Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto for our disaster recovery procedure and testing to ensure our servers and virtual machines can failover from a production environment if there's a catastrophe. We have a disaster recovery test twice a year and use Zerto to recover the environment.

We have two environments for Zerto. One is for the US, and the other is for Europe. We updated one last week to version 9.0, and the other still uses version 8.5 but I will update that today or tomorrow.

Zerto cut down the recovery time tremendously and improved our disaster recovery process. It made it easier for us to recover if needed during a disaster. Zerto definitely reduced downtime. The other software we used had a lot of manual steps. It was efficient, but our recovery time was longer. I estimate that Zerto cut our recovery time by at least 70 percent.

We had a disaster recovery four or five years ago. I can't remember what happened, but I believe something crashed in our data center, like a power outage. We did a failover of our network using Zerto from production to disaster recovery. We successfully completed the failover process in three or four hours without issue. The data was current, and the application owners could access their data and continue working while the issue was resolved. 

Zerto also brings down our costs. If we don't meet our SLAs, the clients are not happy and we get billed or fined. Every minute an application is down is costly for us. However, I don't think it has reduced our staff. We have a dedicated team for disaster recovery. While it doesn't cut down on the number of team members, It makes our jobs a lot easier.

Near-synchronous replication is an extremely powerful feature because it's like a mirror environment with almost real-time replication. Everything in my production environment is mirrored in the Zerto environment. I want the two to be as close as possible. 

If you have a disaster, we don't want your data to lag too far behind. You don't want to be an hour or two days behind. When you recover an environment in Zerto, the data is current.

I would like to see some graphical improvements in Zerto's interface. There's an option to export a list of all of our servers, but the information isn't presented the way we want. We want it in a specified sequence broken down by region, etc. We can't manipulate the data when we export it. Maybe they could change it to look more like an Excel sheet, and we can customize the graphics and data. We suggested these improvements to Zerto through their portal.

We've been using Zerto for six or seven years.

It's highly stable. We've had no issues. We haven't had an incident or any problems with Zerto being unavailable or maintenance that would cause an outage on our side. If anything is happening on Zerto's side, we're not affected and that is great.

We haven't seen any limitations so far. Zerto is constantly upgrading its products. There are upgrades every five months or so. They're constantly tweaking and making the product better.

I rate Zerto support nine out of ten. It's excellent overall. We've only had one issue in the past six or seven years. I think the person was maybe new to the team.

They prioritize calls based on severity. If the issue is affecting our environment and we can't get anything done, they'll escalate the ticket and help us immediately. If we just have general questions or a concern that isn't severe, they still respond quickly.

Positive

We previously used a site recovery manager from vCenter. It's effective, but it requires a lot of manual steps, especially when we deal with databases and so forth. Zerto is quicker, more efficient, and easier on the eyes. I'm a huge fan. 

We started using Zerto because vCenter required more steps to failover our environment. Zerto does all the steps that we would normally need to do manually, reducing our recovery time and procedure steps. Something that previously took 45 minutes takes Zerto 10 minutes.

The other solutions are still in place. We use vCenter and NetBackup for our legacy systems.

Zerto is user-friendly. When I set this up six or seven years ago, I knew nothing about Zerto. It was relatively straightforward to go from the vCenter SRM to the Zerto environment. It's intuitive, so I can log onto Zerto and figure it out without having to take a class or official training. I can log on and navigate through the screens. If I get stuck, Zerto support is always available.

There were two of us who set it up. I'm in the US, and the other guy is in the Philippines. He initiated it, and I finished it. We completed it in one day, but I don't remember how many hours it took. We did a quick check the following day to ensure everything was in line.

I contacted Zerto recently when I upgraded one of my environments to version 9. I had some general questions because a few of our VMs were not syncing. I was getting an error message because the recovery didn't progress, so I had to reach out to Zerto support. We actually figured that out on our own, but they pointed us in the right direction.

We tested one product for two or three months, but I can't think of the name of it. Zerto was easier for us to dive into and pick it up quickly. The leadership of the disaster recovery team made the final decision along with management. I don't know if cost played a factor, but Zerto was more efficient and easier to use. It was exactly what we needed.

I rate Zerto ten out of ten.

We use it for DR as well as migration. We have four data centers and migrate workloads between them.

We don't use it for backup.

We had some ransomware that got on and infected the corporate shared drives. It was just one system and one user type of thing. It didn't spread because we had it locked down pretty well. So, I just bumped the server back entirely so we did not have to worry about it.

We have only had one instance, and it wasn't widespread, where we had ransomware. The RPO was approximately 20 minutes. We had an active snapshot from when the incident happened, because we couldn't really iron it down. Therefore, Zerto saved us time in this data recovery situation because I didn't have to rebuild the thing or do a SnapMirror. 

If we had used a different solution, it might have taken a week for our data recovery situation instead of 20 minutes with four or five technical folks (not including management), instead of just me. This is because we didn't have anything documented and just counted on Zerto to do it. I don't know what the company had set up previously since I'm new, but at the previous place that I've experienced malware, you would have to stand everything up from scratch and scrape through all your backups and differentials. 

We use in the data center if there is a live event that could cost the company millions of dollars, which I haven't experienced, e.g., if our data center were to explode or get hit with a meteor, then ceases to exist. We have the option to go in and flip a switch. That has never happened. However, our tests using SRM went from a day to minutes when we switched to Zerto.

The most valuable feature is DR. In my opinion, there is nothing better at what it does.

The solution provides fantastic continuous data protection. We do a lot of spin up test environments depending on what happened, then make changes and rip it down. Or, if we got hit with malware, then we use that to do a point-in-time recovery. We custom create software in-house, so we will spin up a test environment to test code deployments or do a copy to do the same thing, if we want it to be around longer than a test recovery. For example, somebody got hit with something, then they infected the server. We were able to restore it back to a point in time before the infection. 

It is super easy to use. A non-technical user can get it up in a day. I can get it up in 15 minutes. I've brought it to help desk guys and network operations center guys, and it's easily grasped.

While I am open to transitioning over to using Zerto for long-term retention, the problem is the alerting function in Zerto is very poor. That makes it a difficult use case to transition over.

The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it.

Four years.

The stability is fantastic. It has gotten a lot better as far as the maintenance. Initially, it required a lot of prodding and poking. As it sits today, it is really stable, though you sometimes need to mirror the changes in the application to what you have changed in your own infrastructure.

The management once it is already deployed is easy to moderate. Things can get a little goofy with the DRS and if you're shuffling things around. If your infrastructure is pretty static, you're not going to have any problems with Zerto. But, if you move things around or do any updates, you have to come in and make sure everything is good to go. It is not difficult, but sometimes you are required to go in and maintain it. Because we turn off the alerting in most places, you don't know its status without going in and manually looking.

I am the primary Zerto administrator. Therefore, I own the product for my company and use it every day.

Scalability is great. It will scale essentially one-to-one with your virtual infrastructure. However, if you have more hosts and VMs, then you have to go in and manage that many more hosts and VMs.

Four people know it and use it to do things. I'm the primary, then there is another guy who is the direct backup on my team. Then I have trained a couple other people who know how to utilize it in the event of an emergency, e.g., "This is how you would failover X environment." Because it won't automatically do failovers, somebody has to pull the trigger. Therefore, we have documentation in order to do that. It is very simple.

We don't use it for everything, not in both instances where I implemented it or been in charge of running it over. However, it definitely has freed people up to do other things in that space. It only takes me to entirely administer Zerto, instead of a backup and recovery operations team with two or three people.

We are at about 60 percent of use. I would like to see more. We don't do persistent long-term backups or use any of the cloud functionality, though I think we will as we're in the midst of looking at AWS to potentially migrate workloads there. I also very interested in using it as cold storage.

Initially, years ago, the technical support was very poor. We were promised one thing that was physically impossible with the software. I spent a lot of time fighting everybody in support. Since then, the support has been really good. In my experience, they are all mostly stateside. They understand the product inside and out to help you with your needs or come up with some type of creative solution.

At my previous company, we were using SRM and our DR tests would take one to two days. For our primary customer, we switched to Zerto, then it took 15 to 20 minutes instead of days. It was a huge difference. That was from Boise to North Carolina, then back. It was approximately 30 terabytes of data with 19 virtual machines. It was a pretty large orchestration.

SRM was replaced by Zerto due to simplicity. SRM is very complicated. It is also not easy to use and set up. Zerto is better for implementation and ease of use. So, it was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward, though it could be more straightforward. Now, you just install the software on a Windows system. It would be nice if they had an appliance that autodeployed in VMware. That would make it simple. But if you can install Office or any kind of application on Windows, you can do this. It is super easy to set up with minimal front-end learning required. 

The deployment takes about an hour for an experienced person. If it is your first time, then it will take a couple hours.

You need to know your use case for an instance where you need something to be backed up. Once that need is identified, you need to know where it is and where you want it to go. Once you already have those questions answered, the implementation is simple. Through the installation progress, you just plug in those values of where is it, what is it, and where do you want it to go, then you're done.

At the company I'm with now and at my previous company, I was the architect and implementer. Zerto generally requires one person for the setup.

The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field.

It has helped decrease the number of people involved in data center moves. For the infrastructure pieces, which is my primary responsibility, I am the sole person. Whereas, we use to have an OS guy and a network person before to manually configure the pieces. We also had application teams, but they are still relevant. Previously, it took four people because we were touching each environment and machine. Since we wanted it done fast, we would stack a bunch of people on it. Now, it's just me and it's done faster.

When migrating data centers, we have saved a lot of time on my team. Something that takes an hour or two used to take a week or two.

There is big ROI for ease of use, management, and labor overhead versus other solutions.

Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it.

We currently use Veeam and Commvault.

In general, moving VMs through VMware using site-to-site is not as easy than with Zerto because the data has to go on flight, and Zerto just sends it over. I like that aspect of it. During our data center moves, we move from one location to another (San Jose) with a two-hour total downtime from start to finish: From powering the systems down, getting them over, getting a live feed changed, and back up and running to the world. This would be way slower with a different product.

For long-term retention, we do Veeam to spinning disk. While the LTR is something I am interested in, I think Veeam has the upper hand with alerting and job management. Both Veeam and Zerto are easy to use, but Zerto is easier to use.

I am not a big Commvault fan.

It could replace Veeam and Commvault, but not at its current price point.

Most people assume catastrophic failures have a long-term data impact. However, with Zerto, it doesn't have to be that way. If you spend the money to protect everything, you are going to get that low data recovery time. Whereas, if you are cheap and don't buy Zerto, it's going to be hours to days of data loss. With Zerto, it is in the minutes. Thus, how valuable is your data? That is where the cost justification comes in.

If you are thinking about implementing this type of solution:

• How important is your data? 
• Would your company go bankrupt if you were unable to do what your company does for a week? 
• Do you have contract requirements which say you need to have a DR plan up and running? 
• Do you want to spend a week doing it or 20 minutes doing it? 

It's that value of time, money, and data. I can implement Zerto and use it in an emergency situation anywhere. If you're talking to somebody like me who understands data protection and disaster recovery, the question is how much is your data worth to you and how fast do you need it back?

Currently, we are doing our own storage as the target for protection, but there is interest in enabling DR in the cloud, e.g., to do Glacier or something cheap in Azure.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

I use it for yearly disaster recovery testing.

The main benefit we see from Zerto is that it helps to meet our disaster recovery objectives.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is important and impressive.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment and has improved all over RPO. 

The speed of recovery with Zerto is extremely fast. We're able to perform disaster recovery testing on dozens of VMs within an hour or even half an hour.

I like its fast recovery, fast RPO and RTO, ease of use, easy interface, ease of deployment, and that it's always available.

I would like for Zerto to improve reporting, provide more data on individual VMs and their performance, and maybe expand into backup with the ability to scan for malware or offline scanning.

I have been using Zerto for over seven years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support are excellent. 

Positive

We previously used Commvault. It used a lot of scripting and configuration to make disaster recovery happen, and it was slow, with a low RPO.

We haven't tried disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We only use on-premises recovery.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was straightforward. 

We previously used or evaluated other backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

We compared Veeam and Commvault against Zerto.

We chose Zerto because of its performance and ease of use.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because there's always room for improvement. 

A lot of use cases involve how we effectively manage our DR and make sure there's not a lot of manual effort. On the business side, we proved the solution worked and showed the analytics on the DR report afterward. Those are the requirements.

At one of the banks I worked for, we used it for our merger and acquisition to replicate a legacy application that was no longer supported. Rather than try to rebuild it, which would have taken days or weeks, we could use Zerto to replicate it to our data center and join it to our domain. That was one of the biggest use cases we have had. 

Another use case is for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and to migrate service to a public cloud.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is great. Not a lot of solutions can do that, and most organizations don't know that Zerto can do it. Once you have that near-sync capability, you can see how much more you can recover and be more resilient. 

At the end of the day, we're trying to protect our data and not put the company at risk, whether it's from a cyber attack or just any sort of DLP data loss. 

In financial services, data is paramount: protecting it, making sure you don't lose it, and integrating it. Having that near-sync ability is useful to any organization.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. It really increased how many points in time we can recover, and not only the time to do it but where we want to do it too. 

Generally, we choose a point in time because they're simulated tests and controlled. In the event of a true disaster, I'm sure I'd utilize one of the closer points to have more recent data, but it's good to have that option. Luckily, I haven't had to use that option.

It's night and day. With other solutions, you're locked into specific RPOs and RTOs based on how that solution works. Zerto gives us the flexibility to choose which we want to use and recover effectively.

The main valuable features are the fast RPO and RTOs we could achieve and the analytics behind that. 

In my role these days, I have to make sure I can prove to the executive team as well as the business lines why we chose this solution and how it can help us.

One of the projects we're working on is DRaaS service. Once that's implemented, we'll test that solution. The whole premise of using Zerto is to replicate one-to-many and then test that scenario.

Zerto should continue adding new features. When I used it at the other bank, it wasn't good with replicating VDIs and automation. They've made a little more advancements in automation and scripting since then. 

At one point, it was custom, requiring professional services. Now, Zerto has more built into its engine that will help with the failover of virtual desktops.

I was an early adopter. I worked for a managed service provider in New York City back in 2009 and was introduced to Zerto near the end of 2010, early 2011. That's when we started implementing it for our clients. I've been bringing Zerto wherever I go ever since.

Stability is great. Sometimes you have network blips, and you can be out of sync, but it'll catch up eventually. There are very minor issues, if any.

It is very scalable. For example, there's a tertiary site that we're building for the DRaaS service. 

We just go to initiate the one-to-many and replicate up there. It's easy.

The customer service and support are responsive initially, and then they help you solve your problem. There was only one time with the custom scripting for the VDI that they wouldn't help because it was custom, and they wanted more money for that. They incorporated that into their solution a few years later.

Positive

In the past, I have used a different solution. I've worked with SRM, Double-Take (which is terrible), and BMC Recovery Point. Ever since I got hooked on Zerto around 2011, it's been pretty much Zerto.

The installation itself is very easy. Any problems I've run into, either when I was managing it or doing the installation myself, support has helped every step of the way and has been very easy to work with.

It's on Expedient's cloud, which might be AWS. I'm not sure. I just know we're doing it through a third party.

A lot of the ROI is with engineering hours. If it took eight hours of overtime to pay one or two engineers to do a DR test, now we can do it in one hour. 

We can factor in how many DR tests you do and calculate the cost savings. That alone is a good ROI.

The pricing is pretty fair. It increases with the number of VMs you have. When we had about 600 VMs at my last bank, we did an enterprise licensing agreement that helped cut down the cost. It required signing on long-term, but it was the most effective.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I've used this solution for so long and have seen it mature. It's just easy. In IT, especially in a managerial role, we want things to work. We don't want it to be complex. If it serves the business goals of data resiliency, then that's all I need.

Definitely do a proof of concept (POC) and make sure it fits your use cases. On paper, it will, but every company is different. Sometimes, for some reason, it won't work. Or not that it won't work, it just doesn't fit what the business is trying to achieve. So do the POC and see for yourself if it works.

We use it mainly for our disaster recovery, so we replicate our production VMs between our data centers.

The solution meets our high availability and disaster recovery needs.

The disaster recovery reviews itself and it has the ability to fail over within seconds and get new machines up and running on a new data center in a matter of minutes.

It's pretty easy to use. It depends on how detailed you get into the product. If you get real detailed into the product with some of its backup capabilities, it can get a little bit more detailed, for example. However, for the disaster recovery piece itself, it's it's pretty easy to use.

The near synchronous replication is effective. It works really well. The replication and the RTO, RPO times are pretty much the best in the industry.

We saw some benefits right away in that we were understanding that we were now highly available. We also started to see more and more benefits as time went on.

It helps protect virtual machines in our environment.

Our downtime and our ability to replicate happen within seconds. We've seen other products that take about five minutes. Now, we take seconds to get things back up and going. Therefore, the loss of data is virtually nothing. We've been extremely happy with that. 

It's helped reduce downtimes in pretty much any situation. We've had instances where a data center or a cluster in a data center was down or we were having problems with it and being able to have that replicated data being able to be spun up within a matter of minutes. It's significantly helped where if we didn't have that ability, we were probably looking at at least three to four hours, if not a day, of downtime. We're talking about the difference between minutes of downtime versus hours to potentially days.

With Zerto we haven't had any any actual instances where ransomware or anything like that actually comes up. We do yearly testing where we'll fail over an entire data center. While we haven't had any malicious incidents, we've had success with conceptual testing.

Zerto hasn't necessarily reduced the overall testing in our organization. We still have to do the testing. That said, it's reduced the time in which it takes to perform that testing. So, we still have our requirements to do yearly testing. However, it's at least reducing the amount of time it takes. Before, the testing would take an entire weekend and multiple departments in order to complete it. Now we're finishing our testing in a matter of hours. We're knocking off quite a bit of time with Zerto - plus hours of time in order to complete testing.

Zerto is now our resiliency strategy. We're able to replicate all of our data and be able to bring up an entire data center within a matter of minutes, which has become our go-to for our resiliency within both of our data centers.

Recently, they started forcing everybody to use a Linux-based appliance for their z/VMs. That appliance has been extremely touchy and, in some cases, problematic. However, there were Windows-based z/VMs prior, and we never really had issues with them. But now we're running into problems where certificates aren't able to be imported for things like LDPAPS and SSL. We've run into actual downtime with the z/VMs recently, which is new to the Linux app appliance. Overall, the appliances had some bugs, and they've not been as reliable as they were in the past.

I've been using Zerto for a little over 4.5 years.

There are the no real lag issues, We've only had a couple of instances where the system has been down, and wasnew since our Linux appliance install. Overall, it's been pretty reliable with the caveat that the new Linux appliance has had some downtime. Prior to that, we hadn't had any. 

Scalability's been good. There's a couple of instances where they could allow for some more local replication, however, scalability has been good.

I quite frequently contact technical support. On most things, they have been pretty good. The issues that we've had with that z/VM, those tickets can take quite a while. I have one ticket that's been open for about four and a half months now. They're still trying to figure out some of the bugs within their system, which has caused some tickets to take longer than they really should.

The quality of response has been pretty good. Maybe 7  or 8 out of 10 are quality responses. They're they're pretty good, pretty knowledgeable. Again, there are some instances where they're still learning the system as well, or there's something new, and it's a little bit odd; however, other than that, their answers are typically pretty spot on and pretty well documented.

Neutral

We used to build products by Nutanix. Their RTO times were much higher. That's about the only solution that I've used at least recently.

I wasn't part of that decision making process. Zerto had been onboarded by the time I came on to to the team here.

The deployments have been pretty easy as long as you have your network topology figured out. If you're just starting up a brand new appliance, and you're running through a setup, signing IPs , et cetera, you have to make sure that the z/VMs can talk to each other. It's a pretty easy process.

Usually, for the setup, we have the SME, which is me, and then a backup to be a second pair of eyes, however, a lot of the work is been done just by myself.

In terms of maintenance, there are updates that need to be applied. The certificate imports need to happen depending on expiration dates. There also is their key cloak integration for authentication, and that requires some upkeep as well depending on how you're signing permissions and what you're signing permissions for.

I've done redeployments myself, for example, when we switched over from Windows to Linux to z/VMs. That was all in-house. At the time when they did their very first deployment, they had used a third party vendor to assist with that. We've not needed them since. 

I don't have any visibility on the pricing. 

We're a Zerto customer.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

New users need to understand the product prior to deployment and make sure that they're taking the time to whiteboard this out. Your VRAs are going to take up a good amount of space. So users need to understand that when you're replicating data over, you are making a second copy of that data, and understand what your test scenarios are going to be. You need to understand if you need things like a test environment to actually be within Zerto since that will be taking up more space. Overall, people just be aware that the Linux appliances still have to have their bugs worked out. For first-time users, especially, I would keep those deployments as simple as possible to start.

We use it for disaster recovery. We were looking for faster recovery time objectives. Our primary use case is protecting virtual machines in our environment.

It's improved our testing frequency, and that has definitely helped.

And the effect on our RPOs has been very good because of the continuous replication; you get more checkpoints. Compared to other disaster recovery solutions that we've used, it's much more efficient when it comes to recovery. It's much more resilient and provides a better experience. It's a better product than the traditional backup and recovery methods we were using.

Zerto has also helped reduce downtime in some situations. We can recover systems in minutes, versus hours. There has been a significant improvement in our RTOs.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce our DR testing on the order of hours and days.

The ease of use is one of the most valuable features when it comes to making changes and configuring. It's very easy to set up and configure. It's a great product.

Another very important feature, because I work in a very high-transaction environment, is the near-synchronous replication, and it works well.

They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it.

I have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

It's very stable.

It's scalable. I plan to increase our usage of the solution.

I have not contacted their tech support.

We were using typical backup recovery from tape or disk. Zerto is far easier to use, simpler, more efficient and reliable, and more effective than traditional disaster recovery tools.

It has not replaced all of our backup solutions. It's another tool to prevent a disaster.

Our deployment is on a private cloud. We have compute, storage, and network that we replicate to. The initial deployment of Zerto was straightforward. It took less than 30 days to get it fully operational.

We used it in our test environment first and, once we validated that everything was functional, we included our production environment.

The maintenance involves keeping the versions up to date and there are agents that have to be updated as well.

We had a managed service provider set it up and deploy it. On our side there were one or two people involved.

I can't quantify the ROI because we haven't used it in a disaster. It's more of a cost-avoidance solution, protecting the organization.

The pricing is very reasonable. There are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

We looked at Symantec, Veritas, CommVault, and Rubrik.

Have clear requirements on what your RTO/RPO requirements are, and which applications will be involved. You need to have clear business requirements and align Zerto with your business continuity plan.

Zerto is very innovative and they're constantly making improvements. It took some time to realize some of the benefits but it's been a great journey.

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

Right now, everything is on-prem including LTR. We are looking at adding the Azure features but we're not quite there yet.

We purchased Zerto to replace our Legacy backup system that still had disks, Archiver Appliance, and everything like that. We had wanted to do something that was diskless but still gave us multiple copies. So we were utilizing both the instantaneous backup and recovery, as well as the LTR, Long Term Retention, function. We do our short-term backup with normal journaling and then our longer-term retention with the LTR appliance, which is going to dedicated hardware in one of our data centers.

We use Zerto for both backup and disaster recovery. It was fairly important that Zerto offers both of these features because Unitrends did provide the traditional backup piece. They also had another product called ReliableDR, which they later rolled into a different product. Unitrends actually bought the company. That piece provided the same functionality as what Zerto is doing now, but with Unitrends that was separate licensing and a different management interface. It wasn't nice to have to bounce between the two systems. The ability to do it all from a single pane of glass that is web-based is nice.

It's definitely not going to save us money. It'll be a peace of mind thing, that we have another copy of our data somewhere. Our DR site is approximately 22 miles away. The likelihood of a tornado or something devastating two communities where our facilities are based is pretty slim. It's peace of mind and it does not require additional storage space on-prem. We know that the charges for data at rest are not free in Azure. We get good pricing discounts being in education but it definitely won't save money.

Zerto was fairly comparable to what Unitrends was offering with multiple products. We didn't gain a ton of extra features. If anything, in the very near future, it will give us the ability for Cloud backup and retention to have some of that sitting out in the Cloud as an offsite backup. We have a primary site, a backup site, and a recovery site. We have multiple copies already, but we want to have one that's not on any of our physical facilities so we will be setting that up shortly. We just need to get our subscriptions and everything coordinated and up to par. That would be the main improvement that it's going to provide us. But we're not quite there yet.

Zerto has reduced downtime. Speaking specifically to the file restores, it's definitely restored things much quicker. Instead of waiting for half-hour to get a file restore done, it's a matter of five minutes or less to do it where they can keep rolling much quicker versus with Unitrends. Other than that, I can't say there are any huge differences.

The difference in downtime would cost my organization very little. We're a small technical college, so we're not loopy on making or losing thousands or millions of dollars if something takes five minutes versus an hour and a half. Higher ed is a different breed of its own. 

In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image. Our main data stores are close to two terabytes. It would take 15 to 20 minutes just to mount the image. Whereas with Zerto, I don't think it's taken longer than a minute or a minute and a half to mount any image that we've needed to go back to a restore point on.

With Unitrends, some could have taken a half-hour. I'm the only network administrator here, so it usually was a multitasking event where we would wait for it to load. I would take care of a few other things and then come back to it.

Switching to Zerto decreased the time it took but did not decrease the number of people involved. It still requires myself and our network engineer to do any failover, back and forth, because of our networking configuration and everything. I know that Zerto allows us to RE-IP machines as we failover. However, because of the way our public DNS works and some of our firewall rules, we have purposely chosen not to do that in an automated fashion. That would still be a manual operation. It would still involve a couple of people from IT.

Zerto does a pretty decent job at providing continuous data protection. The most important thing that I didn't clearly understand upfront, was the concept of journaling and how that differs from traditional backup. For example, if you set journal retention for seven days or whatever, in your traditional backup, it kept that for seven days, regardless of what was happening. You had it versus the journaling, where coupled with some of the size limits and stuff of the journal size, if you don't configure it correctly, you could actually have less data backed up than what you think you do. I also found out that if you have an event such as ransomware, that all of a sudden throws a lot of IOPS at it, and a lot of change rate, that can age out a journal very quickly and then leave you with the inability to restore if that's not set up properly.

We have requirements to keep student data and information for seven years. We need long-term retention for those purposes. We don't typically need to go back further than 30 days for file restores and everything. There has been the occasion where six months later, we need to restore a file because we had somebody leaving the organization or something like that and that folder or whatever wasn't copied over at the time they left.

Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware because we did not have it correctly configured. When we had an event like that, we weren't able to successfully restore from a backup. That has been corrected now. Now that it is configured correctly, I anticipate that it will save us weeks of time. It took almost two weeks to get to a somewhat normal state after our event. We're still recovering somewhat from rebuilding some servers and stuff like that. To get our primary data and programs back up and running to a mostly normal function, took around two weeks.

We also expect that it will reduce the number of staff involved in that type of data recovery situation. We ended up having to hire one of our trusted partners to come in and help us rebuild and remediate. There was at least a dozen staff including our own IT staff, which was another 10 people on top of that. Provided that we do now have this set correctly, it would really drop it down to maybe two or three people.

In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if the implementation team had a better best practices guide and made sure things like the journaling are very clearly understood. 

Speaking directly to our incident, we did have professional services guide us with the installation, setup, and configuration. At that time, there was no suggestion to have these appliances not joined to the domain or in a separate VLAN from our normal servers and everything. They are in a completely isolated network. The big thing was being domain-joined. They didn't necessarily give that guidance. In our particular situation, with our incident, had those not been domain-joined, we would have been in a much better place than what we ended up being.

I have been using Zerto for about two years

It is quite stable. I haven't had system issues with it. The VRAs run, they do their thing. The VPGs run, so as long as we're not experiencing network interruptions between our two campuses, the tasks run as they should. In the event we do have an interruption, they seem to recover fairly quickly catching up on the journaling and stuff like that. It's fairly stable.

Scalability is pretty good. We have 50 seats, so we will just be starting to bump up against that very shortly. My impression is that all we need to do is purchase more licenses as needed, and we're good to expand as long as our infrastructure internal can absorb it.

I just recently learned from Zerto Con that they are coming out or have just come out with a Zerto for SaaS applications, which gives the ability to back up Office 365 tenants or Salesforce tenants. I am very interested in learning about that. We have been researching and budgeting for standalone products for Office 365 and Salesforce backups. From my understanding, those products would be backed up from the cloud to the cloud so that it wouldn't have impacts on our internal, long-term appliance, or any of our storage internal infrastructure. That's very appealing. 

It will depend on costs. If it's something that I can't absorb with the funding I have already secured for Office 365, then it would have to be added to our next year's budget because we run from July 1st to June 30th. Our capital timeline budgeting has surpassed us already.

For the most part, the technical support is pretty decent. I've only had to open one or two tickets and the response time has been pretty good. Our questions were answered.

We previously used Unitrends. We switched solutions because we were at the end of our lifecycle with the appliances we had. At that time, Unitrends was not quite as mature with the diskless and cloud-type technologies as Zerto was. We were pursuing diskless where we had to rotate out hard drives for archiving. We wanted to get rid of that. That brought us to Zerto and it was recommended by one of our vendors to take a look at it.

Unitrends had replaced Commvault. 

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, deploying the VRAs to the VMware infrastructure and stuff like that was point, click, and let it run it. It was fairly quick. The VRAs took a couple of minutes each, so that wasn't bad at all. Setting up the VPGs is quite simple. There is a little bit of confusion where you can set your default for the journaling and stuff like that and then modify individual VMs after the fact. If you want different journal sizes for different VMs in the same VPG, there are a couple of different spots you can tweak. The setup and requirements of the LTR were a little bit confusing.

We purchased six or eight hours of implementation time but that was over multiple calls. We stood up some of the infrastructures, got some VPGs together, and then they left it to me to set up some other VPGs. Then we did a touch base to see what questions I had and things like that. We had six or eight hours purchased but it was spread over multiple engagements.

For the most part, only I worked on the deployment. Our network engineer was involved briefly just to verify connectivity via the VLANs and firewalls. Once we had established a connection, he was pretty much out of it.

I'm the only one who uses it strictly for our district backups. We're a small college. Our IT programs, HR, or business services, don't have their own separate entities. It's all covered under the primary IT department.

I don't know that we've saved a ton by replacing our legacy solution with Zerto. I think there's a little less overhead with it. Setting up the VPGs, the protection groups, and everything is a little bit easier and the file restores go much quicker. Fortunately, we haven't had to perform full system restores, but I did not need to do that with Unitrends either. It's usually a folder or a file here and there. We're not really intense on restoring. It has saved a little on management, but not a ton. 

Pricing wasn't horrible. I can't say that it was super competitive. We definitely could have gone with a cheaper price solution but the ease of use and management was really what won me over. Being the only network administrator, I don't have a ton of time to read through 500-page user manuals to get these things set up on a daily basis. I needed something that was very easy to implement and use on a daily basis. In the event I'm out of the office, it would be nice to have simple documentation so that if somebody needs a file restore while I'm gone, it can be handed off to somebody who is not a network admin as their primary job.

I have not run into any additional costs. Obviously, if you're going to utilize Azure for long-term retention it is an additional cost, but that's coming from Microsoft, not Zerto. To my knowledge, there is no additional licensing needed for that, that's all included in the product.

Commvault was another solution we looked at even though it was against my better judgment. We looked at Veeam and Rubrik as well.

In terms of ease of use, Veeam was pretty similar but at the time we still had some physical servers that we no longer have now. We are all virtual now. Veeam couldn't accommodate that, as I understood. I liked the features of Zerto and the ability to get the RTO and RPO reports and see where we're at. The ease of file restores was really nice.

My advice would be to make sure that you clearly understand what you require. You must have retention and recoverability. Make sure that your journal configurations correspond to accommodate that in an event like ransomware or something like that, that a high change rate can happen. Also, utilize long-term retention for instances like that. 

I appreciate the continuing education that they provide. There is Zerto Con and they have different customer support webinars. They do the new product release webinars and stuff like that, where they're very open on what features they're adding, what they've released, and what improvements they're doing. Whereas it seems like most companies, say, "Okay, we have an update available. Here are the release notes." And, it's up to you to go through that.

I like that Zerto takes the time to sometimes do live demos. We're migrating from 8.0 to 8.5. We're going to do it in a live environment and show approximately how long it takes and all the steps to go through it. Make sure you check this box if you're upgrading from this. I find that very helpful. I'm a visual learner, versus learning from reading. Seeing some of those step-by-step upgrades, releases, and feature demonstrations is very helpful.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.