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 Zerto as a migration platform from a customer's data center or from their on-premises environment to our data centers. We also use it for disaster recovery.

Zerto has helped to reduce the number of people involved during a data recovery situation in our company. All we have to do is click a few times. We have even configured a DR solution for our customers so that they can do it themselves. We give them access to the Zerto platform, as well as have a small manual of instructions, and they can go do it. It's very simple to use and to deploy and to support. It does not have a very large learning curve.

For our clients who do DR in the cloud, Zerto has definitely saved them money. We only have a few DR client accounts, but for the ones we do have, there haven't been any failures of Zerto, whenever we do failover tests. It performs well.

It's a great platform because it's very well built, technically. 

It's also very much faster than any other migration or disaster recovery platform we have. I work with virtualization, mostly on VMware, and I must admit that Zerto is even better than VMware Site Recovery Manager. Zerto compresses the data and it works much faster. We use it whenever we can, and especially whenever we are on a tight time schedule for closing a project, or we need to bring information or VMs from a client or from another data center. Zerto is very valuable because of its speed.

And in terms of ease of use, when I started with my current company I didn't even know about Zerto. My first project was a migration from a big customer and I thought, "Wow, this will be a lot of work." It was a little scary because of the pressure to get it done. But Zerto was so easy to use. I like it a lot.

I've been using Zerto for about 12 months, but the company I work for has been using it for four or five years.

It's very solid, like a rock. It's very stable.

Even with the most recent customer that we migrated to our data center, it was really impressive that Zerto kept the levels of performance very consistent. This customer's site was at another data center provider, not one of ours. It was on a very old VMware version, and we were deploying them to the latest, vCenter Server 7. At first I thought, "We will be struggling to bring this customer over," because they were two major versions behind. I didn't think Zerto would be compatible for making this migration happen. But it worked like a charm, and we had no problems regarding Zerto itself. While we had some problems with this migration, they were not related to the technology.

It's very scalable. Most of our core usage here is for migrations from our customers' on-premises or data center instances. And about two years ago, we had a very big migration of over 3,000 virtual machines, and Zerto performed really well. That's why we have kept Zerto in our portfolio.

Their support is amazing. We have had to open some support cases and they have a very good technical team. They're always referring us to their technical teams if we need to discuss something. Or if we fail to understand some of the concepts, we can reach out to them too. It's more than a commercial relationship. They support us whenever we need help.

Positive

We do setups of Zerto every week or two weeks, because it's not a single platform. We are a multi-cloud environment and service provider. We deploy it according to project requirements. So we don't have a single Zerto platform. We are always deploying VMs and DRs.

Zerto is very easy and straightforward to set up. Whenever we want to use Zerto for a migration from an on-premises customer to our data center, we usually create a WAN to WAN link, or a LAN to LAN, or a VPN link between the customer and us. We just deploy the VPNs from our side to the customer site and request access to their environment. We check for special VM configurations. It's pretty straightforward. We don't like telling the customer to do it, even though it's very easy to deploy and configure, because it's part of our service to do this job for them. We also have our own guidelines and policies that we use to configure Zerto for the best migration setup.

The last deployment I did took me four hours, which included setting up both my side and the customer side, doing the pairing and, later, the VPG's. We migrated over 100 VMs and it took about two days to fully replicate their site to ours. The migration window to do the move was about six hours because they had to change applications. But the move itself took no more than two minutes for every Zerto machine. 

When I talk to the customers, I tell them that it will be faster than the move window we request. Most of the time set aside for the window is for taking applications offline, because they will often need to reconfigure them. When client data comes from an on-premises site to our data centers, there are usually IP address changes, or we have to update VMware tools, or do something at the Zerto machine level by changing Zerto hardware, such as a network card. The moving itself is pretty straightforward.

Because I'm a support engineer, I don't really work directly on the commercial side of things. Whenever I need to request a license for Zerto, someone on our dedicated licensing support team takes care of it. So I don't know if that process is easy or not.

Zerto works very well as a backup and recovery solution, with frequent recovery points. It's very good. But it's too pricey for us to use it as a backup solution for all of our clients. Not every customer needs recovery points every five seconds.

It's a great platform, if you use it as a recovery system and as a migration tool. It's really amazing. It's a very well-developed product and one of the best solutions. In the same way that what makes Microsoft big today is Active Directory, which is an amazing product and one that no other enterprise could do any better, Zerto is the same type of leader in its category and is at the very top, without a doubt.

We primarily use Zerto for our critical applications and infrastructure to allow immediate failover at our DR site. We licensed our critical applications and database servers and standard backup the rest. In order to increase uptime, we replicate our entire Active Directory infrastructure as well.

We are able to pass many financial and IT audits because we have a solid system in place with zero RPO/RTO. Furthermore, we can train almost any tech or engineer on the process of flipping to the offsite primary. The button and some minor DNS changes and we are up and running.

The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable. It is literally as easy as pushing a button to flip to a contained test environment for staging roll-outs or verifying backup integrity. The upgrade process initially was tedious, making sure every VM host got updated separately, but now it is streamlined and a breeze.

I would like to see better notifications when the sync is off for an extended length of time.  There is nothing worst then going to do an upgrade or test a restore and realizing some of the VPGs need to be fixed because their journal is too small causing bitmap syncing to be off.

Stability is tied to the latency of your offsite DR.

The scalability is directly correlated to your storage and compute. More licensing as you grow is all you need.

The technical support for this solution is great. Every time I have had an issue, I get a real person, quickly, who remotely takes over and repairs the issue.

We were using RecoverPoint by Dell EMC prior to this solution. We switched because it was extremely cumbersome and far from streamlined during failover.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. It's literally an install button and then next, next, next... 

Zerto assisted us with the deployment.

Have not had to failover often but the ability to test product upgrades has been invaluable.

The cost is not dirt cheap but also is not terrible.

We thought about VMware Orchestration.

If you are looking for an extremely easy solution to implement and is highly effective then this is your baby.

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. 

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.