Zerto Reviews

In our case, we used Zerto Replicator mainly for DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan), but also for testing.

For example, journaling capability allows you to recover from a ransomware attack. Thus, it is not only used in DRP scenarios.

In addition, there are increasingly more environments (such as IBM BlueMix) that support Zerto replication, for public cloud contention environments.

Zerto allows RPO of seconds, without need of snapshots. It is agnostic to storage and allows journaling of up to 30 days.

For me, limiting the minimum licensing package for 15 virtual machines (VMs) is a issue. Not all environments (especially in Latam) start with 15 VMs.

No, not really.

No, not really.

The support is in English only, and I estimate it 4/5.

I know Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication) and in environments with aggressive RPO, and non-reliance on snapshots, Zerto is a superior solution.

It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.

The licensing is by virtual machines, start in 15, and grow in packs of 10. There is an annual support that must be contracted.

Yes. Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication and storage-level replication) were evaluated.

It is important to have clear:

1. Required links between sites.
2. Available network (ideal network L2 inter sites).
3. Capacity for journaling (+/- 7%) in contingent site.

We use the ZERTO Implementation to pretend critical VM and Groups of VM (Application Consistency) from failing. The solution with ZERTO helpy us to TEST and Failover without pane. Installaion is based on local primary site and remote desaster site with a distance of a few 100km and a bandwith up to 30Mbit.

Managing the system is easy and reliable, you can choose any VM you want to replicate to your DR Site in Combination with other VM's. Testing a DR is easy and well reported.

Any business unit can define it's needs for SLA and the IT department is able to follow these needs with less management and overhead. If a problem occurs (like ransomware or db errors) IT department is able to roll Back to the right point without loosing productivity of other not effected VM. So for both business and IT it is much easier to use Zerto and profit from best function and best performance in these area of replication tools

Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3.

DR Solutions with less management and less space. Licensing of DR Site is not necessary until activation of VM. That are very good news for Db users.

As described above, only the WAN traffic regulation should be monitored, if it runs it works fine and absolutely stable

More VM more bandwidth over WAN, but this is normal. In competition with other replication tools, Zerto works well and compression is fast and stable. If you want to scale order license for it and go on.

Customer Service:

Really fast and helpful. The documentation is a good stuff to read before calling, most of the events are well described and could be solved easily by yourself

Technical Support:

very fast and very good

We uses before VMware Site Recovery. It is to complex and expensive at all.

Parallel to the primary replication tool Zerto, we are using VEEAM Always On Replication Version 9.5. It works but we can't replicate in the same manner as Zerto, because this tool works with events and they are queued so you will not be able to replicate in the same way as Zerto. Also the amount of VM's to replicate at the same time is limited to the VEEAM Environment of proxies. More Proxies more VM, but also more overhead and bandwidth usage.

It works fine for replicate a few times a day, but not in sec.

If you follow the documentation you need about 20 Minutes to first run of replication. This is fast and you can choose it if you want with the trail license from Zerto by yourself.

No we did by documentation and without external team.

Hopefully 50% less than with teh other solutions, we will have a look to it after a year production

Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back, in case of Disaster situation. You will be so fast back in production and this is very rent-able for the business units you safe from outtakes.

Yes, Site Recovery and VEEAM Always On Solution

With the next generation Zerto5.5 they allow replication and production in azure, so cloud based DR comes reality.

Everybody who looks for alternative solutions in physical sync mirroring of data (Metro-cluster) should think about business needs and ABC (Application Business Continuity) Zerto can do it and helps you to keep business online with less cost than other solutions.

I've used it for a temporary migration. We had to shut down a data center and we moved some database servers over to a disaster recovery site. We then did the maintenance at the data center and brought them back.

We're using it only for on-prem and we use it to replicate from our onsite data center to a co-location, but there is a fiber connection between the two, so it isn't an internet-based replication.

In that migration instance we had six terabytes of data that we needed to protect and bring online quickly. We had a replication going and we made the protection group switch and brought the systems back within less than 30 minutes. It reduced our downtime on some critical applications.

If we hadn't used Zerto, we would have had to vMotion them to the other side and that could have taken hours. That could also potentially have been unreliable because there's a timeout period when vMotion works. We used Zerto to be safe.

It is pretty simple to use.

Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes. We'll do the failover and some preparation activities and then there's a checkbox you need to check to continue and sometimes it's small, in the corner, depending on which screen you're using. A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there.

We also had an issue with a misnamed network. They should make that a little more apparent when it's not available on the destination side. We were able to go all the way through with it, but when we did the recovery, it wasn't available. A pre-check to say, "Hey, it's not available. What network do you want to use?" would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for about a month because I'm new with my current company.

The stability has been alright. We have failed over quite a number of machines.

We did have an issue with one failover. It didn't fail over completely. You really don't want to have to contact support in those situations, but we had to. It could have been an issue on our side as opposed to something being wrong with the configuration. I don't know what happened, but they got it working.

We had to call support during that migration because one of the settings wasn't correct. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but we had to create a ticket. Zerto got back to us within an hour, so we were really impressed with the support from them. It was really good. They got us taken care of pretty fast and we were back online during the process, within an hour. They were quick to respond after we submitted the ticket and then they got it fixed. There's not really much more they could have done in that situation.

Positive

We use VMware-native as well as Zerto. It's all circumstantial, based on sites. Some sites ended up getting an SRM license, so we have kept them instead of wasting licenses. And some sites use Zerto. Maybe down the road we'll pick one of the products, but for now, we use both.

Zerto was already there when I stepped into the picture. I helped initiate some of the disaster recovery processes. Based on what I saw from the outside, it was easy because it was ready for that situation quickly. It was ready in a business day or less, aside from the replication aspect or the data sync from when you first set up the jobs. But the basic setup to get things going was ready within less than a business day.

I would think we have seen return on the investment in Zerto because we use it a decent amount of the time. We have reduced the downtime within the last month because of it as well.

We've used SRM from VMware. Personally, I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements and VMware tools get us stuck sometimes. If the VMware tools aren't working on a virtual machine, it won't replicate over as quickly or start up as quickly because it's waiting for that service. You have to do custom settings to avoid that. Zerto doesn't have that requirement. It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor and then trace back and see what went wrong.

Zerto is also probably faster because SRM waits for VMware tools to come up and say, "Hey, we're here." That's not a requirement that I know of, with Zerto. Maybe it is. I'm a newer user of the product.

In terms of the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, Zerto hasn't really reduced that. My team generally handles those situations and it's the same number of people, regardless of which product we're using.

Zerto worked and did its job and it was easy to use. My team liked it, and the database administrators, who were the customers in that instance where we did the temporary migration, appreciated it.

I would rate it at eight out 10. Sometimes the interface can be a little tricky. If you're using a disaster recovery application, you're in a stressful situation already. Sometimes there are a lot of confirmations you have to go through just to start the Virtual Protection Group, and then it starts and you have to confirm again a few minutes later. You're stressed out. You're talking via chats with a bunch of people and there were times where that prompt was probably sitting there for minutes, which cost money.

More confirmations upfront and removing that second one later on in the process would be good, or a popup, instead of it being a small checkbox in the corner of the screen, is my recommendation.

We primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

Zerto is good in terms of providing continuous data protection. We have databases that require point in time recovery capability and Zerto is very flexible in this regard, compared with some other solutions we use, such as Sybase Replication and Oracle Replication.

We do not yet use Zerto's long-term retention feature but we are planning to do so. Currently, we are exploring AWS Glacier for long-term retention, and we will see how Zerto can help with the process.

Using Zerto has helped to simplify our process. The DBS steps are very deeply involved in the case of Sybase replication. This means that it takes a lot of technical skill, time, and effort to manage Sybase replication. Compared with that, Zerto is very user-friendly.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the number of highly skilled people involved and the time it takes to complete. For example, to do a command-line restore and recovery of Sybase involves pages of steps and it requires a talented DBA. However, with Zerto, we can take care of that with an intern. Only one person is involved in the process for either case, but with Zerto, fewer skills and experience in recovery are needed.

Fortunately, we have not yet been the victim of a ransomware attack. However, I am confident that Zerto can help, should that situation occur. Similarly, since implementing Zerto, we have not had any downtime. That said, we have simulated different scenarios and our results were good.

The most valuable feature is the point in time recovery. This allows us to recover at any point in time, up to a minute or so.

Zerto is pretty user-friendly. Normally, data recovery involves a lot of DBS skills but with Zerto, it is point-and-click.

It is very important to us that Zerto provides both backup and disaster recovery in a single platform. Because of problems that people are facing, we needed to have recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for the major cloud providers. This is the primary reason that we were looking for an up-to-date and current solution.

I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files. I have not tested it yet, so I can't say for sure whether it will choke or not.

The two large clouds that we use are AWS and Azure, and compatibility with these is always important for us.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years. We are using one version back from the current one.

In terms of stability, so far it looks okay but I am not sure how Zerto will react to volume loads. We haven't had a chance to test that because we don't have such a large environment.

Scalability has been good but I have yet to see how large a file it can handle.

We have two DBAs using the product, and then we have some interns to help out.

Currently, it is running in a small network where it is backing up a couple of replicated environments. We may increase our usage in the future, as we are now just beginning to back up everything to AWS.

Zerto's technical support team is pretty knowledgeable.

Prior to Zerto, we were using Sybase replication. When Sybase was acquired by SAP, we began having trouble when we needed technical support. The reason that we started looking for a replacement product is that we used to contact technical support in California when we needed help. However, we now have to call Germany first, only to have them redirect the call to California. SAP is a mess.

I was involved in setting up the proof of concept, and I found that the initial setup was okay.

Once the PoC was complete, we went into small volume testing and then started using it after that. The deployment only took us a couple of hours.

A couple of people from our organization handled the deployment, and we had some Zerto technical reps available to answer questions. The Zerto staff are pretty knowledgeable and they answered the questions well.

Compared to the licensing fees with Oracle and SAP, we see a return on investment.

Price-wise, Zerto is fairly reasonable and I can't complain about it when we compare it against Oracle and SAP licensing.

We have not tried using any features that are outside of the standard licensing fees.

We looked into Oracle GoldenGate but it is pretty expensive and cumbersome. Sybase is better than Oracle in terms of pricing, but Zerto is cheaper.

We have not yet enabled data recovery in the cloud, but we are planning to use it. As of now, we haven't tested it. We always back things up but in terms of restoring and testing, we are behind.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is pretty user-friendly compared to Oracle and SAP. This is a good solution to start with. Once it has been implemented, I suggest moving to volume testing to see how well it handles large volumes of data.

We have never had a real situation where we were under the gun for the purpose of RTO and RPO recovery times. As such, I can't say for sure how it will behave in a real situation but we are satisfied with our tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Zerto to protect our staff information against ransomware and is outlined in our disaster recovery plan. We have a DR site that we failover to if anything happens at our primary data center. We have only our core services, that we could not live without, being protected.

It is very easy to use. Almost anyone in our IT team can manage it after not using it for months at a time. As the DR strategist here, I like that. I enjoy having a fast way to bring a server back up. It will take me longer to get to my desk and log into everything than it will to actually complete the failover. 

I really like how you can test the failover as often as you need.

The reports it generates are very good at showing our protection state.

It is self-healing in case I mess up on something and need to re-sync. When you are protecting Terabytes of data, this comes in handy.

I think Zerto could do better with size planning because it would be nice to analyze a server for a week and give an estimate on sizing the Journal. I find myself estimating too high.

It would be nice if I had an option to dynamically restore to any host in a cluster. Right now, if we have multiple things happen and the main host is down it will not work. 

We are only using a fraction of what it can do. If you add the backup function it scales very largely. I could see a hospital really finding this product useful.

My first experience with technical support was not good at all. In the last few years, it has improved quite a bit. 

Prior to this solution, we used storage mirroring and DFS syncing. Our old way used far too much storage. Zerto compresses the data well. 

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. We were making initial syncs in forty-five minutes. 

We did both, with most over the phone. Their expertise was fine. I didn't in any way feel like I was not getting my questions answered. 

Our ROI happened in nine seconds.

I don't remember it being cheap. We started out slow, which was a good call. We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running.

At the time, Zerto was the only product doing this so easily. It might still be.

Don't underestimate how good it feels to rollback data instantly. It makes me look like a Wizzard at my desk. 

We use the solution for disaster recovery purposes. 

We implemented Zerto because it is crucial for our organization, especially as we move into the cloud. We needed to ensure that we could retrieve data properly and migrate easily. The solution allows us to keep our users collaborating throughout the migration process, making it much quicker than our previous solution.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It's easy to use, especially when moving data to keep our users collaborating. Putting the server into maintenance mode and moving our systems has worked well for our team.

Zerto is easy to use because of its simple setup and configuration. It also has a user-friendly interface, making data migration, seamless server maintenance, data recovery, and automated replication easy to use.

The replication feature is very valuable. For example, the solution provides synchronous replication, ensuring that data is almost instantly copied to the recovery site with minimal latency. This real-time replication means that the data at the disaster recovery site is nearly up to date with the primary site, reducing data loss in the event of failure.

It is very important to our organization because replication is a fundamental aspect of modern IT infrastructure and disaster recovery. It ensures continued access by having a copy of the data available at a secondary location, which is critical for major business operations during a primary site failure. Even in cases of data loss, replication allows for the restoration of data from the latest copy, minimizing downtime and aiding in quick retrieval.

The main benefits of using Zerto include improved data protection, data recovery, and operational efficiency. Regarding data protection, replication's continuous availability and redundancy ensure that our data is always available at a secondary location, protecting against data loss. Redundancy means having multiple copies of data, which is critical for recovering from data corruption or loss.

We have used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Implementing automated backup solutions has helped us save time in data recovery situations. Regular backups ensure we always have copies of our data and systems for recovery. It has helped ensure that our organization is well-prepared to handle protection and disaster efficiently. By identifying the request and replying promptly, we can ensure the resilience of our overall service.

The tool must improve its long-term storage cloud strategy, making it more seamless and improving the solution's downtime features. 

I have been working with the product for one and a half years. 

We did not encounter any issues in stability. 

The solution's technical support is good. 

Positive

We used AWS Cloud before Zerto. From my experience, both Zerto and AWS solutions are easy to use. They both have user-friendly interfaces that simplify managing disaster recovery tasks, including setting up replication and handling failover and failback processes.

AWS offers a wide range of cloud-native disaster recovery services, like AWS Backup and AWS Disaster Recovery, which are integrated into its management console. AWS also supports automation through APIs and integrates well with enterprise systems, which allows organizations to automate backup, recovery, and failover processes.

The initial setup is straightforward and can be completed within a month. The configuration process is minimally complex. We first assess the current environment, looking at training requirements and infrastructure. After that, we do design and configuration, including architecture design, installation, and configuration. Lastly, we do testing and validation. We have finally distributed the team. After that, we will train our employees through training sessions. We'll give them documentation and train them. And lastly, we do the deployment rollout.

Our in-house team did the deployment. There were ten resources. 

Automated testing and recorded tests can vary based on several factors, including the complexity of our IT environment. For us, it takes around seven to eight days. It's still taking the same time, so we must explore more. Our team is exploring the process more, so it's still taking that much time.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for replication from our primary data center to the secondary data center.

The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is provisioned. If the application team would like to use a replication process, DR process, or RPO, Zerto can facilitate this within 15 to 20 minutes.

This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It can be scalable depending on the licenses which can be quite expensive. 

We previously used SRM. SRM is as not as good at Zerto. That's the reason we bought the licensed product as opposed to the free product. I'm hoping that Zerto will be used in the future in our company for data replication purposes like SQL data.

The initial setup was very easy. I followed the documentation to set it up myself. The person completing the setup needs to understand the storage layer and the network layer for the backup. Without this understanding, It may be extremely confusing.

When you apply Zerto to your environment, you need to understand your networking settings, storage settings, and your capacity planning. Setting up Zerto took us 15 minutes. 

We recently bought more licenses and are exploiting the benefits of Zerto so I would say we are seeing a return on investment. 

Zerto helped to reduce downtime drastically by 80%. I would advise others to complete a full evaluation process to ensure they get the most out of it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We started off using this solution for disaster recovery and DR testing but then it morphed into more of a file recovery tool. We can usually get closer to a point in time recovery using Zerto versus the nightly backups that we do.

Zerto gives us peace of mind knowing that if we were attacked by ransomware, we would be able to recover data from the time before the ransomware to get us back to being fully functional. Zerto helped to reduce our company's disaster recovery testing model to where we can do it all within a day. We normally pick a time around lunchtime on a set day for the different groups to test with and it is completed by the time lunch is over. 

It definitely does make life easier when you're in a situation where you have to have all hands on deck as it doesn't require you to have as many people to bring everything back up.

The file recovery functionality is definitely the most valuable as well as the amount of time it takes to recover a VM. The different snapshots it makes are great, especially when we try to schedule DR testing with our business unit. The less time that we have to spin up the environment, the better the whole testing process will go.

One common use case I'll get is when someone says, "I deleted," or, "I've changed a file." I can ask them, "What time did you do it?" If they tell me a specific time, for example, 1:15 PM, I can pull that file at 1:14 PM and recover the data.

The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup. We tried it once and didn't try again. I'm not sure if they've improved that since then but we actually went in a different direction for backups.

I have been using this solution for six years.

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had to scale much as we're a small business. If we were to grow, it would be a couple of servers at a time so I can't really speak to the scalability of it. We have 400 servers total and only use Zerto with what we consider mission critical.

The customer support is excellent. When you call with an issue, they answer almost immediately. The guys are really knowledgeable.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

We started off with Site Recovery Manager. We did not like the process and once we tried Zerto, we saw how easy it was. That's been the solution until recently as we've added a second data center in which we use now Pure Storage with VMware. They do active clustering and we can use a simple vMotion to move from one site to another versus the way we used to do it before completing a migration with Zerto. 

We still keep using Zerto because we know Zerto works. Zerto is a lot faster especially compared to what we used to do with Site Recovery Manager.

The initial setup is straightforward. I just followed the documentation online and it was set up in a day.

I completed the setup myself. There may have been a help check afterwards once we got the first test recovery group setup. 

Based on the fact that we can rely on Zerto for recovery if anything were to happen and the confidence that our management has in this product, it's definitely worth the money. 

We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year. This is another reason why it's easier for us to keep this product as well as have another solution, because we've already paid the money upfront.

When evaluating Zerto, I would advise others to try to think of any potential scenario to test with and use it to prove whether it does or doesn't work.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.