Zerto Reviews

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 are using Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for on-premises to Azure, and also from Azure to Azure between different regions.

At this time, we are only using it for DR. However, we will also be using it for data center migration.

I would rate Zerto's ability to provide continuous data protection a ten out of ten. The tool is very easy to use. It's also a very simple and very quick setup. The outcome from our setup showed that we had very low RPO and RTO. The interface is intuitive and as such, anyone can log in and figure out how to use the management utility.

Being able to achieve such a low RPO and RTO has significantly reduced our lengthy recovery times. For example, a recovery that previously took four hours is now completed in 40 minutes. Furthermore, it allowed us to complete the data center migration very quickly, with very little downtime.

Using Zerto has allowed us to reduce the number of people involved from a failover standpoint. There are only a few of us who can perform the failover and it is done with the click of a button. From an overall verification standpoint, the application owners are still required to verify.

We have saved money by performing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center for a couple of reasons. First, we saved money by not having to upgrade our hardware and pay for additional facility costs. Second, in Azure, we saved between 10% and 20% compared to Azure site recovery.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capability.

The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration. Importantly, we were able to do this without affecting the DR setup.

When you're configuring the VPGs, they can improve the process by looking at the hardware configuration of the existing VMs and then recommending what they should be, rather than us having to go back and forth. For example, on the VM configuration portion of creating the VPGs, it should already figure out what sort of CPU, memory, and capacity you need, rather than us trying to write that down and then going in afterward to change it.

The logging could be a lot better from a troubleshooting standpoint. If the log was more detailed and more user-friendly, we wouldn't have to make the calls to the support to try and figure out where the problem lies.

They could improve on how many machines the management server can handle for replication.

We have been using Zerto for approximately two years.

Stability-wise, it's pretty good and we've been happy so far. We've had a couple of issues here and there, but nothing that wasn't easily resolved.

The scalability is pretty good. If you need to scale then you can always add more appliances on the Azure side, which is very easy to set up. For the on-premises side, you only need one management server.

We are not a very large environment; we have approximately 400 servers, and then we are protecting about 125 VMs. In terms of users, we have close to 3,000 full-time employees and then about 25,000 contractors. Being a recruiting company, we have a large base of contractors.

The site reliability engineers are the ones that use Zerto more often, and there are three or four of them.

The technical support is pretty good. The level-one has a lot of knowledge and because we've been using the product for a while now, if we get to the point of calling support, usually we have everything ready to go. We explain the situation to level-one support and we can always escalate easily to the next engineer.

Prior to using Zerto, for our on-premises environment, we did a typical database replication from our production site to a secondary site in another city across the country on the West Coast. We also replicated the storage and application code, and it was a very lengthy process. One of the environments took as long as four hours.

We switched primarily for the time savings, although there was also the cost factor. In order to meet the growing demand of our business in IT, we would have had to upgrade all of our hardware, as well as pay extra for facility costs. As such, it did help out on both sides of things.

Also, just the process itself was a lot simpler. It would have required coming up with five or six different teams to do the individual parts, whereas this automates everything for you from a server level.

We use a different product as our backup solutions. Zerto is strictly for DR and data center migration.

To set up the initial environment, it took about an hour. This included setting up the appliance, making sure it's added to the domain, and things like that. But then, creating all of the VPGs will probably be another couple of hours.

The strategy was that we already had everything ready to go, which included our server list and all of the VPG names. If you have that, you could probably have everything completed in half a day, or a day, from a setup standpoint. Of course, this is depending on how large of an environment it is, but for us, we set up five or six environments and it took us approximately half a day.

We had assistance from the sales engineer. 

When we did the PoC, they showed us everything. Once we purchased the product, we used Zerto analytics to determine how many appliances we would need on the Azure side. Then, using that, we were able to break up the VPGs between the different sites.

We have an enterprise agreement that combines all of the features, and we have approximately 250 licenses. There are two different licensing models. The one we purchased allows us to support Azure, as well as the on-premises jobs. This was a key thing for us and, I think, that is the enterprise license. They have a license for just their backup utility, and there's the migration option as well, but we went with the enterprise because we wanted to be able to do everything going forward.

Zerto needs to improve significantly on the cost factor. I know friends of mine in other businesses would not look at this when it's a smaller shop. At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop.

We're very lucky here that finances weren't an issue, but it definitely plays a factor. If you look at other companies who are considering this product, it would be very expensive for somebody who has more than 500 servers to protect.

The bottom line is that they definitely have to do better in terms of cost and I understand the capabilities, but it's still quite pricey for what it does. It would make a huge difference if they reduced it because as it is now, it deters a lot of people. If you've got somebody who's already using VMware or another product, the cost would have to be dropped significantly to get them on board.

We did evaluate other vendors, but this was the only tool that was able to fully automate the conversion from on-premises VMware to Azure. This was important because our goal, or our DR objective, was to set up DR in Azure. Every other tool required having some sort of intervention from us to convert them to Azure format.

I don't recall all of the tools that we looked at, but I think we looked at VMware SRM and also a product from EMC, from a replication standpoint. Ultimately, from a strategy standpoint, this was the only thing that was really capable of doing what we wanted.

My advice for anybody who is interested in Zerto is definitely to do a PoC. Run it against your environment to do a thorough comparison. This is the best scenario; instead of just picking the product, let it go through the different options. For example, whether you are doing on-premises to on-premises, or on-premises to the cloud, this product can do it, but you'll only see the results that you want to see if you grind it against your own environment.

Overall, we are very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use it for disaster recovery and to migrate machines from one location to another.

The big thing for us was our disaster recovery. At that point, we were only able to do a disaster recovery test once a year. Now, we officially do a disaster recovery test once a quarter and we do a subsequent test once a month to verify that it's doing what it's doing and the IP address is changed. Instead of one mass disaster recovery exercise, we're easily able to perform up to 12 in the year.

It allows us to verify in a much more granular aspect whether our data is being migrated or not. Once a year, if we find some issues, we're at least 11, 12 months behind at that point. Every 30 days, if we do a test and we find an issue, we're able to correct that. The time between tests is shorter, which means that if there is a problem we're able to resolve it in a much shorter amount of time versus an entire year, and then waiting another year to see if everything is working again.

When we need to failback or move workloads Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved. We are able to put a machine into Zerto, let it do its magic in migrating the data from one side to the other. We've had instances where we've got machines that are four or five terabytes that we can move from one side to another after it's done synchronizing in 15 minutes or less. Sometimes it takes DNS longer to update than it does for us to move the machine.

Instead of me having a server person, a network person, and a storage person, I can put it into Zerto, let Zerto do its job, fail it over, and then just have the application owner verify that the server is up and running, and away we go. So on a weekend, I don't have to engage a team of people, it can just be myself and one other person to verify that the machine is up and running. It really cuts down on overhead for personnel.

In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy. As far as downtime from an application standpoint, with Zerto, we're from hours down to minutes, which is great when you have applications that are supposed to be the five nines of a time kind of thing.

We have not had any ransomware issues. But we have had an instance where somebody installed something that messed something up. It was a new version of Java and we were able to roll back. Thankfully they realized it fairly quickly because we only keep a 12-hour window. We were able to roll back to almost a per minute instance prior to that installation and recover the server in minutes. Our backup was as of midnight, but they did it at 8:00 in the morning. So we didn't lose eight hours' worth of processing.

If we were going to use our backup solution, it would have taken minutes to restore the actual server, but then from an SQL perspective, we would have had to roll the transaction logs from backups. I couldn't even tell how long that would have taken because we had to do all of the transaction logs, which are taken every five minutes from midnight, all the way to 8:00 AM in five-minute increments. It would have taken considerably longer using traditional methods versus Zerto.

Although it hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery, what it has allowed us to do is actually focus on other things. Since Zerto is doing what it's doing, we're able to not have to stare at it all day every day and make sure that it's working. We have the screen up to make sure there are no errors, but we're able to focus on learning how the APIs work, working on the other products that we own for backup and storage. That's mainly what my group does, we do disaster recovery and storage backups. We have six pieces of our enterprise and before it was just the main piece that we were working on. Now, we're able to actually work with the other five or six entities and start doing their backups and disaster recovery because we have a lot more time.

The failover capabilities are definitely the high spot for us. Previously, when we did disaster recovery it would take us easily a day or two to restore all of our servers. We can do the same thing with Zerto in about an hour and a half.

We're about six or seven seconds behind our production site and it does a really good job of keeping up, making sure that we're up to date. That's one of the other things that we think is just phenomenal about the product, we're able to get in there and put a server in and within usually a few minutes we're protected. Six or seven seconds behind is a pretty good RPO.

Currently, we are using another product for longterm retention, so I don't think we really have any plans on switching over at this point.

Zerto is very easy to use. We did a proof of concept and it took longer to build the Windows servers that had to be installed than it did to actually install it and roll off the product. Our proof of concept became production in minutes.

The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be.

I like the fact that Zerto does what it does and it does it very well. I have had Zerto since version four, so the longterm retention and things like that were never a part of it at that point. I just like the fact that I can install it, I can protect my virtual machines, and I'm comfortable and confident that it's doing things correctly because of the amount of testing that we've done with it.

We have been using Zerto for a little over three years. 

It's very stable. Once a month we verify that the internal mechanisms of Zerto are working. When I do a test failover we check if VMware tools come up, if the IP addresses change, and the things that Zerto is configured to do automatically. Usually, if there's an issue, it's either I did something wrong when I configured it, or I put in the wrong IP address or the VM itself has an issue, the tools aren't loading correctly or at all, or it was trying to do an upgrade and failed. We've actually been able to identify other issues inside the environment that we would not have realized were an issue by doing these tests.

Our next step is not so much increasing the capacity but protecting things to the cloud. We'd like to be able to take those same 350 machines or so do we have, and definitely, if not the important 50 that we have, but all of them, have them not only go to our disaster recovery site but also split to AWS. It's where we have both of the sites, one in one location and one in a vastly different location and if for some reason, one were to go offline, we would have those objects in AWS to be able to spin up and do what we need to do.

We ramped up from that 50 to 350 within a year and Zerto just took it and kept on running. We are still about the same RPO as we were before, we're protecting 60 plus terabytes of data at this point with those 350. It did what it had to do to create new virtual machines, depending on how many disks there are. I think that I was able to scale with our needs really easily. 73 terabytes are what we're protecting right now across 357 VMs, and we have a seven-second RPO. It went from a small number to a very large number. The issues that we've had around Zerto protection has either been that networking wasn't sufficient, or the storage itself had to be increased.

There are three of us who work with Zerto, that's it. We do contact other teams, often our networking team to get an IP address for something. But when it comes to doing the testing, when it comes to doing the implementation, and when it comes to doing verification processes, it's all my team of three people.

I am the data management supervisor and then I have a lead storage administrator and a senior storage administrator.

Prior to Zerto becoming our disaster recovery product, we were using Dell EMC's Avamar for backup recovery and for disaster recovery, which we quickly realized was not going to work out very well. We used it for about four or five years. When your disaster recovery test is five days and you take one and a half to two days to do restores only, that doesn't leave a lot of time for testing. Now, we're able to do the restore in an hour and a half. Then we actually can start testing the exact same day that we did the restores. In most instances, we're able to actually finish everything within 24 hours.

When we first purchased it, the backup portion did not exist. So having backup and DR in one platform really wasn't that important to us. We use Rubrik for backups and longterm retention at this point. We really don't have any intent on using Zerto for longterm retention, as we're extremely happy with Rubrik. But time will tell if we decide to switch over to the LTR portion of the product.

Compared to Avamar, Zerto is extremely easy to use. I can bring Zerto up and start recovering, failing over, or testing machines before I can even log into Avamar. Avamar was very clunky from its interface. It's very easy for Zerto to go in and recover a machine to a certain point in time. Where moving around in Avamar, since it was Java based, would take quite a long time to get from screen to screen. And the workflow was not user friendly at all.

We have different use cases for Zerto and Rubrik but I think that the interface and functionality, as far as what I get out of that particular product, what its purpose is, they're both about on par. Honestly, we've told both companies before, we would love for one to buy the other so that we can get the best of the disaster recovery with Zerto and the best of backup and recovery, longterm retention type things with Rubrik. Because they definitely are probably the two best products for their market segment.

Replacing Avamar has saved us on the cost needed to manage them. As far as management goes, we still use the same three people. But as far as renewal maintenance costs, definitely. Dell EMC is very proud of their products and their renewal maintenance costs were rather large compared to what we do with Zerto.

Initially, we saved about $1,000,000 three years ago by switching to Zerto. Zerto and Rubrik replaced Avamar. But buying both products together, versus what the renewal/upgrade costs would have cost us for Avamar, with all the hardware, was a savings of $1,000,000.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I built a couple of virtual machines to run the manager on, deployed some VRAs, and then attached it to VMware and checked what I wanted to protect. We probably had it up and running in about an hour total. Then we tested protecting some machines, and we had some test boxes that we tested back and forth. It was a very easy setup. People are definitely sold about how easy it is to install and configure.

Initially, our deployment strategy was to protect a small subset of very important machines for an enterprise. And then once we saw how easy it was to implement, how easy it was to put things in there, and how easy it was to protect them, it went from a handful of machines to 350 or so. The initial intent was to protect a very small number. That went from that to a very large number very quickly. Zerto was able to handle it no problem. We actually had to end up buying more storage on the target side because we had not planned on doing that many machines from the initial implementation.

We worked with our account team. We were able to get the proof of concept software, a link to download it. They gave us a key, they gave us a little Excel sheet stating how many machines and IP addresses we needed. Then they basically sat on the phone with us for the hour with WebEx. And we set it up just that moment. That's really the only implementation help that we've ever gotten from them. Everything else has just been pretty much us on our own.

Their support has been very, very good. We've had some technical issues that we've been able to work through with them. Nothing major, but if I have a question or if we run into an issue, we're able to either open up a support ticket and they respond fairly quickly, or we are able to do some searching in their knowledge base. We've had an instance where we did the upgrade to a new version and it caused some problems. But within, I'd say a few hours, we were able to correct it because they had already experienced that. And they had that logged in their internal database of issues. So, they were able to log in, and give us the fix that we needed and get us back on track.

It definitely is a very robust product. The feature set from 4.0, 4.5 to now has increased greatly. We do like the fact, even though we're not using it, that as long as I pay my maintenance when the new features come out like longterm retention, analytics, the monitoring, the reporting, the things that were not there when we first purchased it that are there now, is all part of maintenance. It's not a bolt-on price. They don't charge extra. It was one of the things with Dell EMC that was always a pain was. They had additional costs. With Zerto it's like, "You paid your maintenance, here's a new feature, enjoy!"

They have licensing breaks as far as 50 users, or 50 VMs, 100 VMs, 250 VMs. We ended up with a bunch of 50 at first, and all of our maintenance renewal dates were all different. It ended up costing us more because we didn't just make the investment up front to say that we wanted 250. We had to end up going back and resetting all of our maintenance dates to the same date. It was just a nightmare for our maintenance renewal person. If you did a proof of concept and you like it, definitely make the license investment upfront. That way, you're not trying to piecemeal it afterwards.

Licensing is all-inclusive, there are no hidden fees.

We looked at RecoverPoint for VMs. A long time ago, one of the companies inside this enterprise had used RecoverPoint and it worked really well when it was the physical RecoverPoint. But as things became more virtual, it no longer was as good as it had been, so they had discontinued it. RecoverPoint for VMs was definitely not as easy to set up. It was not as easy to use. It took a lot more resources. This is three-year-old information, but I feel like we would have had to have had more people on our team than we do now with just the three of us. We didn't feel like it was as stable. It certainly wasn't as easy to use, test, or get to work as Zerto was.

My advice would be to do the proof of concept. They're very willing to help you with the installation. Do a proof of concept. If you're not amazed by it, I would be surprised. Everybody that we've ever talked to about this and have done a test of it says, "I can't believe it's just that easy."

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. 

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery, data center movement, long-term recovery, and backup recovery.

Zerto took our disaster recovery practice from sixteen hours down to thirty minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the fully automated failover. The orchestration made the failover very easy for anyone who wasn't necessarily technically knowledgeable to be able to failover a machine.

I love Zerto's near-synchronous replication. I've been using Zerto for three years at my current employer and many years before that. It's been great. Anywhere I've used it, it's made the failover process a lot easier so that pretty much anybody can do it. This feature is our number one priority because we can keep our critical apps running if we have a failure, or even if we have a misconfiguration, it's very easy to recover something quickly.

We've moved some of our workloads to the cloud and back from the cloud using Zerto. The native tools provided by the cloud provider were not as seamless. Having DR in the cloud is very important to us because we trust that the cloud provider will provide a solution, but we also want to make sure that for our business purposes, we have a backup to disaster recoveries so that we're able to recover somewhere else if necessary.

We use Zerto to support DR on the AWS platform. We go between two different clouds. We go from VMware to Azure and also AWS.

Zerto made this quite seamless, especially going between two different clouds. It's just a matter of a couple of clicks. You don't need to understand what's happening on the back end.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It took our RPO from around four hours and now it could be seconds. We can recover the machine in under a minute as far as the boot time. We're between five and ten seconds RPO.

The magnitude of Zerto is much faster. We used to do a disaster recovery failover of our critical systems. It took about sixteen hours and once we had implemented Zerto, it took around thirty minutes to do for the same exact systems.

I would like for them to support additional hypervisor options. They support VMware but if they supported Hyper-V or Nutanix, it would be beneficial.

We have been using Zerto for three years. 

It's been great. We've had it for three years. The only time we reboot the machines is for normal patches. We don't have to do anything else. It just works. We don't have to think about it. We've never had any issues over the three years we've been running.

We started Zerto with a small footprint. We only did a few VMs as a POC with two nodes on each side. Then we've grown it to 34 nodes on each side, including the cloud. It's always the same amount of resources. We're running 150 protected VMs in there. It runs really well. 

The few times we've had to use customer service, it's never been for anything that was really broken. It's more informational or because we didn't understand how the product works. They've been great with communication, they get back to us, and even if they don't get an answer right away in one day, they'll let us know with the ticket updates that they're still working on it. 

It's been really good as far as the little interaction we've had. The one nice thing is that we've never had to use it for anything that's been broken or that it's not working.

They have great communication. They don't just send you links to KB articles. 

Positive

We looked at other solutions before we purchased Zerto. We did a bake-off with a couple of other solutions. Zerto blew everything else away. The functionality is the same as everybody else, but the amount of time it takes to implement Zerto is a lot quicker. 

Making changes if you want to add another machine or another workload takes virtually seconds, whereas we found other systems took a planning time and could take hours to get implemented correctly.

The setup was great. We had one of our newest engineers run through it because as part of the POC, the salesperson showed us how to install it. It was very straightforward. We took somebody who knew nothing about Zerto, had them install it and they had it installed and running in about fifteen minutes. It is quite easy to use. 

I can't say it's the same for SRM. There's a lot of documentation, whereas, with Zerto you point to the button, you push, and it works. 

We did the full installation ourselves.

We got the recovery time from sixteen hours to thirty minutes. Prior, when it took sixteen hours, there would be about ten or more people who were waiting for systems to come online to be able to test. 

With Zerto, within an hour, we get the systems up, and then it's thirty minutes to test. Everybody can go home. There's a lot less time for people to be available. Zerto makes it much easier and quicker to get completed.

The licensing model per VM is great. It's a good way to license it because you want to protect only the devices that you're looking to protect. As far as getting the licensing and working with the sales team, they're very responsive. There's a lot of great communication, it's good all around.

We looked at VMware SRM. We also looked at a manual process. We chose Zerto for the simplicity and the cost ratio was phenomenal. It's easy enough that we've had nontechnical people able to failover just by clicking a button. 

For Zerto, you add the VM in the VPG or workload, point it to the target, pick where you want it to land, hit go, and it's done. With SRM, in comparison, you'd have to make sure it's being replicated between the two SANs. You have to go to a different UI, configure all of it, make sure that's working, then go into SRM and configure all the orchestration parts. It takes a lot more planning. You really have to make sure that all the different systems work together, whereas Zerto takes care of all that for you.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten, there is some room for improvement. The drawback for me is that it's not compatible with every single hypervisor. If we wanted to go with another vendor for a hypervisor locally, then we'd have to look for a different solution, and there's nothing really out there that is comparable to what Zerto can do.

We use Zerto to replicate critical VMs between data centers. We also use it to do local replication whenever the servers do not have shared storage. We have recently used it to migrate some workloads from Azure down to our on-premises data center.

Zerto has improved our organization by simplifying everything because the storage is agnostic. We used SRM (Site Recovery Manager) from VMware, and it's very tied to the storage, and it has to be the same storage on both sides. The whole replication is at the storage level unless you use vSphere in the middle, which defeats the purpose. This is data storage, and you can use it if you can see it, which is very convenient.

We use the solution for one-to-one replication from data center one to data center two, from server one to server two, or from the cloud to on-premises.

We have used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment, and its overall effect on your RPOs has been fantastic.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is simple and amazing compared to other disaster recovery solutions.

I have previously used Site Recovery Manager.

We chose to use Zerto because of the RPO and because we wanted to eliminate the dependency on storage. Everybody on my team is familiar with the tool, and it's easy to use.

The new licensing model didn't work out for us because we used one-to-one replication. The other problem is that the Linux appliance is not available for everybody, and you must have a certain license. It's very important for us that if, at some point, those servers get compromised, or that server gets patches, I don't want to rely on Windows to protect Windows.

You want this hardened appliance to protect our critical workloads. If they can make that available from version one, it shouldn't matter what license you have. This is the best way to do it, and we are going to deprecate Windows support.

I have been using Zerto for five to six years.

Besides running it on Windows, Zerto is a stable solution.

If they need more space, they grab it. If you move the SLA or want to keep more logs or history for the DVR function, you have to check everything before making your claim.

The solution’s technical support is very good.

The solution's deployment is very easy.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Implementing failover to a secondary data center is crucial for ensuring business continuity in the event of primary data center loss. This strategy involves automatically redirecting operations and services to the secondary data center when the primary one becomes unavailable. This not only minimizes downtime but also enhances overall system reliability. 

The failover process requires robust synchronization mechanisms to ensure data consistency between the primary and secondary data centers. Regular testing and monitoring are essential to validate the effectiveness of the failover mechanism and identify and address any potential issues proactively. 

In summary, failover to a secondary data center is a strategic measure to safeguard against disruptions, offering a resilient solution for maintaining seamless operations in dynamic and challenging environments.

Zerto has significantly enhanced our organization's resilience and data protection capabilities. Its real-time replication and failover features have played a pivotal role in minimizing downtime during unexpected events, ensuring business continuity. 

The platform's automation and orchestration capabilities have streamlined our disaster recovery processes, reducing manual intervention and accelerating recovery times. 

The point-in-time recovery options provided by Zerto have proven invaluable in mitigating the impact of data corruption or accidental deletions. This has bolstered our data integrity and provided a safety net against unforeseen data-related issues.

The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization. Conducting live failover tests allows us to validate the effectiveness of our disaster recovery setup in a controlled environment. This feature ensures that all components are in place and functioning as expected, providing confidence in our ability to respond to real-world disruptions. 

Additionally, the ability to choose a specific point in time for recovery down to the seconds is crucial for data integrity. This granular control allows us to roll back to a precise moment, mitigating the impact of data corruption, accidental deletions, or other unforeseen issues. It adds a layer of precision to our recovery process, minimizing potential data loss and enhancing overall resilience.

The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers. Currently, the process is largely manual, and introducing automated failovers after a certain time threshold would enhance efficiency and responsiveness. Automated failovers can reduce the dependency on manual intervention, allowing for quicker and more proactive responses to disruptions. In the next release, the inclusion of scheduled or automated failovers would be a valuable addition. This feature would empower organizations to set predefined parameters and triggers for failovers, ensuring a timely and automated response to potential issues. It not only streamlines operations but also adds an extra layer of reliability to the overall disaster recovery strategy.

I've been using the solution for six months.

We did not have a solution before.

We had great help from the company in terms of setting up our environment.

We implemented through a vendor; I'd rate the experience ten out of ten.

Anything is the worth the cost for virtually no downtime. Time is money.

We did not evaluate other options.

It is a great solution overall, however, it could use some upgrades with automation.

We use the solution for replicating VMs from our on-site VMWare sites to both Google Cloud and Azure clouds. This allows us to feel confident not only in our disaster recovery capabilities but also in testing applications from our on-site data center to isolated cloud instances where there won't be any IP address or domain name system conflicts.  

The continuous backup gives us a better point in time recovery. It also reduces the amount of bandwidth to move the Zerto VM data from site to site, and we like that.

Zerto has improved our organization in several ways, particularly in the realm of disaster recovery, data protection, and business continuity.  

With Zerto's near-zero recovery time, our critical applications and services can be quickly restored, minimizing the impact on business operations.  

The data replication ensures that there is a consistent and up-to-date copy of the information. This helps protect against data loss and ensures data integrity.  With Zerto's single pane of glass, it's easier for IT administrators to monitor and manage their disaster recovery and data protection strategies. This has led to more efficient operations and reduced administrative overhead.

Zerto supports multi-cloud environments, allowing our organization to replicate and protect our important data across different cloud providers and sites. This flexibility has benefited our businesses with our diverse cloud strategies and our on-site data centers in different locations.  

Zerto helped our organization meet compliance requirements by ensuring data protection and recovery strategies align with our regulatory standards. 

Additionally, Zerto has incorporated security features to safeguard the replicated data.

Zerto needs to improve its documentation. It seems like some documents are copied from other older documentation, with misleading screenshots or incorrect steps.  

This can be confusing when newly introduced to a product or in a crisis situation such as a disaster recovery test or a true disaster recovery. The documentation needs to be revised, reviewed, and registered to be correct. Perhaps Zerto should consider an outside consultant to review and approve any documentation that is released.

I've used the solution for about a year.

It's very stable, and we have had no issues.

it does scan well and does what it claims to do.

Support needs to be more flexible.

Neutral

We have only used vRealize.

The documentation was confusing and, at times, incorrect.

We handled the setup in-house.

I don't any ROI information.

I'd advise others to start small.

We also evaluated Veeam.

We use Zerto to back up and recover our data servers.

Zerto is easy to use.

The near-synchronous replication is beneficial and simplifies my work.

I saw the benefits of Zerto immediately after we started using it.

Zerto does a good job of helping protect our virtual environment.

We have seen a 30 percent improvement in our RPO using Zerto.

We have seen a 40 percent improvement in our RTO using Zerto.

Zerto has helped us reduce downtime in several situations and has helped reduce the amount of our disaster recovery testing.

It helped save 20 percent of our time during data recovery situations due to ransomware.

Zerto has had a positive impact on our IT resiliency strategy.

The most valuable feature of Zerto is the quick recovery time.

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

I am currently using Zerto.

I would rate the stability of Zerto eight out of ten.

Zerto is highly scalable.

The technical support offers high-quality responses, but the response time is lengthy.

Neutral

I previously used Azure Backup. Zerto is faster and more dependable. 

The initial deployment was straightforward and took two hours to complete. A team of three people was involved in it.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto is expensive but offers many features that make it competitive.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.