Zerto Reviews

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 use it for backup and replication.

The total time for replication has been reduced drastically for us and that really adds value in the long run because time equals money and resources.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. Previously, when we were doing it across our own locations, we had to make sure it was working by doing a lot of testing back and forth.

Also, the solution is already up to the mark on audits and certification.

For us, the most valuable features are the quick upload time and how the sync works. The sync is pretty good and that's really helpful. The quick upload is important to us because other solutions were lagging behind. We have VMware SRM and Veeam, and they have been pretty slow and sluggish. We have had some challenges with them.

We have been using Zerto for seven years.

We're just replicating and I assume it runs on some kind of cloud as an overlay, so the stability is pretty good.

The scalability is insane. Really good.

An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time.

Neutral

We still have some other solutions in-house. We are not fully dependent on Zerto. We are still trying to get rid of the others, but we have not entirely moved on.

In 2014, when Zerto was launched, the initial setup was pretty simple.

We used an integrator. Our experience with them, at our engineering level, was that it was pretty smooth and streamlined, the first time we used Zerto. We had a few issues in the initial deployment, but later on, when we moved to scripting, the process became streamlined.

I would like to see different service levels. They're good, but it still takes a lot of our budget in ops.

We evaluated Veeam and SRM. Zerto is an HPE product, and we have been using a lot of HPE servers. That trust in HPE won our business.

When comparing Zerto with Veeam and SRM, the latter are newer in the market. They try to provide a multi-cloud strategy with tie-ups across six different clouds, which is different from Zerto. That's where I would use them if I had to.

All the solutions were almost equal but Zerto is still better because they have a lot of releases and new versions.

We are just using it for backup and replication. We have not yet had an event where we have had to restore.

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.

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.

Our primary use for this solution is DR Replication to a separate data centre. We use VMware at both sites. We're currently replicating around eighty VMs from our primary data centre in London to our secondary data centre in Beccles. Most of these are SQL servers with the VSS agent installed.

We now have the ability to activate replicated VMs at our DR site within minutes of something happening to our primary data centre. The ability to have a RPO of seconds has enabled us to restore data to just before an incident has occurred, which certainly saves a lot of time and money.

The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and simple setup.

The ability to do a test failover to an isolated environment has been very useful, as this allows us to test servers without any implications to our live environment.

The dashboard is very clear and concise, showing any problems in different colours.

The VSS agent setup and configuration does seem to be a bit clunky compared to the rest of the software. We have had issues with licensing, where the license we've been given by Zerto support doesn't include VSS replication, which was a pain at the time.

• Replication from Hyper-V to ESX so I can retire my old environment
• Failover from Site A to Site B

Before this product, we had a lot of custom scripting and multiple other products to try and get to a similar place that Zerto allows without fully managing to. Zerto allows for a more granular replication ability and therefore a more flexible model than the per-socket licensed alternatives. It is positioned fantastically for pay as you grow which is just what we were after.

• IP Addressing of failed over VM’s isn’t working properly.
• Over time, it would be great to get more meat on the bones in the backups side of the product.
• Ability to add hard disks to a VM and have Zerto just pick up those changes rather than perform a full re-mirror.

There are many post migration activities associated with a Hyper-V to ESX migration – don’t presume this is a hands off activity as it very much isn’t at this time.  To make it hands off, there would be a ton of custom scripting required.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has not been an issue to scale it for our needs.

The product has significant promise but it’s a long way from fully functional, there are fantastic features in the product and fantastic features promised “in the next release” too. Make sure you run through a good sizing exercise first.

Replication at the hypervisor level. We’re a cloud Service Provider, and any solution relying on a specific storage vendor's functionality is a show stopper for us.

We can set up Disaster Recovery environments for our customers in a matter of minutes.

I hope that in the future the product will offer integrated encryption functionalities, so that the VPN setup between protected and protection site can become optional.

I've been using it for four years.

Assuming that you comply with the minimum requirements specified in their documentation, there should be no problems with deployment which is very straightforward.

We have never encountered problems with the stability.

Zerto scales very well.

10+

11 on a scale from 0 to 10, probably the best technical support amongst the vendors I'm working with.

Yes, complexity and cost.

Very straightforward and simple setup.

We always do the implementation in-house for our customers. The vendor always kindly provides one of their engineers to perform a post-installation check.

We sell on a per-use basis and pay using the same model.

When we started using the product, it was pretty unique. Since then, we have evaluated some competitors but still there’s no match.

Zerto allow us to to replicate our critical application servers with a sub 5 min RPO. Before Zerto we would restore from tape backup. 

Also, the testing recovery in an isolated environment allows us to test recovery any time we need to.

I would like to have automated load balancing of the ZVM's at the target site. Each ESX server needs to have  ZVM system to replicate the VM's. At the target site if you need to take one of the ZVM's offline at the target site you need to manually change the VM's using the ZVM. I would like this to be automated.