Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for our servers in the multiple data centers we have. It allows us to replicate our servers from one data center to another and perform disaster recovery testing to ensure compliance with our organization's DR requirements.

Our organization wanted a solution for replication, whether for VMs or Azure sites, and the ability to migrate servers or VPGs in case of a disaster or for testing purposes. And we wanted something reliable.

We're migrating out of one of our older data centers currently, and sending them to either Azure or one of our two VM data centers. We've been working on getting all the servers out of the old data center for a year. Being able to migrate those servers, with the help of the service teams, is one of the best features. Instead of having to do them one at a time, we can build a VPG. That is especially helpful with some of these really large VPGs. We did one a couple of months ago that was 36 terabytes. We were able to migrate that entire VPG at one time, watch it replicate once it was there, and then do the reverse replication. That process has been amazing.

We use Zerto to protect VMs and our RPOs are very solid. The RPO is a little slower for Azure, but that was expected and it was covered in the documentation that Zerto provided. But the RPOs from one VM center to another are solid. The same is true for our RTOs. We have no complaints in that regard at all.

And it will definitely help reduce downtime if we have to migrate from one data center to another due to a disaster (which we have not had to do so far). Downtime would cost us a lot, no doubt. We have not had any major disasters as of yet or problems with spyware or ransomware. But we have had instances where a server was corrupted in one data center and because it was backed up with Zerto, we were able to fail over to the secondary site and get the VPG back up very quickly. From the time that the decision was made that we needed to fail over, it took around 30 minutes. It was very quick, especially compared to trying to troubleshoot and rebuild. Our patients weren't affected.

The platform has also helped us to streamline our DR testing. We're able to do our annual test as quickly as possible, whether it's a failover rollback or a system move. It has made that process much much quicker and a lot less painful.

I've only been in this position for a year, but from what I've heard, DR testing was not a pleasant experience prior to moving to Zerto. They were always having failures and then would have to set up another downtime and test again. With a lot of our applications, those that are tier-ones, we're having to do the DR test at 1 AM or 2 AM. Nobody wants to have to do a four-hour downtime test multiple times.

And not having long downtimes for DR has helped a lot. Our customers and service teams know that we have to do these tests once a year to stay compliant. We plan for a four-hour downtime every time we do a DR test. Very rarely do we need four hours. We block out that time just in case there are issues we didn't expect but we're usually done in under two hours, including failing over, doing the testing, rolling back, and testing again. I don't know if you can actually put a number on not having downtime, in terms of the impact on the service teams, nurses, or patients.

Right now, our DR team is just me and my boss. At one point, there were three people on the team. It says a lot about Zerto when it can be used with a minimal staff for DR. Prior to moving to Zerto, the team had four members. So it was double what it is now.

The replication works really well. We perform multiple tests a month and annual tests for our tier-one and many of our tier-two apps. We need to make sure we can quickly and reliably migrate VPGs to the backup data center in a disaster scenario. Migrating systems as a failover rollback or a system move are two of the functions that I like the most.

It's also very simple to use. For example, when we need to move data so that our users can keep collaborating with one another, using Zerto is very simple. Putting the servers into maintenance mode and either moving or testing them for our teams, has worked very well. We have found very few hiccups with any part of the solution, especially with the new version that they released recently.

The near-synchronous replication-also works really well. When you move or have just built a VPG, watching it step through things is great. It's a well-made product. Near-synchronous replication is very important, making sure that it's done properly and that it's complete.

We have Azure data centers. When migrating out of our older data center, if we find that Azure is the best place for those new servers, we have been migrating them there and doing the DR test at the same time. I haven't found any problems with migration to the cloud. For our applications that will work in Azure, Zerto's disaster recovery in the cloud has worked really well.

I turned in a ticket a while back when I found a glitch within Zerto. When building out a VPG and doing the machine types within Azure, they were not coming across correctly. It would say it had a CPU and memory of a specific type, but it was not accurate. When I sent that ticket in, the support manager said that it hadn't been found before, but that my report was accurate and that it was a bug, and that they were working on it. 

But I've been very pleased with the updates that they put out and the service. I don't have a lot of negative things to say about Zerto.

I've been in this position for a little over a year and have been using Zerto during that time.

I've never seen it go down. It has been stable and easy to use, which are some of the main reasons we're still with them. We haven't had any large bugs with it. The software seems to be well-tested before new updates go out.

We have it deployed across three on-prem data centers in two different states, plus the two different Azure sites that are also out of state.

We've added a couple of new data centers since I've been in my position and adding them to our Zerto interface was not very difficult. The scalability is good.

Whenever I have had any issues, I have contacted support and they have been knowledgeable. Getting a hold of Zerto's support has been easy. In general, compared to all the other applications that I've ever supported in my career, Zerto has been one of the easiest to contact and actually get help with. I've worked with some vendors that were really difficult to work with.

Overall, Zerto's technical support has been fantastic. When I've had issues, submitting a ticket online is fast. In all but maybe one instance, I had a callback within just a couple of hours. Their support has been awesome.

Positive

Our organization migrated away from a couple of other solutions prior to my starting this position. But the disaster recovery manager that I work for has said multiple times that Zerto is the easiest solution and has the most robust features compared to whatever they were using prior.

I know our organization still uses Veeam, but they do so in tandem with Zerto.

There is an annual cost for Zerto, but that is something that our director level works through. Our organization, St. Luke's, goes through all vendor contracts looking for the best value. The fact that we have been using Zerto for a few years says that the value must be there compared to other vendors.

Not having to take down our tier-one system for an extended period of time for DR testing is invaluable. You can't put a dollar value on the impact on a patient's life. We need our systems to stay up constantly because they are what keep people alive.

In terms of maintenance of Zerto, we do our monthly reboots of the servers so that they stay up to date with the Microsoft patching. And anytime that Zerto has updates to their software, we make sure that we stay compliant with that. And once every year or 18 months, we update the cert on the servers.

My advice is to look for a product that is easy to use and easy to learn and allows for scalability and DR testing that works well.

In my previous company, I used it for disaster recovery. We protected our critical workloads in another data center where we would replicate our primary workloads.

In my current company, we're in the middle of a data center consolidation project and we're using Zerto in two ways. First, we're migrating the workloads we had in one data center to another, about 250 servers. It took us about three months to complete the migration. We had to schedule all of our moves and work with the business to validate that the services were fine and accessible, once they were moved to the other data center. We've completed the migration and a data center has been shut down, and we're working on building disaster recovery for our primary workloads in Azure.

The main benefit is that we are centralizing our disaster recovery solution. Before, we were doing replication for some services and RecoverPoint for other services. We had a mix of tools for disaster recovery and we're trying to simplify that process with a product we can use for both. We're even contemplating using Zerto for backups as well, because we use other tools for that. But the main focus is having a specific tool, Zerto, that we can use to achieve our disaster recovery goals for on-prem services.

We also have a big push to move our DR solutions into Azure as a result of a decision from our upper levels to use Azure as our primary solution for building applications. That has allowed us to reduce costs and consolidate from three data centers to one, with our disaster recovery solution in Azure. Our focus on one tool has made it simple. We're still working through that process. Whereas the failover solutions in Azure are somewhat the same as any other data center, building out the rules and requirements for firewalls is a little more complex. We have some third-party vendors that are helping us design and build out our security into Azure.

Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery, your recovery point can be 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, our recovery point objectives are in the seconds. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto. We don't have to run incremental backups every half hour or 15 minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well. It's essentially just a shutdown and reboot of a VM.

Near-synchronous replication is incredibly important for us because we have transactional applications that work on financial and transactional databases. The fewer the number of transactions that are potentially lost, the better it is for our organization. It means we don't have to go through rebuilding those transactions. It limits the amount of data that we could possibly lose in a disaster recovery situation, amounting to just a few seconds' worth.

The near-synchronous replication with Zerto has enabled us to reduce our RPOs to two seconds instead of hours and, sometimes, days.

And Zerto really improves RTOs for moving applications. You're not waiting for restores to happen. In some cases, if you have large amounts of data on the order of hundreds of terabytes, it could literally take you a week to recover certain applications, especially if you're pulling the data down from Azure or offsite storage. Zerto greatly improves the amount of time that it takes to recover. And you don't have to do one at a time. You can move over a large chunk of servers at once and get those recoveries running and mounting in your disaster recovery environment. It's a lot quicker than running a restore from a restore product.

In addition, the solution reduces the amount of downtime we have in applications during migration. We had a large number of servers, including some critical production applications. But we didn't have to find windows where we could have those systems interrupted for a short period of time. A few minutes of downtime, compared to having the application down for hours, helped move our migration project along. We moved about 250 servers in a three-month period, and we didn't have any issues with any of the applications related to data or the like. We had two instances where there was an issue related to licensing but they were our only issues when moving these applications.

The auto-connect feature is valuable because we can set the amount of time that we delay before committing a move from one location to another, giving application teams time to validate that the move went well and everything is working before we commit those changes. That gives us the ability to roll back to the same point we were at before we shut things down, if needed. 

Another nice aspect of the product is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. And once or twice a year, we'll do a live test that is more like what would happen if we lost a data center.

Zerto is also a very easy product to use. Although I've used it before in other environments, we introduced it to some engineers on our team and, after a couple of hours of training to go through the product, it's fairly intuitive. It's not something that takes a five-day training course to understand. You just drive through the checkboxes to build a protection group and that's pretty easy to do. You don't really have to understand coding or the like. It's GUI-driven, so it's fairly easy for an engineer to create protection groups.

You can use Zerto as a backup product, but in the discussions that I have had with them about the product, they don't really sell or talk about that feature as much. So I would be interested in improvements related to using it as a backup. If I could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where I need to recover something, that would be helpful. It has some of that functionality, but it's not something they promote a lot. They should point out the benefits of using Zerto as a backup and recovery product instead of just a DR product.

With Cohesity, we keep a limited amount of backups, about 14 days. That way, we can recover an individual server within the same site or we can restore data or databases that we need, in a non-DR way. We use it for typical day-to-day backup and restore. If we could use Zerto in a similar fashion for everyday backup and recovery scenarios, that would be another area where we could consolidate into a single application.

At my old company, I used it for several years, and at the company I'm now at we've been using it for about a year.

It has been rock-solid. I haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers. It just runs.

It's really scalable. You can create as many protection groups as you need, and a lot more than we have in our environment. 

We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload.

Our experience with their tech support has been good. I have never called them with an issue that they couldn't resolve fairly quickly. 

I did call them a few times on some migrations that we were doing off-hours where certain aspects of the migration didn't work, particularly on the reverse protection. I always got a callback within 30 minutes and most of the time it was quicker. The support has always been great.

Positive

One of the main issues was handling large data migrations. It wasn't feasible to do a big-bang move where we could move everything at one time, so we needed to schedule moves. We were able to at least replicate the information and work through a schedule for the migrations quickly. One of the major things we were trying to adjust was having to schedule the migrations and working with the team to validate that everything was functional. We were also looking to minimize the amount of time that that service would be offline during migration.

In addition, we use a combination of tools. We were doing replication with RecoverPoint, and straight backup and restore with Cohesity. While we still use Cohesity, we did get rid of RecoverPoint and we don't use VMware Site Recovery Manager because we're not recovering from VMware to VMware anymore. Cohesity does certain things and Zerto does certain things very well.

The implementation of the migration was very straightforward. The implementation of disaster recovery into Azure was a little more complex. In part, that was because of the way our company built our Azure subscription and the rules we have in place for installation and dividing things and networks within Azure. 

But from the standpoint of installing and deploying the product, it's very simple.

We did it in-house, but we did have a Zerto engineer run through the installation into Azure with us because we did run into some issues related to permissions in Azure and some of the custom roles that are defined. We also worked with an engineer from Azure to help us, mainly around the identity portion in Azure.

On our side, it was just me and one of our other engineers involved.

We have seen ROI on the migration project which didn't require a whole bunch of people involved. We rotated two people who were able to facilitate the migrations when we scheduled them in the evenings. Sometimes, we would do up to six or seven migrations in an evening. 

The main thing that held us up a little in that project was the validation process required by the business. If we had been able to just run through it, we probably would have completed it a lot more quickly.

Still, we didn't require a lot of resources to do it. It was just one engineer to handle a migration and the applications teams to validate. We didn't have to go outside the company to hire services to help us with the migration. That was helpful from a cost perspective.

Pricing is one area where there could be some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting.

Others in our organization have raised the issue of how it's licensed, where you need one for every VM you're protecting.

We looked at RecoverPoint and Site Recovery Manager in VMware, but they just didn't fit the type of scenario that we were looking to set up with replication and recovery into Azure. We couldn't really find too many tools that were doing it in a way that was not too intrusive. There are ways you can migrate things into Azure and run them, but there's a technical process that you have to go through to make it happen. 

We were looking for a solution where we wouldn't have to flip all the switches for Azure. We wanted something straightforward that was much simpler to use. Zerto was really the only tool that we could find to do it. Others that we looked at briefly just didn't do what we wanted to do, so we didn't spend too much time on them.

Recovery with Zerto is a little more straightforward compared to other solutions, and the amount of time it takes is fairly short. You can recover with Cohesity fairly quickly, but there are a bunch of other things that you need to do, depending on how the recovery is done. If you're mounting a new virtual machine from a snapshot, which would give you a fairly quick recovery, you would still have to re-synchronize that data to keep it as a replication, and that takes some time. 

Zerto is just a more straightforward solution. You're getting pretty much the same server restored in under a minute, which is the time it takes to reboot, sync, and bring it back online. Other tasks you have to do, when bringing something up in another data center, like re-IP the machine, can be automated in the Zerto replication. It makes things easier.

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for a migration tool, this is a great migration tool that will help you move workloads between data centers. It's agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure.

And you have to look at whether you're moving a large amount of data or a large number of servers. Think about how much downtime your business can afford for moving those applications. If you're looking for something that can move an application with minimal downtime, this may be a solution for you. Or if you're moving large amounts of data, but you don't want to be down for the whole time you're restoring or moving, a synchronous product like this may be a solution for you.

We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Azure environment and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests into Azure, and still keep our production environment up and running. We've tested certain workloads failing over into Azure, including a standard Windows or Linux box, and specific things like SQL Server, Oracle, et cetera. It has been going well so far and we're at the point where we're defining our protection groups and security in Azure for all of our critical workloads.

We have not yet used the immutable data copies feature, but I was just at a conference and had some meetings with Zerto, some of the product professionals and engineers, and that is something that we are strongly looking into. That's because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then you're still in a bad situation. Putting the data into an immutable repository is something that we are definitely looking into. Especially in the industry that we are in, cybersecurity is a big issue.

We have also not used it for blocking threats and attacks. But the ability, in conjunction with immutable data and putting that into a vault, to look at the data that is being replicated in real time and scan it, would be a great benefit. We do use some of the best-in-class tools for that kind of protection, but this would just be another layer to help with that. It's an interesting feature and another tool that would add a layer to our cyber protection.

Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in backup and DR management. We have a pretty lean team. We try to cross-train our employees on the different products that we use. But Zerto did help to simplify the process because we can get people trained on it. They can assist in covering for other people in the group when they're out. The training only takes a couple of hours to go through the tutorials.

Our use case has evolved over the years. Initially, we strictly used Zerto for its original purpose: continuous replication of our virtual machines. We had a ransomware attack and needed to instantly restore virtual machines on or off-site without too much aggravation. That has been successful. The product expanded since then, and we're using many other features now.

We haven't replaced our other backup solutions yet, but we're considering it. I need to do some more testing of my databases and mail servers. It depends on how we utilize the cloud in the business. We're currently using an on-prem data center with a reserve disaster recovery site, but we're contemplating a transition to Azure. For example, if we are using Exchange Online, I'll need to find an appropriate backup solution. It may be something in the Azure stack, but I don't know yet.

We plan to use Zerto for cloud disaster recovery eventually. I'm in an upgrade cycle because I need to upgrade various backend elements to put me on 9.5, which I think is the latest release. That will give me immutable storage and benefits like single sign-on and multifactor authentication, which insurance companies increasingly request for all our applications. I plan to start shifting workloads into the cloud, and Zerto is one of the tools that will help me with that.

Zerto is deployed across my organization's entire computing infrastructure. We've got several different departments in the firm, so it handles many workloads. That sits on a Windows environment, and it replicates a data center where we just buy some shelving space. Including equity partners, consultants, and other visiting members of staff, we have around 250 users over seven sites.

Zerto is the ideal solution from a technical perspective. I have confidence that I can quickly and effortlessly restore data and train my IT colleagues to do the same. Ultimately, the benefit to the firm is knowing that everything's protected. My colleagues don't need to dive deeply into what I do because it's my specialty. It has been a massive game-changer to have that confidence in data recoverability. The rest of the firm considers it part of the suite of tools I've implemented. 

I've been working in IT for nearly 30 years. In the old days, you would need to know precisely the configuration, whereas now you only have to press a few buttons, and you're in the same situation that you would've been after maybe hours or days in the past. That's happened in a short period of my career. 

We've seen a massive improvement in our RPOs. It used to take hours, if not days. When I started working here 17 years ago, recovery took weeks because of the lack of preparation. Now, it's done in a matter of minutes. You've got to practice it, and the Zerto tool has a timer where it asks you to check your DR every six months. I do that religiously. The RPO is theoretically in minutes, but I've never had to do it. 

Zerto has also had an overall positive impact on RTOs. You don't need to maintain a massive set of documents to recover your systems. You can spin them all back up in your reserve site. Obviously, you must do them in the correct order. Then, you can then test your functionality, and you should be good to go. It massively reduced our RTOs.

Our RPO went down by about four hours, and the recovery time may have gone down from five or six hours to less than an hour. Some firms that invest in this can get it a lot lower than that, but I would say we're well below an hour now to restore the entire system.

Downtime comes in so many varieties, and you need a Swiss Army knife with the tools you need to deal with them all. Zerto is only one piece of a toolset I use, but it's one of the major elements. It offers the basic flexibility to have different destinations for your data and the ability to spin it up quickly. When recovering from a disaster, you typically deal with an issue you've never seen before.

Sometimes, you might have a failure that only affects a third of your network, or it's a ransomware attack that only affects specific VMs. You have no idea what will hit, so flexibility is essential. You need to be able to do it and get on with trying to recover your data rather than having to remind yourself how to do it. I've had to do that a few times with software. You practice it because you can't remember it, whereas you don't need to do that with Zerto.

The cost of downtime is hard to quantify with a law firm. There's an evident revenue impact when the system is not running. It means people are not earning fees because we're a professional services firm. However, the effect's size depends on the disaster type and how long you are down. If you're down for weeks, that will damage your reputation, which is everything in the legal field. It's a massive advantage if we can get our services online quickly. 

The solution has also reduced our DR testing time considerably. You're prompted to test every six months, and I can run through the test in a couple of clicks. I go into the reserve site and ensure the servers are spun up. I verified that all the services are running as expected, and they can see each other. Completing the test cycle takes me maybe 30 minutes.

Previously, it might have taken a few days to do a disaster recovery trial because I had no way to restore data accurately without affecting the live data. Zerto creates a sandbox environment where you can test without affecting operations. In the past, I might have needed to disrupt business for a couple of days to run a full test. 

I can allocate that saved time to more valuable tasks. When I'm not maintaining the system, my role is to be a Solutions Architect, deliver new projects, and provide third-line support to help users with their day-to-day tasks. Zerto frees me up to concentrate on developing my team and working on value-added business projects. I estimate that it reduced my system management overhead by 15 percent. 

I can't say with certainty that it would reduce the staff need in a real-life disaster recovery situation because we never know what we'll get. We take disaster recovery seriously because we don't see the form disaster will take. People from marketing will be involved in communicating with our client base. Elements of management need to intervene to ensure the staff members are safe. "Disaster" is such a broad term. You could have a fire in one of your buildings or a ransomware attack. However, it would be easy for me to perform the disaster recovery by myself from the Zerto control panel.

Continuous replication is the primary feature we use now because we originally purchased Zerto. I'm starting to utilize the long-term retention and instantaneous file restoration features, which have been introduced since the original purchase in 2015. Initially, we deployed Zerto as a second data storage point, but ultimately it will probably facilitate some of the migration of my workloads up to the cloud. It's evolving with the network and how we deliver computation.

Near-synchronous replication is handy for instantaneous file restores. Over the next few years, I think I will have to be more flexible about how I run my network. We're transitioning from an on-premises to a hybrid setup and, finally, a cloud environment. It's crucial to have the ability to move around data recovery points, some of which are local, and it's becoming increasingly important as we move away from traditional backups. 

Currently, I'm still maintaining another backup regime due to the complexity of recovering some of my applications. Near-synchronous replication isn't one of the most vital factors yet. Continuous replication to remote sites is the primary concern and reason for the purchase. We are waiting to upgrade to version 9.5 before we start using immutable data copies, but I'm excited about that feature. Immutable backups will be a real game-changer because we'll have an incorruptible backup sitting in the background.

It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

The stability is excellent. I've never had a problem with it.

The scalability's been fine. I increased my licenses from 20 to 35 or 40. It scales horizontally too. I used to replicate to one destination: my data center. Now I replicate to two destinations, and I'm starting to replicate into Azure Blob storage, as well.

I rate Zerto's support 10 out of 10. They always answer my questions, but I have very few issues because it's so simple and flexible to use. It's well thought out. Software often isn't designed with the user in mind, but this one has been. It's aimed at the right professional level. It's obvious if you've got enough technical knowledge. It's so robust and easy to use that I rarely contact technical support.

Positive

I did use a different solution that was part of the EMC stack for my storage area networks. Zerto is probably 10 times easier to use. When you work for a small or medium-sized organization, you aren't generally exposed to a variety of solutions because there are higher opportunity costs for time spent learning and setting it up. 

When I was doing the assessment, I got some experience with SAN-based recovery tools integrated with VMware, but those didn't seem to work well. Zerto is simple and actually works. 

I purchased Zerto to simplify installation and configuration. I set aside a couple of weeks to install it, and I managed to do it in one afternoon. Managing the solution is pretty straightforward for someone with technical skills and experience. I find it simple to use, which is one of the reasons I like it. A lot of the products in the legal sector where I work are incredibly complicated and hard to use. This isn't one of them.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to install. Based on my previous experience with the EMC solution, I expected to be deploying it full-time for two weeks. I set up the prerequisites in advance, which included creating a couple of Windows VMs. We installed, set it up, and started replication within a couple of hours. I have a team of people, but I completed the installation myself.

Zerto is relatively low maintenance, which is another bonus. It just churns away. You need occasional upgrades and bug fixes. I spend an hour or two on maintenance every six months or so. Apart from that, the only other maintenance I do is testing every six months. 

Obviously, it would be nice to have it for free. Nevertheless, a lot of effort has gone into making it a top-notch product. An excellent product with expert support is never going to be cheap. I think it's fairly priced for what it does and the benefit it brings to our business.

I've gone from a standard license to an enterprise license with an increasing number of VMs. Enterprise covers on-prem and the cloud, whereas the standard license is strictly on-premise. I'm not an expert on Zerto's licensing, but I know that I've increased my VMs and the range of destinations as part of an upgrade.

I didn't evaluate any other solutions because I instantly liked Zerto. I'd been given permission to look for new products to protect us in the future, but when I saw a demo of Zerto, it was pretty much over.

Virtually everything is fairly straightforward. The upgrade cycle is painful in other products, but easy to do in Zerto. The integration with the mobile app is seamless, so I can monitor the system from wherever. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. It's given me tremendous peace of mind and confidence that the network can be recovered quickly and accurately. I would suggest future users take some time to do an in-depth trial. 

If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. In my job, a decision is sometimes obvious, but it's tricky in other instances. You might need to draw up a weighted scoring model and check a couple of suppliers. This time, it was so clear. It's hard to quantify the pleasure of getting a nice piece of software that just works.

We do a semiannual disaster recovery test, usually one in January and another in September, where we fail our entire company over to our Arizona DR facility. We run the business out of the Arizona location for the day. In order to be able to do that, the Zerto application allows us to migrate 58 machines over to that location and allows us to run our business from that location for the course of the day.

We are able to have a successful disaster recovery solution through using Zerto for our Disaster Recovery drills. We are able to fail over anytime, day or night, to run our applications out of our Arizona facility. Within a 15 or 20 minute time frame, we can have those application servers up and running in Arizona. It is just a huge help to have a successful, reliable disaster recovery solution that we know at any point in time, within 15 or 20 minutes, can be running out of a different location.

Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill it would take two of us working for three or four hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I'm able to finish my work in about 30 mins and be available onsite to help and assist anybody else as needed during the disaster recovery drill. Its ease of use and the ability to have a reliable solution for disaster recovery has become invaluable to us.

There is built-in active logging if needed for a longer retention period. If we fail a machine over and are just doing tests for it, we can fail it right back at the end of the failover without much issue. We couldn't do that with SRM. The ability to keep track within the activity log of what is going on with the VM, then fail it back prior to the one-hour time frame that we have set up without having to worry about it losing data during our tests or production failover drills.

The product is very easy to use. On a scale of one to 10, I'd say it's a nine as far as ease of use goes. In order to do an update in our old product (SRM), we basically had to take down almost our entire vCenter to be able to do the updates. Whereas, I can do updates to our Zerto product within 30 minutes to both our ZVMs in Massachusetts and Arizona. We haven't had problems troubleshooting after doing upgrades. Within five minutes, we can configure a whole new cluster solution and work on getting it synced out to Arizona.

It transfers up-to-the-minute files. Therefore, if something was to happen and the business was to go down Massachusetts due to a server failure, we could simply fire up those VMs in Arizona within approximately five minutes. The data protection level is top-notch. We haven't lost any machines, data, or VMs during the course of utilizing this product.

The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't give you accurate information on the error message to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go actually login into Zerto to determine what's causing the issue.

Another issue with the alerting is that it will pause a job. E.g., if we have something running from Massachusetts to Arizona, but a VM has been removed, updated or moved to a new location in vCenter. It literally pauses the VPG the VM resides in but will never give us a notification that it's been paused. Therefore, if we had an issue during the course of the day such as a power event and we needed to gain access to those VMs in some sort of catastrophe, we wouldn't be able to get access to them because that job was paused and were never notified about it being paused for whatever reason. It would therefore be a big problem if the VM was needed to be recovered and we didn't have those resources available.

It would be great to get more precise alerting to be able to allow us to troubleshoot a bit better. Or have the application at least give us a heads up, "A VPG job has been paused." Right now, it's sort of a manual process that we have to monitor ourselves, which is not a great way to do things if you have a superior disaster recovery solution.

Almost two years.

The stability is rock-solid. Nothing has gone down since we installed it; there has been no downtime.

Typically, once a quarter, we have an update. Last year we were at version 7.5, then we recently went updates to 8.0. On top of that, they release security patches and other things to improve bugs they find in the program. Right now, there is a U4 version that's out, which we will be updating to this quarter.

In the U4 version, there are security enhancements because a lot of zero-day issues that are being found in a lot of the applications. Zerto is making more security modifications and enhancements to the encryption between one location and another, so somebody can't hack your data and access it while it's in transition.

Scalability is very easy. We are going through a POC right now because we want to branch out to the cloud. Just getting that set up and going through the process was about 60 minutes.

It's very scalable and extendable. We can do one to many solutions, as far as where our disaster recovery is going. This is what we wanted. We would never have been able to do that with our SRM product.

There are two engineers trained to use the product. I'm the primary contact for the application and do most of the work on the product. One of the storage guys handles a lot of the storage set up on the back-end with me. We have at least two people trained on each application that we have in-house. Both of us are in charge of making sure the application is up-to-date and doing what it's supposed to be doing. 

Zerto's technical support is very good. They are very reliable and always very pleasant to deal with. We've never an issue working with them. They usually come back with the precise solution to whatever we are troubleshooting.

Our issues are usually user self-inflicted. E.g., we remove a host out of the cluster to upgrade it or do something else with it and don't follow the correct procedure that's needed in order to be able to shut down the Zerto appliance correctly. If somebody doesn't follow that procedure, because they either don't know how, weren't aware of it, or just skip that step, then it causes problems inside of Zerto. This will pause jobs and the VPG will no longer be accessible on that host. Sometimes it's easy to get it back up and running again. Usually, when you put a new piece of hardware in the cluster that has a different set of parameters with its hardware, then the appliance will be missing because it was taken out with the old hardware. Usually, you need to get their technical support involved in order to be able to troubleshoot the issue with them to be able to get the VPG back online again on the new hardware. As I said its self-inflicted most of the time because steps are missed with our processes.

The documentation that we got from them was in depth and work well when needed, if you follow them correctly you will have success. If you don't follow the steps, that's when problems develop. Therefore, it's not a fault in their documentation, it's a fault of the user who's not following the proper steps for success. It doesn't happen often but I think we have contacted technical support only three times in the two years that we've had the product.

For eight years prior to using Zerto we used to use a product called SRM, which is part of VMware. We finally switched over to Zerto after having them come in and do a presentation for us. This was after trying for about a year to do that and convince our vice president to allow us to migrate over to a different platform.

The reason why we used SRM was because SRM was built into our VMware vCenter licensing. We never had a successful DR test during the previous couple of years with SRM. By switching over to the Zerto product a year and a half ago, we were able to run a successful disaster recovery test within three months of switching over. We had our first successful disaster recovery tests in two and a half years because Zerto made our life so much easier and helped getting servers over to a new location almost seamlessly. 

In order to be able to have a successful disaster recovery, we need to be able to successfully migrate 58 servers from our Massachusetts location to Arizona. On previous attempts, we got about half the stuff over there, then we'd fail. In other scenarios we would get everything over there but some of the machines wouldn't come up because of the way they were configured. One time, the business was down for about half the morning because it took us that long to get the stuff back up and running using SRM. This was a real pain point for us, getting this product in place and working successfully. It took Zerto to be able to finally get us to do that. It's been a lifesaver. All we had with SRM was nothing but headaches.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had everything running in half an hour. It got deployed with two virtual machines (ZVMs): One got deployed in Massachusetts and another in our Arizona location. From there, we deploy appliances to each one of the hosts that's inside of the clusters that we are managing for our disaster recovery solution.

Within 30 minutes, we had it deployed to our entire production cluster and the hosts in here. After that, we just started creating jobs, which took quite awhile to do because we have a lot of large servers. However, that's not the worry of the Zerto application, but the size of the VMs we have in production. 

For our implementation strategy, we just mimicked what we had in place for our SRM environment. Our 58 machines are spread across different clusters: some in our DMZ, some in our prod and some in our WebSphere clusters. After that, we ran two tests to ensure that we were able to fail over to our Arizona location then fail back without any changes or modifications to the VMs. Once we did that, we started rolling out to each of the clusters, one Virtual Protection Group (VPG) at a time. I think we now have 23 VPGs total.

We worked with an outside vendor (Daymark) who does a lot of our work through outside vendors. They work with Zerto directly. When we set it up originally, we had a Zerto technician on the call as well as a Daymark technician on-site working with us.

Our experience with Daymark has been very good. We love working with them and try to use them for our integration and infrastructure work. They are a very good company that are easy to deal with. We try to use them as much as we can. Thanks to Rick and Matt for a great working relationship.

We have seen huge ROI.

It used to be a three-person job, and now it only takes one person to manage and run the process. The fall back is the same thing. We've never had any issues with stuff coming back out of Arizona to our Massachusetts location. Within 15 to 20 minutes, we can have our servers successfully migrated back, then up and running just as they were originally without having too many conflicts or configuration issues. 

The solution has helped us reduce downtime in any situation that we have come across, thus far, for disaster recovery at a 4:1 ratio.

We are an insurance company therefore, if we're down for an hour, it's thousands of dollars being lost. E.g., people can't pay their insurance bills, open new policies or get the support they need for an accident.

These things have been invaluable to us:

• Not having to have so many bodies onsite during a disaster recovery drill.
• Not having to worry about multiple people dealing with the application.
• The product's reliability of always being up and running and not having any issues with it.
  

It's very equitable, otherwise we wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per host used. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we have configured and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all.

There is a one-time cost for maintenance and support. We have a three-year contract that we will have to renew when those three years come up. There is also licensing on top of that for whatever product you are using it depending on the host configurations.

Right now, we use Veritas. We will be evaluating Veeam and Rubrik as a new solution for our backups in the next quarter or so, on top of the fact that we may decide to use Zerto. The three of them are in the mix right now for when we decide to switch over vendors for a better backup solution. 

Zerto gives you the ability to utilize it as a backup solution, but it's not a true backup solution because it can't do file level backups. If you want a particular file off of a server, it can't do that for you. What it can do is give you the whole server, then you need to go back and pull that file off it. Mainly for that reason, we haven't chosen to use Zerto and may never use Zerto as our backup solution. The other solutions allow us to get a file level backup.

Don't hesitate. Go out and do it now. Don't wait two years like we did. Push harder in order to be able to get the solution in place, especially since we know it will work better for you. Don't just take, "No," for an answer from senior management.

The application is phenomenal. They continually add new things, more plugins, and modifications to the way things work. It just gets better as they go.

We don't plan to use the solution for long-term retention at this time, but we are looking at going into a hybrid cloud solution in the near future which we may be using long-term retention for to make a duplicate copy of everything we have in our Massachusetts data center into a cloud solution. Whether it be an Azure or Amazon location on the cloud.

While I can't really speak to whether it would allow us to do it, the application is set up to create a duplicate of the actual servers in Arizona. That's how it works so quickly. If we ever had a problem, I could always revert back from the duplicates that we have out in Arizona using the application, if necessary. Luckily, we haven't had a need for that, and hopefully never do.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

I initially started using it as a disaster recovery solution, and I am still using it as a cyber test recovery solution. I also began to use it as a migration tool for cloud, from on-premises to cloud.

The replication feature stands out. The way I can sync servers from on-premises to the cloud ensures the consistency of the VMs without hampering their state. This is a very beneficial feature. Once replication is initialized, the complete state of the server is replicated, known as the initial sync. Subsequently, the Bitmap sync occurs, capturing changes on the protected server in real-time and replicating them to the protected site as well. For example, my primary site in Austin, Texas, used to recover to Santa Clara. Recovery was previously tedious, taking a whole day for all servers to bring up and validate their consistency. With the deployment of Zerto, this has significantly improved.

In newer versions, the success rate compared to older versions is quite low. I have tried to implement Zerto version ten in my environment, but for some reason, multiple errors occur, forcing me to revert to the previous version. Despite the previous version being out of support, there is no alternative to getting the newer version working. For example, when a requirement arises to replicate one server located in a different vCenter to another site, I download the latest version and deploy it, but I face issues deploying the VRA agent on the ESX host. This keeps failing despite multiple cases raised with Zerto support, none resolved in a timely manner. By the time the issue is looked into, it is often too late for my requirements, leading me to abandon Zerto ten installation and revert to the earlier versions. Presently, there is an open case with Zerto support concerning Zerto ten deployment issues, yet no fix has been provided. Hopefully, a resolution will be found soon.

I have been using the solution for five to six years.

Initially, I had a few stability issues. While some remain unresolved despite submitting cases, I have found workarounds. These issues do exist, as random crashes occur. Understanding how it works, I avoid troubleshooting, which risks the replication servers. Instead, I promptly delete the malfunctioning elements and set them up again to resume replication, ensuring stability.

In terms of basic troubleshooting, they perform well. However, when engineering support is required, delays occur. One notable example is the challenges faced during total implementation. I have raised three to four cases, yet due to urgency and delays, they were not resolved on time. When more complex issues arise, support takes additional time, but they handle simpler issues within two to three days.

Neutral

Earlier, I used Site Recovery Manager from VMware, which had errors and delays, and was not as flexible compared to Zerto. This prompted me to switch to Zerto. I am also using ASR, the Azure Site Recovery Manager, for cloud-to-cloud operations. Although recent features were introduced, I have not thoroughly explored them, leading to the adoption of ASR.

The setup process took around one month because I was unfamiliar with the product, necessitating some learning. I had daily calls with the account manager and managed to set it up to Zerto's standards within a month.

The deployment was a one-person job handled by two individuals, with me being the primary one. It was straightforward enough for a single person to manage.

I can give it nine out of ten.

We're solving the issues of disaster recovery with it. So, our main use case is disaster recovery. We use it to do real-time replication of our data so that if we needed to failover for whatever reason or we had a disaster at our primary data center, we would be able to spin up in our colo disaster recovery location with minimum downtime. Our delay is about five seconds. So, if something negative were to happen to our data center, our DR copy would be within five seconds of the original copy, which is pretty good. We are also using it for testing.

Our setup is on-prem. It enables you to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but we didn't go that route. We went the route of creating our own colo location. So, instead of leveraging Azure or AWS, we decided to maintain our own facility. Our primary data center is on-prem, and our disaster recovery location is a colo location that we control.

The current version that we're using is 9.5, which is the latest. When we installed it, it was probably version 8.

The mere fact that we're able to do live testing has definitely helped us with deployment times. It has helped us with troubleshooting as well.

It saves effort, time, and money. It saves us the effort of having to make sure that information is replicated. It saves us the time that would be required to build that ad hoc, and it allows it to be more of a point-and-click operation than something for which we have to dedicate more time and effort. Especially in our use case, we're not replicating a crazy amount. We're only replicating about 40 virtual machines and about 13 terabytes of data. It's not a small amount, but it's not a crazy large amount either. To be able to load all those 40 machines at one time with one click and then bring them up either in production failover or production test is fantastic. We haven't really been able to find any competitor that can do that at least as easily as Zerto. That was the driving force.

It has helped to reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing. We can now do it in minutes, whereas previously, we could never do a valid test. We could only test that our backups were copied. We could never spin them up and run them all. Barracuda would do point-in-time backups, but we didn't have any place where we could actually deploy and test them all. That's not necessarily a hundred percent on Barracuda, but from basically not being able to do it, we are now able to do it within a few minutes. 

It has saved all the time that would've been spent validating copies of virtual machines. It can now be used to actually test that everything is connected, everything is spun up properly, and everything is connecting and speaking properly. So, there has been a tremendous amount of time savings. People who were responsible for doing it have saved time because they don't have to spend an entire day testing to make sure that the backup is copied properly so that they can be recovered. Now, we can do a test failover in a few minutes and be able to validate it like that.

It helps to protect VMs in our environment. It has been great in terms of RPOs. Prior to using Zerto, depending upon the level of disaster, it took us hours, days, or weeks to recover. Now, the average recovery is nine seconds. That's pretty big. We went from hours, days, or weeks to seconds and minutes to recover.

Its overall impact on our RTOs has been fantastic.

Its main feature is continuous replication. We are able to have continuous replication, and we are able to have the information available as per recovery point objectives (RPOs) and how much data to retain. The real selling point was to be able to have those statistics and be able to test and show that the replication is occurring properly and then to be able to do live passive testing.

We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit.

In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them. 

Everything is meant to be simple. When something doesn't work, even though what you were trying to do appeared to be very simple, there are probably a lot of pieces behind the scenes. So, to be able to narrow down where in those 100 steps something went wrong can be a little tricky. When there is a failure, there should be a more detailed explanation of what the error is and how to remediate it. Currently, it's a little vague. A part of that could be because we use Zerto on top of Hyper-V. VMware still has a very large market share over Hyper-V and a lot of the information and a lot of the deployment plans are geared towards VMware. So, sometimes, there are new features that first roll out to VMware and then come to Hyper-V.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It's a very stable platform, but sometimes, we've had instances where we've upgraded versions and went from version 8 to 8.5 or to version 9 to 9.5, and there were issues. When you deploy, depending upon how many host machines you have, something might go wrong with the deployment to a host. In that case, you have to do a decent amount of work so that you can remove your virtual machine and restart the underlying host, which is something that you try to avoid doing, but sometimes, that's required in order to resolve the issue so that you can do the upgrade properly and allow that. When there is a problem like that, it can affect the performance of the system, but that falls more under maintenance and upkeep. In general, it does run pretty smoothly. It comes down to the fact that whenever there is a problem, it's a problem. That's the same with anything. Everything works until it doesn't, but in general, it works more than it doesn't, which is what you want. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

Their tech support is pretty good. We've had issues where we have reached out to them, and in general, they're pretty responsive and helpful. A few times, we've had them jump on to do screen shares and pull information and do deeper dives into some of those errors that didn't have detailed inputs about the area we need to look into, and their tech support has been pretty good. Based on the help that they provided for the issues we had, I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were using point-in-time backups provided by Barracuda. The issue with that was that we were taking point-in-time backups, and we were saving them in the cloud, but if we didn't have a location to restore the data to, the backups weren't very useful. They were useful from the backup standpoint but not from a disaster standpoint. In such a case, our primary data center would be wiped out. We would have our cloud copy, which would probably be a day old, and then we would have to take that cloud copy and download it somewhere where we don't have machines. So, we would have to buy servers or buy something to download our backup copies to and then spin them up. That could potentially take weeks. Now, we already have the hardware in place, or if it was a cloud, we would leverage the cloud, but we already have the hardware in place. So, at any point, it's a matter of enabling, going live, and saying failover, and then basically, having our DR copy become live. So, the time to recover was the main reason for going for Zerto.

We still have the Barracuda solution in conjunction. A lot of that is due to the fact that we already have a long-term contract. We have a five-year contract with Barracuda. We probably don't need to renew that, but there are benefits of both. We have kept both solutions because they do slightly different things. The way we use Zerto is that it's focused mainly on disaster recovery. Barracuda gives us more of a long historical recovery for easily recovering things such as files. We have backups of virtual machines that might go back four or five years. You might argue that it is not worth it because a lot of the data that is multiple years old might not be of value.

The way it would work with Zerto is that we could keep a live copy within Zerto for 30 days. After that, we would have to take that data and throw it somewhere else for long-term storage, which would incur additional costs and adds a little bit. Because we already had Barracuda, we leveraged Barracuda for long-term retention. We don't use Barracuda for disaster recovery anymore, but we use it for point-in-time recovery. We take a backup that gets shipped to the cloud to have an extra copy that is just there, which then becomes part of a historical backup where we could go back six or seven months, whereas Zerto is only for recovering files up to a few days. Anything older than those few days would be recovered via Barracuda.

Zerto can do a backup for or recover data longer than that period of time, but it becomes a little bit different process. When we looked at Zerto three years ago, the ransomware, journaling, and being able to go back a few hours and restore your entire environment back to a point in time were nice features, but they weren't the selling point. The selling point was disaster recovery. So, that's the main thing for which we're using it. We are not looking at the ability to go back 30 days to recover a file. I definitely see it as a plus, but because it wasn't the initial selling point, and the way that we architected things, we don't necessarily use that right now. However, when our contract with Barracuda ends, instead of renewing, we could consider just buying long-term retention through a cloud provider and then maintaining a longer history with Zerto.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done. We were pretty much able to have it up in a few hours, but it also depends on your use case and the complexity of your deployment. Like anything, there are a thousand ways to skin a cat. So, it depends upon how you want to have it set up. It depends on:

• How complex groundwork do you want to put in?
• How isolated do you want your test case to be?
• How isolated do you want different things to be set up?

There could be a little bit more complexity, but in general, it's pretty simple to get going. Obviously, there is a lot that goes into it, but the actual work of setting it up, once you have those decisions made, is pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy.

We definitely did a lot of planning, but we did the actual deployment or the actual configuration of it before we engaged with the professional services aspect of our deployment plan. When we bought the software, we had a project management plan and support from Zerto directly. We pretty much did all the setup ahead of time by ourselves. So, in our case, the setup was very simple and very easy.

It does require some maintenance. There are always service updates that are available, and occasionally, there will be little bumps in the road that require maybe reinstalling or updating something. In terms of general maintenance, as compared to other solutions, its maintenance is probably a little bit less than other solutions. Maintenance is still required, but it doesn't require an extreme amount of maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

When we went to locate this software, we worked with ePlus. They made several recommendations on different solutions, and from those recommendations, we narrowed it down and picked Zerto.

I liked them a lot at the time. The sales rep that we had there was fantastic. Unfortunately, a few months after our project was purchased, our sales rep left the company, and then we just never really connected with any of the new people. That has not necessarily something to do with ePlus. They're a large, great company, but what really separated them and made that project beneficial was the account manager that we had during that time period. He was fantastic.

In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie.

We did look at other similar solutions, but what made Zerto the solution that we went with was the fact that it included the recovery of the actual virtual machine. Other solutions had the ability to do the same kind of synchronous or near-continuous data replication. However, if we had the underlying data replicated but our virtual machine's copy or our virtual machine configuration was different or was not at that target location, we would have to then configure those machines to load the underlying data. The feature that made Zerto useful was that it handled that and replicated the virtual machine information as well. So, we didn't have to do that. Once we configure and specify it to replicate a virtual machine, all the data that's associated with it and its configuration is replicated. We don't have to deal with additional steps.

Three years ago, when we were looking at disaster recovery options, a lot of the solutions were targeted at replicating the underlying data but not necessarily how to get that data usable. Getting the data usable part is often the trickiest and the most time-consuming part. So, when you don't have to take that into consideration because it's already being copied and it's current, your downtime associated with a failure event is reduced. That was definitely a selling point for us.

We looked at Veeam, and we looked at how we use Pure Storage for our underlying data storage. They have the capabilities of doing synchronous, real-time replication, which has improved a lot in the past three years. So, the limitations that made it less appealing a few years ago might have been removed now, but at the same point, that's only the underlying data. We would still have to recreate virtual machines that will spin up that data. There is no other real solution that I'm aware of that does this as nicely. Even some of the other Microsoft native solutions aren't as nice and user-friendly. They definitely don't give you the ability to do testing. We couldn't spin up a replicated copy without causing issues. Zerto allows us to spin up a test version of our production software or our production VMs without affecting the production copy.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done, but once it's running, it's very simple. If it's set up right, it literally involves a few clicks. Testing and failover can be done in a few clicks, which makes a very complex thing simple. So, if you set it up and you have the groundwork done, then with one or two clicks, you could do major testing, and you could do major failovers. From that standpoint, it's extremely simple to use once it's up and running.

They have a lot of other features that we don't really leverage 100%. We use it only for disaster recovery, but it also contains features for ransomware where you can recover files. Although we don't use that feature, that's definitely a benefit. We have recovered files from time to time but not because of ransomware. We maintain a history of up to 30 days for each of the virtual machines that we have. We have a different solution to recover files older than 30 days.

We don't really use Zerto for immutable data copies, which goes into the ransomware where you expect not to be corrupted by ransomware. We use it, but we've never had a case where we had to recover from a ransomware instance or anything like that. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery and continuous replication. We have a separate backup tool that takes point-in-time backups. In terms of the 3-2-1 rule for our organization’s recovery strategy, our separate point-in-time backups give us three locations. At a point, we have three copies of the data in different stages.

It hasn't reduced our downtime in any situations because we didn't need to do disaster recovery. So, from that standpoint, we don't have any baselines before or after.

It hasn't directly reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, but the amount of time required per person or the time required by people for validation has greatly reduced. We never had anybody dedicated to it as their only function, but the amount of time that's required to do testing is significantly less. So, there has definitely been a saving of time. Similarly, there has been no change in the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery management. In theory, it wouldn't because, in most IT organizations, a lot of people wear different hats at different times. We didn't have a dedicated person or a dedicated team only to validate backup and recovery.

Compared to other solutions, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

It's deployed on private cloud. I have two data centers, one in New Jersey, one in Ohio, which is my job site. I'm using a Zerto instance for my servers and another for my VDI machines. I can replicate everything.

When COVID started, everybody started to work from home and the internet connection to our New Jersey data center was saturated. But we had the same internet connection in Ohio, so why not use it? We needed to spread the load between data centers, so I used Zerto to failover 60 of our 175 users in New Jersey to Ohio, and they were able to work for nine months from Ohio. They were able to connect to their machines from home via Ohio, and it worked perfectly. Later, when we realized that the COVID situation would continue, we increased our internet connection to New Jersey and, using Zerto, I migrated all 60 users back. When COVID happened, Zerto saved the day. We didn't have to stop our business for a minute. It was seamless.

We also had problems, a few times, with SQL Server. That was pretty early on in our use of Zerto, and I used Zerto to recover it from our other site. We were on SQL on the other site for a week until they figured out what was going on and fixed everything. After that, I used Zerto and migrated back to New Jersey. That was a big save.

When I started with this company we used the Double-Take solution. It was very cumbersome and very difficult and we could only back up some servers. And when something happened, we could only have a limited number of people connect. When we started using Zerto, I was able to give every user a machine. Everybody could now log in to their machines and see all the applications, everything the same as it was before. People couldn't believe that was possible. To do it we created a fully virtualized environment.

In addition, we are a very heavily regulated organization because we're working under SEC guidelines. We have large institutional clients like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. For them, we have to prove our resilience and our ability to work in any situation. If we cannot do that, they will pull their money out. We run DR tests and we share the test results with them. Our clients want to see them. We couldn't do that without this solution. Zerto gives us the easiest and the most reliable way to do it. When we ran DR tests before we had Zerto, it was always very difficult. It would take almost a day to bring things back. With Zerto, I can have everything back in 15 minutes. In 15 minutes everyone can connect and start to work.

With our old solution, in a DR situation, we would need three system administrators working for hours before they got things to a point where a few people could start working again. And it took almost 24 hours to get everything back. And at the end of that time, we were exhausted. The first time we did it with Zerto, for practice, we clicked a couple of times and just sat back and watched.

It decreases the time it takes to recover and the number of people needed to do it. We were planning to hire a person who would be dedicated to our DR solution, before Zerto, because that was the only way we had found it could be done. When we installed Zerto for a DR test, we were surprised how easy it was to do it. When we hired another system administrator, because we had grown as a company, I gave him something like a half-hour lesson on how to use Zerto and he started to use it himself.

The continuous data protection is very important. Even if it's synchronous, right now we are at seven seconds difference, so we practically have all our data available, always.

Our old solution, Double-Take, required a lot of scripts and they were prone to mistakes. Zerto is so easy to use that when I showed it to my manager, he said jokingly, "Huh. I could use it myself, I don't need you." Zerto is most elegant. When I look at what's going inside Zerto, I see there is a ton of scripting but it's hidden from me. I just need to specify what I want to protect and where I want to protect it; very simple stuff. When they first brought in the solution, I saw what they were doing, how they were running all these commands, but again, I don't need to do any of that. If you do things right and you test it, it will just work with no issues at all. Nobody can come close to the elegance of Zerto.

I have been using Zerto since 2010 or 2011. We got Zerto when it was at version 1.2. They had just started.

I just upgraded to 9.0 U1. We ran our tests for IT a few days ago, because we made some network changes. And Zerto just worked perfectly.

From what I understand, if instead of 15 servers you need to protect 100 servers or 2,000 servers, if you properly plan everything it doesn't matter how many servers you have. To bring back 15 servers or 115, 15 VMs for 115 VMs, there is no difference. It will take the same amount of time.

Their technical support is great. When we have issues they work with us and troubleshoot until we figure out what is going on. I have no complaints. 

Initially, we used Double-Take on physical servers. We had five physical servers in our data center at that time. Later, we migrated all our servers from physical to virtual, using Compellent storage at the time. We were able to replicate our storage for DR, but it took a long time because there was a lot of manual work that was not scriptable. After that we found another solution, but it also required a lot of scripting and it was pretty cumbersome. It worked but it was pretty difficult.

Finally, Zerto came to us and we tried it. It was just day and night, a big difference between the previous solution and Zerto.

If you give me two Windows Servers, it will take less than 24 hours to replicate everything and you can already run a DR test. It's really amazing.

Initially with Zerto, every time there was an upgrade, I practically had to do everything from scratch. I had to recreate the groups and everything else. It didn't work well and I told them, "This is a big issue." In version 5, I believe, they resolved this and I could pick up my environment and restore it. When I upgraded my Zerto from version 8 to 9, it worked great and automatically. After half an hour I was running a brand new environment.

Every single penny we have invested in Zerto has been worth it. It has allowed us to grow our business and acquire more clients. Our clients are very happy with our DR solution. That's why they give us more money. For a company like ours, the more money we manage, the more revenue we have. From that perspective, Zerto has paid for itself 100 times.

It was a little bit expensive. It took a long time for us to get DR for our workstations. It's one thing when you have 15 servers, but when we needed to bring on almost another 200 users, and each was the same price as the servers, it was too expensive. But Zerto worked with us and gave us a solution that was pretty decent in terms of price. For my company, it was a good solution.

We bought those initial 200 licenses and we pay for maintenance every year, but it's stable. We don't have any issues. We get support, we can upgrade to a new version when we want, and they will support the changes on the ESX host.

I have looked at Commvault and HPE but I haven't found anything I like, so far, as much as Zerto.

Initially, when we looked at some of the other solutions, before Zerto, we were thinking that we would have a special person who would constantly build scripts. But Zerto is so simple that I  don't spend much time on this side of things anymore. My manager said, "I don't need to worry if you go on vacation because I can just open the console and click 'Failover,' and that's it. Everything will be done in the background." Zerto is an incredible solution.

It's not only about how much easier it is to install, set up, configure and, after that, run tests for DR. It also works. With previous solutions, DR tests failed a few times because they didn't work well or took too long. We would start a DR test at nine o'clock in the morning and we still couldn't bring things up until three in the afternoon. People couldn't wait that long. They hated those DR tests. Now, when we run DR tests at nine o'clock, everybody is back by 10 o'clock. We're really happy with this kind of scenario.

When we talk to other vendors I say to them, "Okay, you want me to try your solution. Can you promise me, when it comes to DR tests or real DR, that in 15 minutes I can start to use my DR system?" They ask me, "Who gives you this ability to run in 15 minutes?" I tell them, "Zerto. I've done DR tests with Zerto for many years, and within 15 minutes we are up and running." They are surprised.

The main thing to figure out before going with Zerto is, from a business point of view, what your company needs. What level of protection do you need? What regulations do you have to conform to? Can you survive with a seven-second difference in the data? Is 15 minutes enough or not?

Also, you need to take into consideration, from the licensing perspective, not only the Zerto licenses, but that you need to have a license for ESX, vCenter, hosts, and hardware. You need to count everything before you decide to go with Zerto. In our case, we're doing private cloud, and we needed to build that private cloud first. You have to decide if that is workable for you or you're okay using Azure or some other public cloud provider. Once you work through all that, Zerto will definitely be very good for you.

One issue we decided on, from a business perspective, was to divide our users into two groups: level one and level two. Level one users should be able to connect after 15 minutes and level-two users will be brought back after all level-one issues have been resolved, which should be within a couple of hours. When the business made that decision, we created the groups.

We're also working with Zerto as a ransomware backup solution. Right now we are using seven-day journaling but we're putting it on external storage or cloud. We're thinking about a one-year solution where we can go back to any particular point in time, bring the server back, and get all the files. We upgraded our version so we can start to use external storage. Zerto is one of the greatest applications we have for security and vigilance.

They did everything so well that I don't know how it can be improved. It's one of the best solutions among all the different components I have. I would rate most of the other solutions we're using between seven and nine out of 10. Only Zerto is a 10, along with my malware solution, Minerva Labs. Both companies are from Israel and I always grade both a 10 when I talk to others.

We use it for disaster recovery. We use it for some testing. And we use it for hot backups on databases.

This past summer we had multiple hurricanes down south. We host for our clients, and what we did was proactively move them from their location down south up to our Boise data center in Idaho. We were able to do that with Zerto.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. I was actually part of a project to move a data center, and we used Zerto to move it. We moved 20,000 virtual machines and the downtime was just a reboot of each machine. Before, it probably would have taken at least six people in multiple teams to do it, whereas in this move it was just two engineers from the same team who did it.

In addition, we recently had a corrupt database that we recovered using Zerto. If we didn't have Zerto, we would have had to do a restore and we would have had a loss of data of up to 24 hours, because the backups were done every 24 hours. In this case, we were able to roll the database back to a point in time that the DBAs deemed had good data. There was very little data loss as a result. Using Zerto in that situation saved us at least eight hours and from having to use multiple teams.

In that situation, for the recovery we would have done a restore from backup. The problem is we would have had X amount of hours of data loss. I don't know how long it would have taken the DBAs or our developers or app owners to reproduce the information that would have been lost. That could have ended up taking days. I've seen it take days in the past to recreate data that was lost as part of the recovery process.

Another point is that the solution has reduced the staff involved in overall backup and DR management. The big thing is that it reduces the teams involved. So rather than having the SAN team involved, the backup team involved, and the virtualization engineers, it ends up being just the virtualization engineers who do all the work. It has reduced the number of people involved from six to eight people down to a single engineer.

The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution.

Having been in disaster situations myself, one of the things that a lot of companies miss is the fact that, during a test, it's all hands on deck, but during a disaster not all those hands are there. I don't know what the statistics are, but it's quite infrequent that you have the ability to get the technical people necessary to do technical stuff. I was also part of the post-9/11 disaster recovery review, and one of the key conversations was about situations where an organization had the solution in place but they didn't have the people. Their solutions were quite complex, whereas with Zerto you can do it with a mouse. You can do it with non-technical staff, as long as you have your documentation in proper order.

I've been doing disaster recovery for 20 years and, in my opinion, the solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features. The back-end technology, the split-write and the appliances, they've got that down very well.

There's room for improvement with the GUI. The interface ends up coming down to a personal preference thing and where you like to see things. It's like getting into a new car. You have to relearn where the gauges are.

I'd also like to see them go to an appliance-based solution, rather than our standing up a VM. While the GUI ends up depending on personal preference, the actual platform that the GUI is created on needs to go to an appliance base.

Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it.

I've been using Zerto for five years.

We had a rough start, but in defense of that, we were doing a lot of going long-distance with what we had.

The thing that I liked most about the problems that we had was that Zerto wasn't afraid to admit it. They also weren't afraid to put us in touch with the right staff on their side. It wasn't a big deal for me to talk to their developer. Normally, when you're at that level, the developers are shielded from customers, whereas with Zerto it was a more personal type of service that I got. We had a problem and they put me in touch with the developer who developed that piece of the solution and we brought it to resolution.

It's very scalable. We grew from just a few hundred to a few thousand pretty quickly, and there were very few hiccups during that process.

Out of the gate, when you call their number, they could do better. 

The thing is that I've developed such a good relationship with all of them, at all levels at Zerto, that I know who to call. If you're off the street and you call in, you're going to get that level-one support who's going to move you through it. When I call in, they put me right through to the level-two support and I move from there. It's like any support, if you know the right people, you can skip the helpdesk level and go right into the engineering.

The disaster recovery solution for the company I'm currently with was the typical restore from backups. They were using SAN replication as part of it. 

Personally, I've used many solutions over the years, starting with spinning tape, boot-from-disk, and then as we virtualized the data center, we started doing SAN-based replication. I've deployed and supported VMware Site Recovery Manager under different replication solutions, and then moved into Zerto. Prior to Zerto I used several different vendors' products.

Having been in disasters, living in Florida and experiencing them, I understand what it takes to recover a data center. I worked for my city in Florida and volunteered in the emergency operation center. Not only did I sit in technical meetings on how to recover computers, but I also sat in meetings on how to recover the city. So I have a different perspective when it comes to disaster recovery. I have a full view of how and what it takes to recover a city, as well as how and what it takes to recover a data center. Using that background, I pull them together.

As a result, I first look for a solution that works. That's key. If it doesn't work, it's out the door. The second factor is its ease of use. It has to be very easy to use, just a few clicks of the mouse and you're able to do a recovery. Zerto meets my requirements.

Not only was the initial setup simple, but upgrades actually work and backward compatibility during the upgrades work. I've been doing IT for 25 years and it's one of the few solutions that I have come across where backups work, not only doing the actual backup, but they're compatible with what you have in place. Upgrades are very impressive and very seamless.

I started with working with Zerto during the 4.5 version. Right after we deployed that we went to 5.0. The length of time really varies depending upon your engineering platform process. I did the PoC and all the documentation, and then I did the deployment into production. I spent a few days on the PoC because I needed to know what its performance impact was going to be on the host, on the VMs. Then I had to see what the replication impact was going to be as well. 

And documentation took me a couple of weeks. Because I've been in disasters, when I do documentation I do it so that I can hand it to anybody, literally, including—and I've done it—to the janitor. I've handed the documentation to the janitor and I've had them sit down and do a recovery. I'm picky on documentation. 

The actual sit-down at the keyboard to do the deployment, after everything was in place, including getting a service account, getting the VM deployed, etc., was quick. In one day we had it up and running.

I tend to do it myself because I'm old-school. I want to know how it works right from the ground up so that if I have to do any trouble shooting, I know where not to go to look at things. If you understand how something works, you can troubleshoot a lot faster.

I'm the lead architect, engineer, and troubleshooter. We have about four other people who are involved with it. We have several people because of our locations. We have more here, in the Idaho area, than we do in our other data center. We have one down in the southeast, hurricane area, of the United States. They're not expected to do a whole lot of disaster recovery, whereas we are.

I don't dive too much into the pricing side of things, but I'd like to see better tiering for Zerto's pricing. We do multi-tier VMs. I don't think I should be paying a penalty and price for a tier-three VM where I don't need a really tight SLA like I do for a tier-one.

Also, if we're looking to replace the data center backup solution, I have VMs that I may not need for a week in the event of a disaster. I'd like to see a backup price per VM, rather than the tier-one licensing that I currently pay for, per VM. I'd like to see better tiering in regards to the licensing.

We have Commvault, Cohesity, and Veeam. Veeam is probably the closest to Zerto for ease of use. The problem is that Veeam doesn't have the technical background of the split-write that Zerto has. Veeam can be very painful. It can't protect any VM in your infrastructure. Its process of doing snapshots is very painful. Whereas with Zerto, it doesn't matter how busy the VM is, it can protect it. Veeam does not do it that way, but its GUI is pretty easy to use. But again, if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how easy it is.

Commvault and Cohesity are both complicated solutions. Cohesity is like Veem, it is snapshot technology. Its GUI is okay but it's a little cryptic and that's the thing that I don't like about it. With 25 years of doing IT, I can tell that the interface that Cohesity designed was done by Linux engineers. It's very kludgy with multiple clicks. You've got to know where to go. With Zerto, it's plain and it's simple to use.

Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use.

What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication for many years. If you're doing long distance, you have very high latency and you need to compensate for that. I worked with Zerto developers and we were able to tune replication to meet our site-to-site requirements. That was a key thing, and that's missed a lot of times. When people deploy the solution, they're not always keeping up with the SLA, and it has nothing to do with how it was deployed. It has to do with the pipe and the latency between site-to-site. That tends to be missed when deploying replication.

It is on our drawing board to look at Zerto for backups and long-term retention. I would say we're going to end up using it. It makes sense, at least from my standpoint, to keep things simple. It already has the data, so why not use it to move it wherever?

When it comes to the fact that it provides both backup and disaster recovery in one platform, I had never thought about the backup piece. When they announced it, it just made sense to me as an engineer with a logical mind. "Hey, I'm already holding the data, shoveling it across states. Instead of putting it here, why not put it over here at the same time?" So I was very excited about a two-for-one product. My company has backup solutions and they're struggling with them. I'm looking to replace their backup solutions with Zerto, probably in 2021.

We're also still looking at doing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We've done some testing with it. In my previous company we were using it and deployed it around the globe. Due to border restrictions, we had to go to the cloud with it. It was big because we were able to go to the cloud and we didn't have to stand up another data center. I'll be conservative and say that it saved us a few million dollars.

I give Zerto a nine out of 10. The only reason that I'm not giving it a 10 is that I'd like to see the GUI made into an appliance.