Zerto Reviews

After working with the product for about 6 months, the fact that you cannot only replicate virtual machines to another location, but the fact the you can group and configure various boot orders, with time delays is a valuable feature. There is also the ability to change the networking properties such as the IP and MAC addresses, DNS entries, and other options.

At this point we are not fully using the product for disaster recovery due to the fact we are not 100% virtualized. The hope is that within the next two years, it will greatly simplify our DR testing since there is a "failover test" option. This allows the systems to be brought up in an isolated bubble for testing. It will also allow all of the restores to be synchronized to the same time.

The one area I see a need for improvement is supposedly on the roadmap, which is to be able to replicate to multiple locations.

6 months.

No.

No.

No.

The account representative have always been helpful, even offering to get a product engineer on the phone to assist with configuration items if needed.

I have only had to contact technical support once and in that issue they responded very quickly and had the issued resolved with an hour.

There was a small RecoverPoint with SRM configuration, but it was difficult to manage and keep updated.

The deployment was very straight forward. A small plugin called a VRA is installed on each host. This keeps track of the virtual machines. Then, there is a dedicated virtual machine that runs the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM). This is provides the web management interface and monitors the VRA's. This is also where all configuration and updates are performed. The menus do a great job in guiding you through the configuration of the protection groups.

The deployment was done in-house with the assistance of an implementation engineer over a web session.

An exact dollar ROI has not been calculated. The largest gain will be seen in man hours used for DR testing as well as the management of backups and recovery. This will turn what is now a very manual process into a fully automated recovery.

If you are planning on using this with a hyper-converged appliance running anything other than VMware, you may want to verify compatibility. On many of them, they are only compatible with VMware running, although they are adding other hypervisors. At the time of this writing, according to Zerto, they are not compatible with Simplivity at all.

No.

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 it primarily for DR.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is that it is the easiest to install, upgrade, and manage. Most things in the product are fairly intuitive and easy, including upgrades. You don't have to dig through a bunch of manuals or go through a bunch of technical data to make it work.

The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us.

The alerting could be fine-tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them.

It could be cheaper as well.

I've been using it for six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any real problems or downtime. The only thing is that it runs on Windows, so that has its own problems.

Zerto's scalability is very good. We haven't had any scaling problems. We tested out DR in Azure, DR to VMware on GCP, and DR on AWS. It performed on all of those. The AWS setup was the most complicated, but AWS with Windows is a little bit messy.

We currently have 400 licenses. We have two ML350s, and we use Zerto to keep them replicated. If one fails, we just move to the other. That has been expanding, and that's where we've been adding licenses.

Zerto's technical support is very responsive. We had some posts that were not working properly and caused some issues with Zerto. The technical support staff were very helpful and worked through the night to help us resolve that. They always solved any problem I've had, so I'll give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used SRM. It had a lot of specialized plugins and specialized machines, but was very cumbersome. We weren't guaranteed that it would work all the time. It was very complicated to set up and manage as well.

SRM was storage-vendor-dependent because you had to have plugins through the storage vendors. It wasn't IP-based at the time and relied on storage-based replication. We had disparate storage arrays and disparate systems, and the IP-based replication treasury was much more resilient on our end.

The initial setup was unbelievably easy. We had Zerto up and running in five minutes, whereas setting up the SRM replication took weeks and needed technical support staff.

We deployed it ourselves.

In terms of ROI, it was quite expensive, but I think we got a lot of value out of it, such as being able to have a reliable DR method, particularly offsite. We have very poor latency locations, and sometimes, we replicate those. Zerto makes that very easy.

From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high.

We looked at Veeam, but Zerto was a better match for our needs.

I would advise you to give Zerto a try in your environment. Get a trial license and see how it works. I think you'll be very impressed.

Overall, I've been very happy with Zerto, and I'd give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

We utilize Zerto to backup our on-prem environment to our cloud provider. We've also used it for migrations from on-prem to our cloud provider.

Our deployment model is a hybrid. We're using on-prem and also replicating to Azure.

It is used in our production environment and also our lower environment, on-prem. It's like a DR, as we're backing it all up to our cloud provider. There are a handful of servers involved, replicating and backing up.

It saves us about eight to 10 hours a month in staff time.

Another benefit is just the peace of mind that everything is backed up. We rely on the backups, that they're good backups. It's not like we have to second-guess them.

It has also helped us with our migration to our cloud provider. It's made it easier, sped up the process, and taken a lot of the guesswork out of it.

The solution has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations for our backup and recovery side by at least two people.

The most valuable features are 

• the single pane of glass
• the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform.

In addition, the RPOs and RTOs are great on it. It keeps up with things. The protection has been perfect so far when we have done our tests of spinning things up every six months or so. All our backups have come up with no issues at all. They just make great replication copies.

Zerto is also easy to use. That single pane of glass makes it very easy to check on the status of replicated items, and if there are any issues, to dig into them to fix them.

So far, it's been pretty good. I haven't had any issues. If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that.

We have been using Zerto since 2018.

So far, it's been very stable. We don't have any issue with the services or the ZVAs. They just keep trucking. There have been no stability issues at.

It's very easy to scale with it. As our environment has grown over the years, we've been able to add ZVAs to it, configure them, and they just fall right into the mix. Scaling is very easy.

Technical support has been very helpful and quick to get back with responses. Ticket turnaround time has never taken more than an hour for me to receive a response back to a general question.

We used Avamar. The primary reason we switched to Zerto was the integration with cloud providers that it provides.

I was not involved in the implementation, but I do remember that it was a pretty short implementation time. It included setting up the ZVA agents in our on-prem environment and connecting to our provider's cloud storage. The longest part of the implementation was getting the data, the initial seed or the backups, up there. But that's nothing against Zerto. Every environment will be different on that and has to get its initial copy up there. Since then, keeping copies up to date has been good. It meets up with RPOs and RTOs.

The initial implementation and getting everything set up took us about two and a half weeks. After that, to get everything that we are protecting into the cloud took us close to a month. We had to do it in stages, due to our work environment and our connections at the time. We didn't have the biggest connections, but that's more on our side, not Zerto's.

There are three people involved in maintaining Zerto for us. They're systems engineers.

Zerto is a lot easier to use than Avamar: easier management, easier setup, and the single pane of glass to watch over everything makes it better. I wouldn't say there's really a cost savings. They're probably comparable in price, but there were a lot more features and options with Zerto than in Avamar.

If you want something that's easy to set up, with a single pane of glass, and that doesn't take a backup administrator to admin, Zerto is the way to go.

The only lesson we really learned, and this has been resolved now, is that when we initially started using Zerto there were some hiccups when it came to Linux servers, hiccups that we had to work through. Support was very helpful and resolved it for us, but it made it a little bit of a manual process. In the later releases of Zerto, they've resolved those issues. They just had to work out some kinks.

For all the most important applications, we are using Zerto as a hot site in case something were to go on with our on-prem data center-based applications. We can immediately resort to Zerto as a failover.

It's deployed for replication from our data center into the public cloud.

The most important thing is the mean time to restoration. When anything goes wrong, we should be able to rely on the failover data that is available, and we should be able to restore it as quickly as possible. We have been able to reduce that mean time to restore the data pretty significantly with Zerto. It's gone from a few hours to a few minutes.

There are two things that are keeping us with the solution:

1. It does a very good job of keeping the data in sync at all times. 
2. In the event of a failover or in the event of a contingency, we are able to retrieve the data very quickly without any issues.

Both of these points are valuable to us because we have application data and it means we keep the data in sync. It is very important for us to know exactly where we left off in the event of any disaster or contingency. We can always rely on, or resort to, the data that we have as a backup or a failover. Also, in the event of a contingency, or even for doing a mock contingency exercise, the speed of retrieval of data and the speed of getting back up and running — minimizing the downtime — is important. That's where the second feature comes into play.

There are two areas which I would recommend for improvement. One is when we are trying to upgrade any virtual machines, we have to stop the virtual machines that have been replicated in Zerto and then upgrade or update to the virtual machines onsite. Instead of having to do it manually, there should be some way of automating that particular function.

And when it comes to AWS failover, the documentation has a lot of scope for improvement. It's come a long way since we implemented it, from the scantiness of documentation that was available to do a failover into AWS or recover from AWS, but they could still do a much better job of providing more details, how-to's, tutorials, etc.

In terms of additional features that I would like to see included in the next releases, if they could provide us some kind of long-term storage option, that would be the best thing. Then it could be a storage and a failover solution combined into one.

I have been using Zerto for two-and-a-half years.

It's a very stable solution.

It scales very well, in terms of the data size and the number of sites that we want to add on. It has scaled very well, at least in the last two releases.

We have plans to increase usage, but as it is we are using it for about 75 percent of the data at this point. The balance of the data will come onboard by early next year.

We have about 25 people using Zerto, and they're mostly database and storage administrators, infrastructure people, and security people. 

We have not used the technical support. One thing I can say is that they have a very friendly team of engineers. If you have a problem, they are at your beck and call. You can call them and get it resolved.

We were using another solution but I don't want to name it. The primary reason we switched was the ability to restore the. Our main goal was not only to have good replication of data, but to be able to restore the data as quickly as possible in the event of any contingency, whether planned or unplanned. 

From that standpoint, when we put Zerto against the existing product, what took us a few hours in that product took us a few minutes with Zerto. That was primarily the goal. Even though this product was a little more expensive than what we had prior to going with Zerto, we still went ahead with Zerto.

The initial setup is very straightforward compared to a lot of others. The user interface is very simple and very intuitive. It goes one step at a time so you can logically follow through the steps to set it up. Whether it's a small site or a big site, it doesn't really matter.

Overall our deployment took about two weeks. We had a detailed project plan, as we always do with any new products or projects that we come up with.

It doesn't require any full-time staff to deploy and maintain the solution. Once you turn on the process, all that somebody needs to do is just monitor the schedule and see whether it's doing things the way it has been programmed.

We have absolutely seen return on our investment with Zerto. We do mock disaster recovery exercises and, in every such exercise since we've gone ahead with Zerto, we've been able to restore the data within a few minutes, very easily, without any business loss. That gives us the confidence to say that, even in the case of a real disaster, we should be able to restore the data.

We didn't evaluate any other options.

Know your use case and then do a thorough proof of concept with your use case to see whether the solution works for your environment and your specific use case. Have a well-defined project plan and negotiate your way with the vendor.

The biggest lesson our organization has learned in using Zerto is that you should understand the product very well. You should understand what the product is capable of doing and leverage the options and features that are available in the product to the optimal extent. 

We use Zerto to keep a replica copy of the core servers we have running at our backup site. In the case of an outage, we are able to flip over to our backup location. Zerto keeps these servers up to date within seconds and in the case of an outage at our core data center, we can flip over services with little to no data loss.

Mostly what Zerto gives us is peace of mind. 

We do the normal backups and that data gets stored offsite, but unlike backups, Zerto gives us the ability to be back up and running within minutes on a copy of our servers that is an identical copy of what is no longer accessible.

The features we found most valuable is site-to-site replication. This is what we purchased the product for and what we use it primarily for. We are in the process of switching over our production data center and Zerto has been a true time-saver that has cost us zero downtime.

Some features are not up to what we need, although we have found alternatives and aren't really looking for Zerto to handle those items today.

The setup process is time-consuming.

We have been using Zerto for around four years.

With its built-in notifications and reporting, Zerto will alert you if there is anything wrong before it can become a problem.

Zerto works for one or one thousand machines and scaling out is an easy process. Zerto also seems to better support the major cloud vendors, with updates as well.

Zerto technical support has been very responsive and has always been able to help. They are available 24x7 and always have someone to contact you right away.

Prior to using Zerto, we were using VMware's SRS. It was not keeping a close enough copy of our servers.

The initial setup was very straightforward, but also a lot of information was needed. A fair bit of time was spent setting things up, but it was really just time-consuming. There was nothing that needed to be done by the vendor.

As far as setup and maintenance are concerned, you need to be sure to set it up properly, test it, and occasionally perform updates. For the most part, once it is in place it is pretty hands-off.

We implemented with the help of Zerto, who was very helpful in explaining the process and how everything works.

Zerto is not cheap but is an invaluable asset.

If you have the need for what Zerto can do for you then the cost really isn't a factor.

We only had experience with VMware's product and didn't know of anything other than Zerto. Once we tried the product we were hooked and never had a reason to look at anything else.

When we implemented Zerto, we only utilized some of the features. This was mostly because of our needs at the time and partially because the other parts were not up to what we needed. They have since greatly improved on these parts, like the backups features, but we aren't really looking for Zerto to handle those items today.

We have never regretted implementing Zerto and I would not trade it for any other product.

Virtualization, and Zerto improves business continuity and disaster recovery tremendously.

• Continuous replication for VMs
• Ability to choose point in time to recover from
• RPOs in seconds
• RTO in minutes

Adding or changing VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) may require restarting replication.

The product is very stable; no issues with upgrading to new releases.

Adding additional VMs is fairly easy. Adding or changing VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) may require restarting replication.

Very good.

Previously we used SRM (Site Recovery Manager). Zerto is much easier to set up and configure. Failover using Zerto is simply a one-button click, and it does everything else in restoring the VMs at a different datacenter (recovery site).

Initial setup is fairly easy and the environment can be protected in just a few hours.

You can find providers of a DRaaS solution with Zerto license fees for each VM. Zerto only sells to partners and they have a robust partner organization.

The product works and does what is says. Zerto provides enterprise-class, virtual replication and BC/DR solutions for private, hybrid, and public clouds. Future releases will provide multiple destinations/locations to store the replicated data.

Most companies have used backup software for their protection, or disk array replication. Zerto leapfrogs those data protection methods and provides a much more affordable BC/DR solution, with improved RPO and RTO.

Zerto is an excellent solution for cloud-based environments, but for DIY clients who have another site to recover their systems it also works well.

The setup is easier than most products, and for us as a cloud partner, once a customer is trained to create VPGs, they are good to go.

• The replication being log-based is awesome. 
• The VMDK can be preloaded to the remote site or allowed to come across the WAN, then the logs just keep flowing.
• You can set the number of days a VM can be rolled back in case of corruption or virus infection.
• Since the log files are continuously transmitted, the granularity of restores is amazing.
• You can practice failovers (start the replicated virtual machine at the remote site) while the logs keep stacking up. The replicated machine can be open for a few hours, but short times are best depending on how much data is changing.
• Files can also be extracted from the VMDK at the remote site even when the VM is off.
• In case of a disaster, a single mouse click sets the restore to the real failover; click the Failover button, the VM on the replication site is started, while the VM at the source site is shut down. Once up, reverse replication begins and stays in log replication until the systems are reverted back to normal via the same process.

An integrated encryption would allow for faster initial install and connection to the remote cloud site. 

Their offsite backup is a bit clunky, but it will probably improve.

No issues with stability. The delivered upgrades and major updates are stable.

No issues with scalability, it pretty much takes care of itself. One does have to watch where all the recovery site systems are located, to avoid running out of space on the datastores. We can control/move recovery VMs as necessary.

Awesome. Their helpdesk people are among the best.

The product needs a VPN tunnel from the customer site to ours. VPNs can be tricky depending on the compatibility of the hardware. The programs themselves are a snap, and surprisingly small.

Cloud providers get good pricing to encourage quick adoption. A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local.

As a cloud service provider, we have many tools to satisfy the needs of the customer. We have used Asigra, Veeam, StorageCraft, as well as Zerto. Each has its strengths. The market is heating up because of CryptoLocker and other viruses.

There are many products on the market that perform Virtual Machine replication. The other products use Snapshot technology which can have issues with Hypervisors or large disk volumes. The datastore or shared disk (depending on Hypervisor) must have enough free space to allow the Snapshot to be open for as long as the backup runs. This can lead to crashes and consolidation issues, which are usually painful. Zerto is a log-based replication product, for that I give it a 10 out of 10.

I've been using it over a year now, and the product has kept improving. It is easy to upgrade to the next minor or major release.

In terms of advice, I would say become VPN, as well as VMware or Hyper-V, savvy.