Zerto Reviews

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.

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 use the solution for DR failover/testing on our DR site. We're a Windows/VMware environment and replicate 25 virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery site. The solution allows us to perform live failovers without shutting down our production systems.

Zerto has made the testing and the actual failover process of our replicated virtual machines seamless. The product has relieved the administrative burden for the IT staff responsible for the disaster recovery implementation of the organization. Adding new virtual machines is quick and easy, and managing the environment is straightforward.  

Failover testing is the most valuable feature. The fact that we are able to test the failover of live systems during regular hours is invaluable to our organization. No longer do we have to schedule failovers of our systems, which brings down our production environment.

There are a couple of minor areas that could use improvement.

The GUI could be streamlined a bit more to enhance the administrative tasks. I would also like to be able to throttle the email alerts, as sometimes they become a bit noisy, and get tough to keep on top of.

Our company has been using the product for four years.

This is a very stable solution.

It is easy to add new licenses for growth.

Support has always been readily available if there were issues.

We never used a different solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and seems to be in line with similar products.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this solution.

HW agnostic, no impact on production systems, no snapshot, easy management.

Version 4.0 is revolutionary, allowing replication between VMware, Hyper-V and AWS - conversion on the fly, and a a HTML5 GUI

Version 4.5 allows file restore, access based on roles, more powerful APIs.

We dismissed SRM and we no longer need the NetApp replication license. We were able to offer a DRaaS multitenant environment integrated with vCloud Director. Our customers think this tool is awesome.

Backup dedup and online restore, support for SMTP authentication.

4 years

Just in case of strict permission, we needed several ports to be opened. English language of OS for ZVM is needed, otherwise there's a bug showing some of the graphs.

Sometimes in large environments - enough to restart the service in ZVM.

No because it scales with ESXi scale.This is a strong pro.

Very very great, reactive answers in minutes and they don't leave you until the issue is resolved.

Great too - If the first level is unable to solve the issue, it scales to higher-level engineers on the fly.

SRM, but it needeed replication and it was complex to manage.

Smooth and Zerto techs assisted.

It was direct.

We only got SP licensing prices/model.

No, we had to decide if leaving SRM or not. Choice was simple.

There are other competitor on the market, but this is the only one dedicated to DR. All others are backup based. It could seems expensive, but when you realize its power, you'll understand that cost is justified.

Leveraging 'Move' to perform VC-to-VC migrations with little downtime.

Has simplified our DR/BC strategy and allows us to quickly protect Production applications that require low RPO's. We've done several fail-over tests with documented results. We feel Zert0 will only compliment our SDDC strategy.

POC'd the product for 2 months and purchased in March of 2014.

None.. Implementation was simple and quick. We were replicating vms in a matter of hours.

Nothing to date

No

Customer service has been excellent

Technical support has been exceptional

We've used traditional LUN based replication which can be challenging in any virtual environment. Zert0 gave us the granularity to replicate VMDKs to any target datastore.

Setup was simple and straightforward. We encountered no issues.

We spent weeks doing a POC and literally installed and re-installed multiple times to see if there were any impacts on our infrastructure. There were none and it worked as advertised.

N/A

We had capacity so our only setup costs were building a couple of VMs to install the Zert0 Consoles on and licensing of the product. Minimal when compared to SRM, Recover Point and Storage.

We did a POC with SRM and researched Recover Point extensively.

I feel because the product is so simplistic yet extremely robust and effective management may perceive Zert0 as not being Enterprise worthy when in reality, it is. Bottom line, its a great product that brings standardization and simplicity to DR/BC.

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 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.

My primary use case is doing demos and testing to make sure that Zerto is going to work for our customers. I test it mainly for disaster recovery and backup.

We've tested with VMware, Zadara, and AWS.

My clients found the DR feature to be the most valuable. It's something they deal with daily from a virtual machine using VMware, Amazon, or Azure.

Zerto absolutely helped to reduce downtime. My customers can bring up their machine somewhere else, and they can test on it.

Zerto's speed of recovery is very fast and efficient whenever I tested it.

Zerto added the backup feature, but it's not quite up to speed yet when you compare it with the backup capabilities of other solutions out there.

I've used Zerto off and on for about a year and a half.

The stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems.

Zerto can be scaled to any number of servers that you need.

My customers have used Zerto's technical support and had no problems with it.

My clients loved Commvault from a backup side of things, but Commvault just didn't do the DR right for them. It was not quick real-time DR. They brought in Zerto, and it worked phenomenally for their production systems.

From a backup perspective, Commvault is really good, but from a DR perspective, Zerto is way better. It's much quicker and easier to use, and it works right out of the box.

My customers said that though they had to pay for it, they were glad they bought it because Zerto works. It's got really great ROI coming from that perspective.

The licensing model is good. The price is a little bit expensive, but for what customers get on it, it tends to pay for itself. However, if more and more companies start to improve, then Zerto may need to look at their pricing and make it a little better.

We evaluated Veeam, Cohesity, and RackWare. Zerto is by far the best disaster recovery product out there.

You should set it up, test it on a few machines, and also test it in multiple environments. Most people have multiple clouds, so make sure you try it with VMware, AWS, etc. Also, decide whether you want to do all your critical tasks with Zerto and fully plan your DR as the top-level. Determine what is most important and then scale it down to the least important. You can then implement Zerto from that perspective.

Overall, I would rate Zerto at nine on a scale from one to ten.