Zerto Reviews

Zerto is primarily used for disaster recovery. In rare cases, it is also used for backup, but only for long-term storage.

We deployed our on-premises infrastructure in two data centers in Russia located in two cities, and multiple regions with combined infrastructure. We also had two data centers in Europe.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. When I started to pilot the product in 2016, I was able to deploy all required components in one or two hours without any help from Zerto engineers. I only used the provided documentation and user interface. In the years since my engineers have also had no issues with the implementation or configuration of the product. Zerto's ease of use is one of its best features.

To ensure good synchronization and replication of changes in a timely manner, we need to have a very good storage subsystem. In our case, we replaced our old storage subsystem with a new one that is based on full flash storage. After that, Zerto started to replicate changes at lightning speed. Many companies experience issues with Zerto if they do not have full flash storage. When full flash storage is implemented, Zerto is the best replication solution because it is highly dependent on the latency of the storage. Therefore, any kind of storage that is not based on full flashes, such as hybrid storage that combines flash and disks, is not a good foundation for Zerto implementation.

Prior to implementing Zerto, our disaster recovery tests had a 70 percent success rate. After implementing Zerto, all DR tests were 100 percent successful. This represents a significant improvement in our DR capabilities.

We used Zerto to replicate our virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery data center in another city over a single connection.

Zerto can achieve very low recovery point objectives due to its efficient use of resources and compression techniques. However, our company has different RPO requirements for different-sized companies. Since our company is small, our standard RPO is four hours. Zerto exceeded this requirement by achieving a typical RPO of about 15 seconds.

Zerto is a very easy and fast tool to use. However, it is important to note that Zerto requires some time to accept changes after migration. This means that if we do not finish testing within the required time frame, we may run into issues with storage space, as Zerto will continue to collect logs and other data. If the testing period is short and we are comfortable switching between data centers frequently, then we should have a very good experience with Zerto. Compared to VMware SRM, Zerto is much more reliable. I have never had any issues switching between production and the DR data center with Zerto, while I have had to start DR exercises from scratch multiple times with VMware SRM.

We always define and perform the required RTO values in our company. RTO is the time required to recover from a switch. It is about how long it will take IT staff to restore the environment. With Zerto, we can now do this in hours, typically one or two hours, for all switching activities. We have 70 virtual machines configured in Zerto, so it takes about one hour to switch all of them. This is four times faster than our previous solutions, such as VMware SRM or storage-based replication.

Zerto has saved us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes. It is very easy to use, so we do not need to spend extra time training engineers on how to use it. All of our engineers were able to start using Zerto immediately. Zerto is also very fast at replicating data. For example, when we set up a new replication, the initial replication was completed very quickly. Another advantage of Zerto is that it does not require additional steps to change the size of virtual disks. With our previous solution, VMware SRM, engineers had to perform additional manipulations in VMware when changing the size of virtual disks. This was a complicated process, but it is not necessary with Zerto. Overall, Zerto is a very user-friendly and efficient data protection solution. It has saved us time and money, and it has made our data recovery process much easier.

Zerto has saved us around 50 percent of our time.

The most important thing to me is Zerto's ability to deliver continuous protection for all data without any issues or incidents. Zerto is a rock-solid product in terms of protection. We migrated to Zerto from VMware SRM because we had a lot of issues with VMware SRM, including the loss of one server.

Zerto's price has room for improvement.

I have used Zerto for six years. 

I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten.

Globally we have around 200 engineers that use Zerto.

Zerto's technical support is excellent. When we first started using Zerto, we had Russian technical support to help us with some complex tasks, such as configuring unique virtual machines. Our engineers had no communication issues with the support team. Later, when we were in a stable period, global technical support was also very helpful. I cannot recall a time when technical support was unable to help us. Overall, I give Zerto's technical support five stars.

Positive

For many years, the company globally used a variety of different solutions for data protection and disaster recovery. These included storage-based replication solutions based on IBM and EMC storage, as well as special appliances from Dell EMC. For smaller companies, VMware SRM or VMware replication without SRM was used, with manual configuration of replication. In order to simplify and unify its data protection and disaster recovery strategy, the company decided to adopt Zerto. Zerto was initially implemented in a small region, the Middle East/Asia. After a couple of successful migrations of data centers in this region and a parallel unsuccessful DR exercise in EMEA, the company selected to use Zerto globally. Following this, smaller companies in Russia started to receive a recommendation to implement Zerto instead of any existing solutions. Zerto has been a success for the company, providing a unified and simplified data protection and disaster recovery solution that has improved the company's overall resilience.

We used one internal engineer to perform the initial setup on two data centers in two days. In general, this involved installing two virtual machines with Zerto Virtual Manager on each data center, creating the corresponding network access rules, and then deploying Zerto replication agents to all virtualization hosts. The last activity was automated, so it took about one hour to deploy Zerto for all virtualization hosts. The replication took one week.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto is a premium disaster recovery solution. It is not the cheapest option on the market, but it offers a number of features that make it a good value for businesses that need a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

I give Zerto a ten out of ten. Based on my experience with different replication solutions, Zerto is the best one I have used. I am very disappointed that my current company decided to stop using it due to existing standards. Zerto is not cheap, but it is very stable, available, fast, and easy to use.

The most time-consuming part of a disaster recovery test is the testing of small and medium-sized enterprises, business users, and other stakeholders. IT-led environment restoration activities typically take up about 30 percent of the overall DR process. Zerto can reduce this time by 50 percent. Overall, this is not a significant impact, and Zerto is a very stable and reliable solution.

Zerto has not reduced the number of employees involved in data recovery situations. This is because we have a small team, and we always use engineers to perform disaster recovery activities related to storage and virtualization infrastructure. As a result, we have not had to reduce the number of staff members used for these activities.

Zerto did not replace all of our legacy backup solutions. Our legacy backup solutions were dependent on IBM Power servers, which required corresponding backup agents. Zerto is not compatible with these agents, so we use a separate backup solution for these servers. This separate solution is still in use.

We have two data centers, each with its own equipment, servers, storage, network equipment, and so on. In each data center, we deployed two separate VMware vCenter server infrastructures connected using an L2 line. There was no L3 connection between the data centers. This created a flat L2 network with two data centers and two vCenters on each data center. After that, we deployed two VM servers configured for replication. This allowed us to have a highly available and resilient infrastructure in the event of a failure at one of the data centers.

Regarding Zerto's maintenance, we configured some monitoring for related Zerto services. However, we do not have any daily routine procedures to manually check Zerto to ensure that everything is working properly. Instead, our engineers spend one hour per week reviewing monitoring items and other metrics to ensure that Zerto is operating as expected. From my perspective, Zerto is a self-operating system that requires very little manual intervention.

Zerto is very easy to pilot. I recommend that any customer pilot Zerto before making a decision on whether or not it is the right solution for them. Zerto is a self-selling product. When I piloted it in 2016, I was able to install it in hours and start using it immediately without any help. I believe that a pilot is the best way to see how easy and beneficial Zerto can be.

Zerto is used as our go-to disaster recovery failover software for the replication of key systems from our main office to our main data center. We primarily use it to protect VMs.

Being able to offer the level of disaster recovery RPO that we do has been a game-changer. Offering that level of RPO would have taken other methods to accomplish, but this has been straightforward.

It has been compatible with our VMware environments as time has progressed. We started using this in 2013. To make it easy and even more seamless, they spanned a Layer 2 subnet from one site to another using networking strategies. That way, when we fail over a VM or an asset, it does not change IPs at all. It has definitely given us a level of recovery that we would not have been able to accomplish as easily otherwise.

Recovery with Zerto is faster because, in the past, I believe our organization implemented asynchronous replication and used replication methods that were specific for storage. Having synchronous replication and an RPO that is essentially nothing, between sites, has definitely increased our response time. It allows us to immediately fail over seamlessly. It has also reduced RTOs throughout, since the recovery point objective in general is just a second. The smaller our RPO gap, the faster the RTOs we get.

In terms of downtime, there was a particular situation where we had an unexpected double outage of our WAN link. Unbeknownst to us, both of the fiber runs, although they were from the same company, ran through the same place, along the same train tracks where there was maintenance going. We were able immediately to fail over to our secondary site and keep downtime to zero.

That was an outage that I now know, in hindsight, lasted a couple of hours and it was during the peak closing of the US market for trading. It would have cost us millions. It would've been bad if something had gone wrong, since we needed to trade "now, now, now," but would not have been available. Thankfully we were able to trade.

Another benefit is that it allows for automated testing and non-impactful testing with the ability to spawn VMs in a test. We can perform any type of DR and integrity testing at will without impacting our production. I can't really quantify it but I know that DR tests definitely move a lot quicker now. Normally, DR testing would happen over a weekend. And it used to be the case that we would fail over everything immediately. We still have tests where we do live failovers with Zerto, because they really want to say we have done them. But we have averted investing time in monthly and quarterly tests over a weekend because we can present the automated testing that happens by Zerto with that test network. Without that, we would have to do monthly live testing, so it saves us time.

The most valuable feature is its ability to do failovers from one site to another.

It's also very intuitive, simple, and very straightforward. Its layout doesn't seem very complicated. It shows its features upfront. When I first started using it in 2016, I had not heard about the product, but coming to this company and having to take over managing it was not challenging at all. I was able to intuitively start using it. I have not had any issues with the interface. It's a clean interface and that has allowed me to intuitively use and configure it.

The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor. The other option would have been establishing VMware's native HA approach, where you have to spawn new VMs. It's not as transparent as Zerto, it's more under the woodwork. Zerto's ability to offer that level of synchronicity and immediateness has enabled us to offer that level of SLA for our processes in case of a disaster.

Recently, I started to try to deploy vVols instead of VMFS volumes in my VMware environment and I did encounter an incompatibility. It seems that for Zerto volumes to be protected, there's some sort of limitation with drives having to be either thick-provisioned or thin-provisioned, I forget which. But there's some sort of inherent limitation that causes an incompatibility with vVols and VMware. That has to be overcome somehow. It has to be flexible enough to be able to do its thing.

And for an additional feature, and I'm not sure if this is already in the works, I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins. We have our three main ZVR appliances, each one of them associated with one of the hosts, but as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which. Better management of those ZVR appliances would help, if you have to vMotion them off of something.

If you want to migrate a ZVR appliance from one storage to another, you can't really tell what's what and there are multiple pieces related to this ZVR appliance. I would like to see that cleaned up a little bit with better management features for ZVR appliance maintenance overall.

I've been with the company since May of 2016, so I've been using Zerto for that long—going on seven years. Through the years, I have become a Zerto-Certified administrator because Zerto offers a free course on it.

It's very stable and very hands-off. I have so many other things to do and the last thing I need to be doing is babysitting Zerto, and that's not the case. Thankfully, it's one of those solutions that you set and forget. You pop in every once in a while and make sure the VPGs are still green and thinking. 

The only thing that has happened over the years is that the data store that this thing was on might have run out of space, but that was for other reasons. As long as you keep an eye on it, it will probably always be green and you'll never have to do anything.

I've been able to engage with their support many times over the years and I have not had bad experiences with them. They've always been very efficient and prompt in taking me out of very sticky situations.

Positive

We already have solutions in place for backup, such as Rubric. We used to be a Veeam shop.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

We have two environments, one in our main office and the other in a data center. We have virtual protection groups that protect VMs in the main office and we are able to move them from failover to the data center as a DR strategy. That will change in the future when we move all assets that currently exist in our practice office into the data center as its native location. For now, it's office and data center, but in the future it will be data center and data center.

Our Zerto environment is VMware vSphere 7, and ESXi 7. It's mostly Windows VMs but there are some Linux VMs in there. It's a mixture of thick and thin-provisioned drives, all on VMFS data stores. Those are VMs that it protects and that it is able to move from one place to another.

As for maintenance, Zerto is really hands-off. It's just the usual software updates and that's about it. 

I believe the next step is that the recovery ZVMs (Zerto Virtual Managers) will turn into appliances, so they will be full Linux appliances. That will be great because we won't have to patch the Windows box underneath. Once that migration happens, it'll be even easier to manage. The only other thing that I have to do every once in a while is when we have another VM to protect. I edit the VPG and keep moving.

We have seen ROI due to the lack of losses from downtime that has been avoided.

The pricing seems reasonable. It's still within what we consider to be value-add. Currently, we're running 50 licenses. We're probably going to downsize because there have been organizational changes in our environment and we don't protect as many VMs as we used to.

We have not looked to change over since I got here because Zerto has been that good.

We don't really leverage the restore point backup capabilities of Zerto, although we do, in our virtual protection groups, configure it to have at least two hours' worth of restore points since the last RPO. We also haven't ventured toward DR in the cloud, although there will be initiatives in the future, but it's just something we have not done yet. At least for the assets we're covering with Zerto right now, we've limited ourselves to being able to pivot between data centers.

Currently, we are using it to provide DR coverage for key assets, but I am also going to use it to move all these assets from the practice office in downtown Chicago to the data center, which will be its permanent location. I am going to leverage Zerto's move capabilities to relocate those VMs, Windows Servers, and Linux boxes to the data center permanently. And then I'll establish a recovery relationship between data centers.

For the cost of the product, its value-add, and the return on investment, which is twofold, you should definitely consider Zerto. The hands-off approach and stability of the product alone will give additional dividends. Invest in the solution. It's pretty great.

Zerto is a 10 out of 10 for me. It's one of the easiest pieces of software that I have to manage and one of the most reliable over the years.

In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.

It's easy to use. It wasn't too difficult to start with. With most vendors, initially, you have a learning curve or configurations. In this case, Zerto was quick to understand. The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple. The experience is comparatively good with Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication has not been used much. That said, it does help when talking about storage layers. The availability of the VMs is good. In terms of resiliency, there are a lot of benefits to it. Most have a recovery of 24 to 48 hours; Zerto has gotten recovery down to four hours. 

We've done a POC with a DR to AWS. It was limited, however, it worked well and there was support. We didn't run into any challenges. 

The effect on the RPOs has been excellent. It's been impacted greatly. Customers enjoy the shorter timeline to recovery. The customer confidence is high. 

Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that. 

I've used the solution for almost five years. 

The solution is pretty stable. Sometimes there may be bugs, however, so far, I haven't personally found any bugs beyond the initial setup. 

There is a wide range of scalability with different storage solutions. 

We've deployed Zerto with 40 TB of storage layers. 

Technical support is good. 

Positive

We used NetBackup and v-Motion. I'm familiar with Commvault and Veeam, which is also a fast solution.

When we used VMware V-motion or other methodologies, with Zeto, once you have your SAN hooked up well and your networking component set, then you failover to the recovery. With Zerto, the recovery times were less compared to what we witnessed with our previous traditional methods. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. My job was to get Zerto up from scratch and make sure the configuration, network, storage, et cetera were up and running. It's fairly simple. There's a learning process, however, once you know it, it gets easier. 

I'm not involved in the licensing process. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

While we primarily function as a service provider rather than serving a direct use case, our core focus lies in disaster recovery. We employ a rigorous testing process akin to gear testing and actively engage in recovery operations using Zerto for a diverse clientele, including numerous entities in the financial and government sectors.

Zerto is straightforward to use.

We started to see the full benefits of Zerto one month after the implementation.

The effort on the RPOs has been excellent, greatly enhancing our operations. We have a diverse range of customers who are quite satisfied and express confidence in the timeline for recovery. 

Even Zerto's RTO is low.

Zerto has helped significantly reduce downtime and helped reduce DR testing by over 45 percent.

The most valuable aspect of Zerto is synchronized replication, which is very useful. Additionally, the availability of the virtual machines is quite good. Regarding the recovery point, we achieved at least ten recovery points, and the availability of the virtual machines is particularly notable.

The main issue with Zerto is its user interface, which lacks flexibility and presents a steep learning curve. To improve usability, the UI should be simplified and streamlined, making it more accessible to technical and non-technical users. Additionally, the UI should be better aligned with the platform's various options and features, ensuring a more intuitive and efficient user experience.

I have been using Zerto consistently for almost four and a half years.

Zerto continues to be a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable.

We interacted with technical support many times. They were totally fine and very polite. We receive support around the clock, which is excellent.

Positive

The initial setup of Zerto was straightforward, and their customer service was instrumental in helping us achieve a stable implementation within one month.

A team of five implemented Zerto in-house.

One of Zerto's main disadvantages is its pricing structure, which involves significant upfront costs and limited options for startups with minimal initial funding. Although Zerto offers a comprehensive suite of features, the high cost and lack of flexible payment options, such as pay-as-you-go subscriptions, present a barrier to entry for many businesses. To increase accessibility, Zerto should consider offering lower pricing tiers or more flexible subscription models tailored to startups' needs.

We evaluated a lot of different solutions.

There are some disadvantages; therefore, I rate Zerto eight out of ten. 

We are not a partner, just a customer, but we are trying to collaborate with them as a reseller within one year.

No maintenance has been required as of yet.

We use Zerto for our application data recovery.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication delivers exceptional results. The data at our recovery site is kept nearly identical to production in real-time, minimizing data loss to near zero.

By utilizing Zerto's immutable data copies and adhering to the three-two-one rule, we have established a highly effective recovery strategy.

While Zerto doesn't inherently block unknown threats or attacks, its detailed history logs enable us to revert to a pre-attack state, essentially restoring a clean system.

Our production machine experienced changes that caused the application to crash. To resolve this quickly, we restored the machine to its previous state using a recovery copy located at the recovery site that was made by Zerto. After powering on the restored machine, we changed its IP address, making it accessible again.

Zerto has a positive effect on our RPOs.

It boasts impressive recovery speed. As a customer, all we need to do is power on the machines at the recovery site - that's how simple and fast it is. Even if the recovered state isn't ideal, we can easily rewind to a specific point in time and power up another instance of the machine at that moment.

Zerto makes it easy to migrate data. The total configuration is user-friendly.

While our current RTO is three hours, Zerto can significantly reduce it to just five minutes.

Zerto helps us significantly reduce downtime during hardware failures, software updates, and natural disasters.

While we haven't experienced a ransomware attack, we have a recovery plan in place. If one were to occur, we could quickly restore production to a previous point in time, minimizing downtime and data loss.

Zerto helps us reduce the amount of disaster recovery testing we need to perform, which also allows us to reduce the number of staff required for the testing down to two.

The Zerto application is licensed per VM. However, the amount of data stored on each VM does not affect the licensing cost. Whether we have terabytes or just a few bytes on each VM, the licensing fee remains the same. This means we only pay for the machines we are replicating, which can lead to significant cost savings.

Real-time replication is a valuable feature, ensuring that changes made to the production site are immediately reflected at the recovery site.

Another feature I appreciate in Zerto is its detailed logging. This functionality allows us to easily access past data and reconstruct the machine's state at any given point in time.

We can recover the replicated machine at the recovery site by simply clicking it back up from the replicated machine. This allows us to keep the original machine running while the recovered machine is active. It's also vendor-agnostic, meaning it works with different hardware vendors like HP or NetApp. In other words, Zerto adapts to the specific hardware we have regardless of the vendor.

Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable. We just need to add a license and they provide a new key.

The technical support team offers an excellent service. They empower customers by providing comprehensive documentation and guidance, helping them resolve future issues independently.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward, and I handled it independently. My only reference was the provided documentation; I required no further assistance.

Zerto's pricing doesn't depend on the number of virtual applications. Even if we have a server with 200 terabytes of data, we'll only pay for protecting that single server, not for the total size of the replicated data. This simplifies our cost structure.

The licensing cost is fair.

I evaluated Veeam and SIM before choosing Zerto. Zerto's interface is much easier to use than the other solutions I tested. Integrating into our environment is also seamless.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

You can save a lot of time researching solutions by choosing Zerto. It's efficient, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain. Additionally, Zerto offers excellent support, including comprehensive documentation, breach and RCM coverage information, and a knowledgeable customer support team.

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

We use Zerto to replicate our VMware VMs. We have two data centers in our company. We use Zerto to make sure these virtual machines which are VMware are replicated in the other data centres.

We also use Zerto as a backup tool for Windows files.

Zerto is already a leader in its field. I have seen the benefit of knowing that everything is protected. We've only started a disaster recovery program in the last year after running Zerto. The business is now understanding that recovering from the traditional backup software does take a long time, and it's very complex. 

Using Zerto, I am the only department that can recover in minutes. The database team takes hours, the IBM platform takes hours as well. So time saving is what we see the most of Zerto.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is very important. It's the reason we're still with Zerto. We collect blood in many hospitals, and some of our data centers are in hospitals with power grids that are not as good as commercial buildings. So, we do have servers that will crash. The servers are in the hospitals for latency reasons. And when a server crashes for any reason, it could be a chipmunk eating wires. We need to have another server with no data loss so that the clinics can keep going without having to do a whole bunch of data entry.

We don't use SAP HANA with Zerto, but we use SAP HANA with an Oracle database. These databases are replicated at the hardware storage level, not with Zerto.

Zerto has very little effect on our RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives). As long as we have the disk space, it works well. We currently have a one-hour to one-day RPO and are extending it to about four days based on recommendations.

The continuous replication with a low recovery point objective (RPO) is crucial for us. 

We have mission-critical applications that, if we lose data, we lose a lot of money. Zerto's low RPO ensures minimal data loss in case of a disaster.

Zerto has the ability for us to suggest features, which we do often. We do see some of these features come to life. Better alerting is something that I feel is critical. 

If you turn on the alerting of the on-prem appliances, it bombards your inbox over everything. It's too much. We had to turn that off. We use Zerto cloud analytics for alerting, and we just moved the Zerto ten about a month ago.

Some alerts, such as when one of my virtual protection groups does not have at least one day of logs configured. We find that after we do a disaster recovery failover test we recreate the virtual protection groups. Some of our junior systems admins won't specify. We need seven days of journal logs. So an alert for that would be handy.

We've been using Zerto for over eight years.

It's excellent. The product has been solid for the entire time we've used it.

We use Zerto to protect approximately 300 VMware VMs.

We have not grown Zerto in many, many years. We're likely going to double it. It should not be a problem because it's essentially almost agent-based. I feel that it can grow. We're not a very big client, so I don't know how big it can scale, but I feel that it can.

I rarely need to contact the customer service and support. The product is very good. When I have used their support, I've never had to escalate a call.

There's nothing bad about the support. They are responsive and helpful. A 10 would mean having an experience so exceptional that I would have to tell my family about it.

Positive

Zerto was deployed before my time, so I wasn't involved in the initial deployment. However, I have been involved in upgrades, which are very simple. 

I appreciate the ability to open a case with Zerto support for assistance. For our recent Zerto 10 upgrade, we also had help from Zerto Professional Services, which is a feature that management likes.

Zerto can perform disaster recovery in the cloud, but our company is not cloud-ready yet.  We do not have the governance We are still trying to figure out if we were to fail over an application, is the application team aware that they will have to pay additional funding out of their call centers. So we are at a governance stage right now of planning for recovery in the cloud.

We have two active-active data centers that replicate themselves at the VMware level. We use Microsoft Azure.

We used Zerto Professional Services to assist us with the Zerto 10 upgrade. It was a great experience. The upgrade was done in about 15 minutes for both sites. They were well-prepared and knew exactly what they were doing.

We don't see ROI in terms of direct financial ROI, as we only started our disaster recovery testing about a year ago. However, based on client satisfaction and our decision to double our Zerto licenses, we see a return on investment in terms of overall client satisfaction.

We have a licensing team that manages it, but it seems to be fairly easy to use.

We looked at Veeam and NAKIVO.

The business realized the importance of quick recovery and minimal data loss, which are the main reasons why we chose and continue to use Zerto.

From an end-user interface where you use your mouse to click, Zerto is definitely the easiest. However, for the monitoring piece, where my developers have to use the APIs, Zerto is much harder than the other tools that we've used.

Zerto's recovery is the fastest, hands down. Compared to NetBackup, which takes hours, Zerto's recovery is a matter of minutes. We also use a tool similar to Veeam called NAKIVO for non-mission-critical systems, which has a one-day RPO. Nextiva is close to Zerto in terms of recovery speed, but Zerto's interface, orchestration capabilities, and ability to run scripts make it the top choice for us.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. There's nothing that compares to Zerto, nothing that works as well as it. My only complaint about it is the alerting. There are a lot of alerts that come through, and they are legit alerts. It's excellent.

We implement Zerto as a part of a Disaster Recovery process for our valuable customers, in various environments. Most of them consist of two sites owned by the same customer, connected with campus or wan link, but both using VMware virtualization platform.

Recently we realized a dedicated infrastructure in our Datacenter, then started to propose to our customers DRaaS using those resources as a recovery site and including dedicated 24x7 support. 

Few customers use the public cloud (Azure) as a recovery site: we could only implement and configure the solution or fully manage it because we are also a Microsoft Gold and Tier-1 partner.

Zerto helps reduce downtime in a wide number of situations because it can bring up an entire environment of 40-50 VMs in minutes. 

Zerto helps to save time in a data recovery situation too. Some customers experienced VM or database corruption: using the solution's checkpoint feature, the data recovery happened within five minutes or less. A normal restore would probably be two to eight hours depending on if we had to restore from disk/tape and need or not need to apply logs.

Zerto is great at DR testing. We can spin off critical VMs or an entire environment pretty quickly and have users test against this copy with no production environment impact.

Its overall impact on our RTO has been great. It took a few hours in a very complex environment. The customer was very impressed with Zerto when we started with the PoC and then put it in production. It is great.

Zerto has reduced our downtime. Customers have minimal downtime. 

We have been enabled to automate tasks with Zerto. Staff can now be dedicated to other tasks.

A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site.

Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time.

Zerto is also a very easy product to use.

We started using it a few months ago for immutable data copies for a few customers on multiple repositories like HPE.

Zerto's ability for blocking unknown threats and attacks is key in our disaster recovery process. It's the technical solution where we implement all the data. It is also the recovery plan for our customers.

We have tried experimenting implementing Zerto with the the disaster recovery site on cloud. We use an Azure. It's very useful. Zerto has enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center.

We've only used Zerto two or three times to migrate an existing data center to a new one because the hardware under the machine was from a different brand. We used Zerto because the environment is quite complex and the migration using other tools did not fulfill the customers' needs. Zerto is very good at data migration.

One of its best features Zerto is the ability to maintain the data of multiple VMs using Vipro Protection Group. We can aggregate multiple VMs in a workload for specific services. They are protected at the same time. 

It's very easy to manage and monitor our DR plans with Zerto. It's very easy to learn and operate. It's easier than VMware. 

Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this.

Now we are testing version 10 which include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: we expect more from these features for superior hybrid cloud security.

Reports could be useful for customers. I would like to have a report that shows the latency for every single internal VM. it would be useful for troubleshooting.

We started to evaluate Zerto about three years ago, then we implemented it for our valuable customers who need affordable solutions in their disaster recovery processes.

We haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers, especially with the new "appliance" mode. It just runs.

Zerto is a very scalable solution. We can create as many protection groups as customers need for their environment even as they growth. 

Our customers are mostly medium to small sized enterprises. 

We use Zerto Quick Start service for the first installations and we use it in very complex environments: great. 

We are very satisfied. We had to use it at the beginning to understand the implementation process and what we needed to do. 

They are quick and professional. 

Positive

We previously used Veeam (B&R + DRO) and VMware (Replication + SRM), but they could not offer all the features of Zerto.

We also sometimes still use VMware Disaster Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with VMware Backup and Recovery. 

The implementation is very straightforward.  Must be considered security and lay out the network infrastructure to be more efficient.

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

Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" 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.

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish: with Zerto you could combine resilience, mobility, and protection into a single software-only solution. It's hardware and hypervisor agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure.

We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Datacenter and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests, and still keep customers' production environment up and running. 

We have recently introduced the immutable data copies feature, because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then this is still a bad situation. The ability to look at the data that is being replicated in real-time and scan it, in conjunction with immutable data, and putting that into a vault, would be a great benefit. 

The 3-2-1 rule isn't so important for us when it comes to disaster recovery. We consider the backup process and then the disaster recovery process. We treat them as two different workloads that we could implement to our customers to solve different issues.

The majority of our customers use it in a hybrid environment, but they prefer to use disaster recovery in their own data center. In some cases, we provide disaster recovery as a service, where the disaster recovery site is in our data center.

Doing a proof of concept is the best way to implement and sell Zerto. The customers don't always trust our advice but when I start with a POC in their environment, they see it's benefits.