. I worked for a managed service provider in New York City back in 2009 and was introduced to Zerto near the end of 2010, early 2011. That's when we started implementing it for our clients. I've been bringing Zerto wherever I go ever since.

Stability is great. Sometimes you have network blips, and you can be out of sync, but it'll catch up eventually. There are very minor issues, if any.

It is very scalable. For example, there's a tertiary site that we're building for the DRaaS service. 

We just go to initiate the one-to-many and replicate up there. It's easy.

The customer service and support are responsive initially, and then they help you solve your problem. There was only one time with the custom scripting for the VDI that they wouldn't help because it was custom, and they wanted more money for that. They incorporated that into their solution a few years later.

Positive

In the past, I have used a different solution. I've worked with SRM, Double-Take (which is terrible), and BMC Recovery Point. Ever since I got hooked on Zerto around 2011, it's been pretty much Zerto.

The installation itself is very easy. Any problems I've run into, either when I was managing it or doing the installation myself, support has helped every step of the way and has been very easy to work with.

It's on Expedient's cloud, which might be AWS. I'm not sure. I just know we're doing it through a third party.

A lot of the ROI is with engineering hours. If it took eight hours of overtime to pay one or two engineers to do a DR test, now we can do it in one hour. 

We can factor in how many DR tests you do and calculate the cost savings. That alone is a good ROI.

The pricing is pretty fair. It increases with the number of VMs you have. When we had about 600 VMs at my last bank, we did an enterprise licensing agreement that helped cut down the cost. It required signing on long-term, but it was the most effective.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I've used this solution for so long and have seen it mature. It's just easy. In IT, especially in a managerial role, we want things to work. We don't want it to be complex. If it serves the business goals of data resiliency, then that's all I need.

Definitely do a proof of concept (POC) and make sure it fits your use cases. On paper, it will, but every company is different. Sometimes, for some reason, it won't work. Or not that it won't work, it just doesn't fit what the business is trying to achieve. So do the POC and see for yourself if it works.

We use Zerto for our disaster recovery procedure and testing to ensure our servers and virtual machines can failover from a production environment if there's a catastrophe. We have a disaster recovery test twice a year and use Zerto to recover the environment.

We have two environments for Zerto. One is for the US, and the other is for Europe. We updated one last week to version 9.0, and the other still uses version 8.5 but I will update that today or tomorrow.

Zerto cut down the recovery time tremendously and improved our disaster recovery process. It made it easier for us to recover if needed during a disaster. Zerto definitely reduced downtime. The other software we used had a lot of manual steps. It was efficient, but our recovery time was longer. I estimate that Zerto cut our recovery time by at least 70 percent.

We had a disaster recovery four or five years ago. I can't remember what happened, but I believe something crashed in our data center, like a power outage. We did a failover of our network using Zerto from production to disaster recovery. We successfully completed the failover process in three or four hours without issue. The data was current, and the application owners could access their data and continue working while the issue was resolved. 

Zerto also brings down our costs. If we don't meet our SLAs, the clients are not happy and we get billed or fined. Every minute an application is down is costly for us. However, I don't think it has reduced our staff. We have a dedicated team for disaster recovery. While it doesn't cut down on the number of team members, It makes our jobs a lot easier.

Near-synchronous replication is an extremely powerful feature because it's like a mirror environment with almost real-time replication. Everything in my production environment is mirrored in the Zerto environment. I want the two to be as close as possible. 

If you have a disaster, we don't want your data to lag too far behind. You don't want to be an hour or two days behind. When you recover an environment in Zerto, the data is current.

I would like to see some graphical improvements in Zerto's interface. There's an option to export a list of all of our servers, but the information isn't presented the way we want. We want it in a specified sequence broken down by region, etc. We can't manipulate the data when we export it. Maybe they could change it to look more like an Excel sheet, and we can customize the graphics and data. We suggested these improvements to Zerto through their portal.

We've been using Zerto for six or seven years.

It's highly stable. We've had no issues. We haven't had an incident or any problems with Zerto being unavailable or maintenance that would cause an outage on our side. If anything is happening on Zerto's side, we're not affected and that is great.

We haven't seen any limitations so far. Zerto is constantly upgrading its products. There are upgrades every five months or so. They're constantly tweaking and making the product better.

I rate Zerto support nine out of ten. It's excellent overall. We've only had one issue in the past six or seven years. I think the person was maybe new to the team.

They prioritize calls based on severity. If the issue is affecting our environment and we can't get anything done, they'll escalate the ticket and help us immediately. If we just have general questions or a concern that isn't severe, they still respond quickly.

Positive

We previously used a site recovery manager from vCenter. It's effective, but it requires a lot of manual steps, especially when we deal with databases and so forth. Zerto is quicker, more efficient, and easier on the eyes. I'm a huge fan. 

We started using Zerto because vCenter required more steps to failover our environment. Zerto does all the steps that we would normally need to do manually, reducing our recovery time and procedure steps. Something that previously took 45 minutes takes Zerto 10 minutes.

The other solutions are still in place. We use vCenter and NetBackup for our legacy systems.

Zerto is user-friendly. When I set this up six or seven years ago, I knew nothing about Zerto. It was relatively straightforward to go from the vCenter SRM to the Zerto environment. It's intuitive, so I can log onto Zerto and figure it out without having to take a class or official training. I can log on and navigate through the screens. If I get stuck, Zerto support is always available.

There were two of us who set it up. I'm in the US, and the other guy is in the Philippines. He initiated it, and I finished it. We completed it in one day, but I don't remember how many hours it took. We did a quick check the following day to ensure everything was in line.

I contacted Zerto recently when I upgraded one of my environments to version 9. I had some general questions because a few of our VMs were not syncing. I was getting an error message because the recovery didn't progress, so I had to reach out to Zerto support. We actually figured that out on our own, but they pointed us in the right direction.

We tested one product for two or three months, but I can't think of the name of it. Zerto was easier for us to dive into and pick it up quickly. The leadership of the disaster recovery team made the final decision along with management. I don't know if cost played a factor, but Zerto was more efficient and easier to use. It was exactly what we needed.

I rate Zerto ten out of ten.

We use Zerto to replicate our gold systems. Gold systems refer to those that require recovery in a disaster recovery environment within 24 hours, with a maximum allowable data loss of one hour. Therefore, the Recovery Time Objective is 24 hours, and the Recovery Point Objective is one hour.

I would rate Zerto's ease of use a nine out of ten. The setup of virtual appliances required for data replication is straightforward and effortless. Some of the automation and tooling, such as changing IP addresses or running scripts after a disaster recovery process, is also very user-friendly and simple to configure. 

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is commendable. Usually, the data is only a couple of minutes behind. Hence, we are not employing synchronous replication, but asynchronous replication proves to be sufficient for our needs. It does not appear to deviate too far out of sync or fall too far behind, thereby effectively maintaining up-to-date data. Near synchronous replication holds significant importance as these systems are our critical business assets.

Zerto has helped us improve our organization by enabling disaster recovery both on-premises and in the cloud. We are transitioning towards cloud-based recovery. Our previous solution, before Zerto, only allowed us to replicate data in our on-premises data center, preventing us from migrating to the cloud. Zerto has unblocked us, allowing us to leverage cloud-based recovery now. We were able to realize the benefits within three to four months. The implementation was relatively quick and completed within a couple of months. Everything tested well.

Zerto enables us to perform disaster recovery in the cloud instead of a physical data center, and this is the reason we made the switch to Zerto.

Having the capability to perform disaster recovery in the cloud is of utmost importance to our organization. We are implementing disaster recovery in the cloud to facilitate the shutdown of one of our data centers.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment.

The speed of recovery using Zerto is good. The automation really helps make the recovery quick and easy.

Zerto's overall impact on our recovery time objectives is positive. It is fulfilling exactly what we needed it to do, making it a valuable tool. Additionally, it proves to be fairly cost-effective and easy to set up and use.

Although we have not experienced an actual disaster, Zerto has been instrumental in aiding our disaster recovery testing. Every year, we conduct a DR test to recover systems, conduct assessments, and validate our processes, and for this purpose, we have utilized Zerto. The results have been outstanding, as Zerto has saved us approximately 500 hours of time annually.

Zerto has automated the recovery process by utilizing those playbooks and re-IPing. This has significantly contributed to the reduction of DR testing efforts.

50 percent of the time that Zerto has saved has been allocated to value-added tasks.

Zerto can replicate data rapidly and cost-effectively. We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud. We use Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, and Zerto can recover data from both of these platforms. Therefore, it is not limited to a specific cloud provider like the Azure Site Recovery Manager. 

Zerto has good role-based access controls. For cloud recovery, it allows replication over the Internet instead of private networking, which is really nice.

I would like Zerto to enhance the continuous backup aspect. If Zerto could replace Veeam from a backup perspective, that would be highly beneficial. Currently, we use Veeam for backup and Zerto for disaster recovery. It would be ideal if we could consolidate both functions into a single product rather than using two separate ones.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

I would rate Zerto's stability an eight out of ten. We encountered a problem once, but it was resolved.

I would rate Zerto's scalability a nine out of ten.

We previously used EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point. The reason we replaced them is that they utilized sand-based replication, which couldn't be used to replicate data to public clouds. As there are no sands in the public cloud.

Zerto's ease of use, when compared to EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point, is slightly better. For instance, during the setup process, we didn't require expertise in storage area networks, unlike our previous products. Therefore, it takes fewer skilled resources to set up, configure, and start using Zerto.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment took two months. We identified the core machines that we were previously replicating and gradually migrated applications one set at a time. An application could consist of two servers or even five servers. We can perform these migrations in waves.

For the deployment, we had two engineers, one support person, and one architect.

The Zerto team assisted with the implementation.

We have seen a return on investment.

Zerto is slightly expensive, but we do see the value in it.

We evaluated Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Among them, Zerto had the best feature set for near real-time asynchronous replication.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The speed of the RPO using Zerto is the same as our previous solution. We haven't lost anything, but we haven't gained much from an RPO perspective either. We had good technology; it was just limited by the cloud because there hasn't been any significant change.

We use Veeam as our backup product to perform some of the point-in-time recoveries.

We have only around six end users who log in to the console in total. Zerto is deployed in our primary data center and is also replicating to a secondary data center where it is deployed.

We have people who monitor whether the synchronization is proceeding well, but there is very little day-to-day overhead in terms of maintenance.

Zerto is a solid industry-recognized quality product.

We're backing up VMs with it. Our company has about 200 VMs and we're using Zerto on 30 of them in the main line of business applications. We're using it to replicate all that data over to our DR site so we can do our testing and reporting against that. 

Within those 30 servers we've broken out into three different SLAs on which ones get spun up first. We have it all scripted with monthly plans to fail over, spin it up, actually use it over there, spin it down, bring it back into production, etc.

The business that we're in means we have to run our network 365 days, 24/7, with no downtime. If there's any kind of interruption to business processes — power outage, tornado, fire, etc. — we need to be able to get certain systems up and going in almost real-time. That's how we're leveraging Zerto, to guarantee that uptime and for the ability to spin these things up near-instantaneously.

I know my networking team loves the tool and the interface and being able to roll back and do the failover stuff very easily. But for me, personally, it's how it has impacted our business. The reporting functionality showing that our DR plan is rock-solid and stable, and my ability to generate summaries for our customers, have really improved business processes for us. It gives peace of mind to our customers that our systems are stable and the services that we're providing are stable.

Also, when we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved. The failback feature, from a technical standpoint, is what sold us on Zerto. One of the challenges we had with Site Recovery Manager was spinning up and being in production at DR. If everything is equal, everything is patched and everything's working, both solutions offer a very similar experience: the ability to move a workload from production to disaster recovery works with both of them, no problem. Coming back the other way was just a bear of a move with Site Recovery Manager. With Zerto, it's almost seamless. With Zerto, it takes about four or five mouse clicks and stuff fails back over, and our end-users are none the wiser. And it's just one guy doing it. When failing back from Site Recovery Manager, we'd have to get one of our sys admins involved and we'd have to let our end-users know that they all had to log out.

While it hasn't reduced staff, we have become more efficient and it has allowed me to reprioritize some projects. It's freed up some capacity, for sure. We haven't reduced headcount, but it has definitely taken a big wedge out of the daily grind of our backup and recovery; the stuff they always had to check.

Personally, what I find valuable is the executive summary that says our DR plan is operational. I can then pass that out to our customers. 

Per Mar has about 75,000 customers and, more and more these days, especially given all this [COVID] pandemic, we're asked: Do you have a business continuity plan? Is it tested regularly? Do you have documentation for it? Two years ago, a simple email from me saying, "Yes, we have this," sufficed. We're finding now that people want true documentation from an independent system that generates a report. The reporting that comes out of Zerto is a lifesaver for me. I'm able to generate that up, send it out to the customers that need it, and say, "Yes. Here are our SLAs. Here is our monthly test routine. Here is where it shows us being successful," and so forth.

We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great.

It's easy to use and there isn't a huge learning curve. Even some of the advanced features are very intuitive to folks who have been in this space before. If you have any kind of skill sets around any kind of backup and recovery tool, the user interface for Zerto is very natural.

One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet.

I've been using Zerto for about a year.

It just works. We architected it pretty nicely. One of our licensed servers is a complete test solution for us to show that it is truly working. We're able to take a small test server, a Dev server is really what it is, and we can move from production, move it over to DR, have it run over there for a day, and then we move it back with no data loss. 

It's never not worked and when you come from the SRM world, that's just unheard of. Now we're a year into this product and have gone through an upgrade, and our June test went off without a hitch. It's very rock-solid.

Their tech support has been fantastic to work with. We ran into a glitch when we did our update in mid-May and our primary data center stopped talking to our secondary data center. We couldn't figure it out. We got their tech support involved right away. They identified a bug right away. They were able to roll us back and then stayed engaged with us as they figured out how to fix the bug. And once the bug was isolated and fixed, they got right back a hold of us to say, "We're ready to go," and then they walked us through upgrading both sides. There was a lot of hand-holding in that upgrade scenario. It was a fantastic experience.

It took them four or five days to fix the bug and they stayed engaged with us just about every single day, letting us know the status of it and when it went to QA. We didn't fall into a black hole. It was a very customer-centric experience.

We were using VMware Site Recovery Manager. We're still a VMware shop. Zerto replaced SRM. It was probably cost-agnostic, but what it really came down to was that SRM breaks all the time. You apply some patches or a Windows update. Uptime and reliability for us are super-critical. We don't have a ton of time to spend on making sure it's always working. We were really looking for a solution that we could architect, deploy, and just let it run, knowing that we're protected without our always having to go back and mess around with it.

What we kept finding with Site Recovery Manager was that every time we wanted to do a full-scale, failover DR test, we would have to spend a week ahead of time prepping for it, to make sure everything would work flawlessly during our test. It always worked, we knew how to patch it and get around it. But disaster doesn't give you a two-week notice. You don't know you're going to have a tornado in two weeks. You get about a 10-minute notice and then you've got cows flying through the air. We wanted a tool that we know would just run and work and be reliable. 

It was cost-neutral to the budget, the timing was right, and the solution was rock-solid so we made the change.

Ease of use and deployment are fantastic. This is a solution that we started with a proof of concept. We threw it in a lab and said, "Hey, let's just see what it looks like." Next thing you know, we never even had to tear down the proof of concept. Once we started seeing it working we said, "This is definitely something that we want." All we really ended up doing was negotiating licenses, applying the license key, and we were off to the races.

Soup to nuts, it took us five hours to spin the whole solution up and to create our protection groups. It was very fast. That includes downloading the software, spinning the VM up, and protecting and backing up data.

We worked with one of their engineers through the proof of concept. Once we said, "Hey, this is going to work," we tested it on a few servers and then we became a paying customer. They worked with us to help us define what made sense for the 30 licenses that we bought and what machines to deploy it to. But it's really not a complicated tool to deploy. There wasn't a ton of architecting and solution-building around it. There was some, but it was a very simple solution to install.

We have seen ROI. And even when you cost-compare against Site Recovery Manager, none of these solutions is cheap. But we are folks who need to have uptime and these things have to work. When you start comparing it against Site Recovery Manager, Zerto blows it out of the water, in my opinion.

If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company of our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense. I would really love to be able to just apply Zerto to every virtual machine that we spin up, drop it into the right SLA bucket, and just be done with it, knowing that it's protected, soup to nuts. Unfortunately, that's just cost prohibitive.

My advice would definitely be to leverage the number of VMs. It's not a cheap solution by any stretch, but it delivers on its promise. There's definitely value in the investment. With hindsight, I would have gotten a better cost per VM if I was able to buy, say, 100 licenses. It would have been easier for me to put other servers under the protection of Zerto. I wish I would have had that flexibility at the time. Eventually, budgets will open up and I'll be able to go get another 50 or so licenses, but I'll still be paying a higher price, more than if I would have negotiated a higher quantity to begin with.

We took a look at a couple of other solutions. The other ones fell off the table pretty quickly. We're based in Iowa. We have a good account team here in Iowa from Zerto that knew our account from previous relationships. They came around and said, "This is a tool that you guys really need to take a hard look at."

The sales process took about six months. They came in about six months before my renewal with VMware. We had a few conversations and, about two to three months before the renewal, designed a proof of concept to see if it was actually going to work. They came in and did that. My guys were raving about it and I saw some of the reporting out of it. At that point I said, "Okay, done deal." It was cost neutral. When Site Recovery Manager came up, we canceled that portion of the renewal. There wasn't really a need for us to go out to market. I just trusted the account guys. They knew who we were. The tool worked the way they called it. I don't get too picky. If it works, it's good enough for me.

Take a hard look at it. Don't pass it by, don't be scared off by the price. Definitely take them up on the proof of concept. Have the team come in and do that. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

They talk about technology that can just actually do what it promises. I've been doing this for over 20 years and sometimes you get jaded by the fact that people over-promise and under-deliver. Zerto was definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. The solution went in so easily that I had to do a double-take when my guys were telling me, "Hey, it's already up and running." I said, "It can't be done already." I'm used to complicated deployments. They promised and it does exactly what they said it would do. Don't be so skeptical. Keep an open mind to it and explore the possibilities.

I just sat through ZertoCON. They put a lot of emphasis on long-term retention. It really started putting a question out there as to whether you need a different backup and recovery solution. We use a different partner called Rubrik for backup and recovery. The challenge that we have with Zerto is that we're only protecting 30 VMs, whereas with Rubrik, we're protecting all 200. There's a little bit of a dance between value and return. So we're not using Zerto for long-term storage right now. We're evaluating it. I don't know if it makes economic sense to do so, but we are taking a look at it. And we're not protecting all 200 servers because of cost.

In terms of using the solution for a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes, knock on wood, we have not had to use it in that capacity just yet. We have a very mature cyber security posture and we haven't been popped by ransomware in the last year. But it does give me peace of mind that we also have that ability. That's just another layer of our cyber security posture and we know that we're protected against those threats. So there's definitely a peace of mind around that.

The only folks using it are on our IT team, about five or six of us. Five of my guys use it on a regular basis and know how to manage it. I'm the sixth guy. If I ever have to get in there, we're in trouble.

Our primary use case is to continuously replicate our VMs to our DR site. Having the ability to recover them at almost any point in time, mostly back thirty days, is the main purpose of Zerto. 

We didn't previously have a continuous replication tool and now we have the ability to recover to any number of points in time. That's really beneficial to us. It cuts down our recovery time. 

The most valuable feature is how quickly it powers down the original source VMs and the speed at which it powers up the new VMs. The amount of time it takes to put up the operating system is valuable. The speed is what I like the best. 

The near-synchronous replication is awesome. When you get hit by a cyberattack, you never know where the clean VM resides, and at what point in time it actually exists. Having the ability to find the point in time when we are clean is a good thing.

We are going from a physical data center to a physical data center at the moment.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It increased our ability to restore at a point in time. We didn't have it before, and now we have it.

Compared to other tools, Zerto is a lot faster. There are tools with your primary block storage backup, but they're just not as fast.

I'm having a problem with CentOS 7 and with VMs with multiple network adapters. Zerto recognizes those multiple network adapters on CentOS 7 vm but it will not give me the option to specify a failover IP, for that particular VM. Something's not working right, but Zerto is going to follow up. 

Zerto has been in production for three months. 

It seems stable so far. 

The scalability seems pretty easy. 

Customer service is really good. Technical technical support is lacking. At least from who I've been talking to. Maybe my case has not gotten bumped up to the higher level technicians. Customer support is great, and they're really responsive but their technical knowledge is just not quite there.

Zerto's documentation is outdated. I'm finding it hard to find documents related to my questions. Their documentation is bad.

Neutral

The initial setup was very easy. We needed a little help with the initial configuration, but it was pretty straightforward. 

We worked with Eagle Technologies for the deployment. We loved them.

I wasn't involved in negotiating any pricing. It evidently worked into our budget.

We also looked at Cohesity and Rubrik. I don't know that there's anything like Zerto. We went with Zerto because our third-party vendor recommended it. We also did a proof of concept two years ago. We liked what we saw with Zerto so we went with it. 

Everybody taunts their one pane of glass but Zerto is simple to use. I really like the GUI, the interface is not too busy. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. We don't have a test network setup. I know with Zerto, you can simulate a recovery. 

Zerto would be a perfect ten if the documentation was easier and if level 1 support would be more knowledgeable.

A lot of our focus area has been around capacity planning that includes virtual machine rightsizing and then construction for failover and resiliency-type models. The other area that is important to us is looking at data in motion, data at rest, and data in transit.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted to be able to go ahead and focus a lot on workload migration and disaster recovery.

I can quickly restore data by reverting anything with more or less a nightly backup. I can pretty much have the data through recovery checkpoints, and each of the checkpoints can only be around five seconds apart.

When I need to work a lot with VPGs, it has a lot of capabilities for that. Monitoring is also very important for us. We do work with Splunk, and I am looking a lot around for logs, metrics, and traces. The capabilities that I get are system throughput, and CPU and RAM input/output.

I have used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have pretty much followed a 3-2-1 strategy. We have three copies of production data and two backup copies. We have two different media and then one off-site copy. It has this offering there.

It's helping very much in terms of the malware. They have a ransomware protection capability.

I have used other solutions jointly with Zerto. What is happening is that they have a focus on isolating and locking with a cyber resiliency vault, and what I have been doing more or less around the vault is working with the Delinea Privileged Access Manager solution. So, some areas have intersections with other tools in our stack. I would love to continue seeing more use cases out of Zerto so that I do not have to defer this anywhere else.

It has enabled us to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I think of it as a cloud migration tool. Having DR in the cloud is very important for our organization. I use it with Microsoft Azure.

With Zerto, I have seen five-second near-synchronous replication, so there are thousands of checkpoints in one day, and then afterward, I can have a periodic backup. I can space it out between twelve-hour snapshots. We can have one to three checkpoints per day. I can recover to the state seconds before any sort of attack, and I can utilize Zerto's in-built orchestration and automation. I could easily fail over the entire site without any sort of disruption. Those are the things I see very much in terms of positives. There is a lot of information that it can gather with synchronous replication. The other thing is that I have seen other disaster and backup service offerings, and they very much focus on getting a container image installed or some sort of binary file and then deployment from there afterward.

I find it easy to migrate the data. Once somebody understands how Zerto works, particularly around areas for analytics and automation, with the reference architecture, they will be able to quickly deploy it.

I see a lot of visibility in terms of proactive management with SLA monitoring, run metrics, and other things. We are able to test infrastructure using live and personalized data. It, in turn, becomes very much of a team effort.

Zerto provides complete visibility in terms of storage and consumption data. We get to know the capacity and application volumes. I can also address compliance aspects, such as PCI DSS which is important for us as part of the RPO.

They have an intelligent, predictive infrastructure, so I can just pretty much determine the required compute storage and other server networking resources, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.

It also saves recovery time. We pretty much monitor that information. In terms of time savings, we are able to ensure that we can set up a backup quickly, figure out the integration details with the use of APIs, and meet our requirements around client security. Afterward, there is the cost consideration. Better documentation on the restoration process would be helpful.

Ransomware is one area where we are using Zerto. If we were utilizing another solution, that might have only been AWS-specific, and we might have not gotten much assistance in proceeding with their public cloud vendor as a result. We might have to figure out what we can do around working with an XDR or another mode of ingesting that data for any vulnerabilities and how to focus on encryption thereafter. If we were to consider another vendor, some of them may not have support for Azure. They might be AWS-focused.

Zerto has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. We can create failover tests seamlessly, and we can do this routinely. We are able to save time and look at how we can discern between RTO and RPO.

Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Our team size is still roughly the same. We have not seen our headcount change as a result, but we do not need to hire external consultants to support a project.

If I wanted to focus on operational recovery, which may be recovering instances in the database with a 15-second data loss, there are systems administrators designed to take care of that. With Zerto's offering, someone can utilize the Zerto solution as opposed to depending on any sort of manual human intervention.

The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center.

Zerto has near-synchronous replication. I like it very much. They had an acquisition and are now a part of HPE. I see it very much as a robust solution.

A slight disadvantage of Zerto is that it requires the Windows Server operating system as the base OS. Over time, I would like to see more offerings in that regard. There should be more deployment options other than just the Windows operating system.

The implementation is very quick and painless, but it would be good to have more information that is not case-sensitive. In the server portal, some fields are case-sensitive. It took some time for me to understand initially.

If a VPG goes down and an application host is not responding, I want to have a little bit more flexibility to automatically point the recovery to other hosts. I would like to see a little bit more flexibility to automatically sustain two applications in their most optimal state. If the VPG is going down and any of the recovery hosts are in maintenance mode, there should be a way for maximum flexibility so that it can automatically utilize Zerto to point that recovery to other hosts.

I want some more information about how to work with bare metal drives. I have been doing some work in capacity planning for using MDM and FormFactor cable and then looking at system throughput, App latency, and a lot of scripts in Linux. I would like to have a little bit more information for anybody needing to work with bare metal drives.

I have been using Zerto for several years.

I have not seen any service disruption that impacted us. If anything like that were to occur, they would communicate it ahead of time.

It is scalable. We have more than 20,000 endpoints.

I do reach out to Zerto, and if there are any questions, we have a ticket in-house, so everyone is working on reviewing it at the same time. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. There are no negatives.

Positive

We were not using a similar solution. 

By bringing in Zerto, some legacy work has been discontinued. There is operational recovery, application migration, and application cloning. These are the three areas where Zerto has helped us.

We have a cloud version. It is a public cloud.

Its initial deployment was straightforward. I have been trying to focus on capabilities and encryption and how a long-term retention repository works, at least looking at the data capture. Another thing is utilizing some information with APIs and cloud scaling. I have broken down a lot of my use cases, and we have Zerto on the public cloud. Based on that, I was able to figure out how to work with features like compute as well as storage.

Its implementation took about two to three months. In terms of maintenance, it requires maintenance. We focus a lot on metrics such as RTO and RPO monitoring. Somebody can also put it in maintenance mode operation.

We had Zerto representatives, and we also had work done in-house. 

I work with a team. Other colleagues are also involved in the effort. We have a team of around ten employees.

We did look at a few other vendors' offerings, but we decided on Zerto. Our organization has a partnership with them, and the other thing was that there were a few industry events, and they were able to effectively make a pitch. Their demonstration was very effective. It was also something in which the client was interested in.

To those looking to implement Zerto in their organization, I would advise creating use cases of their own and then trying to see how Zerto effectively helps them. A few areas where they can work are gathering information with the virtual machine rightsizing and being able to go ahead and create resiliency models. Afterward, they can look at compliance. For us, PCI DSS and locating the public cloud environment being used, which in our case was Microsoft Azure, were important. After they have created use cases on their own, they can come to Zerto and see how they are able to effectively handle it. If they are able to think through what they need, they can come up with specific questions and then get Zerto to effectively deliver.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.