What advice do you have for others considering Zerto?

Zerto is adaptable and straightforward, making it easy for new users to adopt. The solution has significant advantages in recovery and offers good scalability. I would rate Zerto an eight out of a ten.

I would rate Zerto eight out of ten. Zerto is deployed in multiple departments and we have ten users. I recommend Zerto because it helps recover data faster and improves its overall quality.

We are end-users. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. When using this with VMware, I'd say it is very easy to set up. I haven't used it with Hyper-V, however, I've heard that Zerto may not develop a version for Hyper-V.

Automated testing and recorded tests can vary based on several factors, including the complexity of our IT environment. For us, it takes around seven to eight days. It's still taking the same time, so we must explore more. Our team is exploring the process more, so it's still taking that much time. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

I would rate Zerto eight out of ten. Maintaining Zerto is manageable as we have a dedicated team of three people responsible for its upkeep. Our organization consists of 40 analysts in one site. Zerto provides robust data protection and excels in disaster recovery for businesses, but its cost may be steeper compared to other solutions.

I would rate Zerto ten out of ten, but I would like it to offer bare metal recovery as well. No maintenance is required for Zerto.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10. My only advice is to go through the YouTube page. Everything you see is helpful.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten. Our Zerto deployment spans multiple locations and is managed by a team of eight administrators who are responsible for protecting 30 virtual machines. While Zerto itself doesn't require regular maintenance, it's important to conduct periodic tests to verify our disaster recovery functionality and generate reports to monitor its health. I would recommend Zerto because it provides better and more simplified protection.

I would rate Zerto seven out of ten. It only works for virtual machines, not physical ones. This means we need separate software for physical machine backup, which adds complexity and cost. Zerto's recovery speed falls in line with what we've experienced from other disaster recovery solutions. Disaster recovery testing was prevented due to security restrictions. Our policies don't permit creating a sandbox environment that interacts with Zerto. Four people are required for the maintenance of Zerto. I recommend Zerto for disaster recovery purposes.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten. Maintenance is required quarterly. The Zerto technical and business teams collaborate with us on the backend to remove all the repeated queries that make the system sluggish. This service is charged additionally. I strongly recommend that anyone considering purchasing Zerto begin with the 30-day trial, which can be extended to 60 days. This ample timeframe allows a thorough evaluation of all features and functionalities. Understanding Zerto's customization and integration capabilities to align with specific business needs is crucial. Had I followed this approach and shared my feedback earlier, the outcome might have been different. Therefore, it's essential to fully explore the trial version before committing to an annual subscription. Close collaboration with the Zerto technical team is vital to ensure successful implementation. While sales teams often present an optimistic view, real-world experiences from existing users provide the most valuable insights. I encourage potential customers to connect with other Zerto users through industry networks to gather honest feedback before purchasing.

We implemented Zerto to address challenges with ransomware and protect the personal information of our large user base. We needed a solution for ransomware protection and data protection. Zerto is user-friendly and compatible with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. We find it particularly convenient as a managed service on Azure, where we can easily enable and configure it for our applications. Near synchronous replication with Zerto performs well, especially after HPE acquires TechGuard Enterprises. We are satisfied with their customer support and end-user support services. We use Zerto to protect three virtual machines in our environment, each running a different application. Zerto ensures that all three virtual machines are fully protected. Zerto has significantly reduced downtime for us as it operates in real-time without requiring any downtime for database or application protection. Simple configuration with our applications and databases is all that is needed. Zerto has saved us time in data recovery situations, particularly from ransomware attacks. It provides comprehensive insights into attacks on our databases and applications, enabling us to take immediate action based on real-time reports and analysis of logs. Zerto has streamlined our DR testing process by offering a DSO option within its configuration design tool. This feature simplifies the setup process and saves time without requiring technical expertise. Zerto has positively impacted our IT resiliency strategy by aiding in the creation of comprehensive IT roadmaps. It assists in planning for application and database deployments, as well as implementing security solutions for protection against ransomware and data disasters. This early-stage planning helps us align our roadmap effectively. New users can confidently use Zerto for their disaster recovery, virtual mobility, and ransomware protection needs without hesitation. It is a highly recommended software for ensuring data security and business continuity. Overall, I would rate Zerto as a 9 out of 10.

To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend doing a PoC on it. Deploy it in your environment and test it. Most of the problems you are going to see are due to the replication, and that is the site-to-site connection. One of the problems that I have experienced with Zerto has been related to replication, not the solution itself. We have not used Zerto for blocking unknown threats and attacks. Thankfully, we have not had that. We do not have experience of that, thankfully. We have used Zerto to do DR to both AWS and Azure, but the ability to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud is not something critical for us because the health insurance requirements for certification do not allow us to put our Tier 1 data in the cloud. Also, because our applications are multi-tiered where they reach out to the mainframe, Solaris, and other equipment outside of the virtual environment, it did not make sense to go to the cloud with it, but we do have it. We have a development environment there. A lot of times, we will use it to refresh the development environment. So, it is important, but in our case, it is not critical for us. We have not had any issues utilizing Zerto to support DR on AWS, but AWS is on the slower side. The reason is that for the connection to AWS, even though it is a direct connection, the speed does vary for us. I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

I would recommend Zerto to others. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten. I recommend that new users take advantage of any training videos and documentation offered by Zerto to familiarize themselves with all the features and how to use them.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten. We have over 300 clients using our web applications.

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.

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

Zerto is an effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities. The biggest lesson that I have learned by using Zerto is the need for application involvement and defining protection groups. Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend doing an architectural design and implementing best practices. Involve your network team early and use Zerto's expertise. I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10.

My understanding is we have a partnership with Zerto. It provided free training to our employees and we have done multiple certifications. We did not use it for immutable data copies. We don't use it for blocking unknown threats and attacks. We don't use it for security purposes. We have other security protection services for our customers, including firewalls and antivirus. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery. I'd advise potential users to pay attention during the initial setup and watch what you are replicating from one side to another. After the setup, you will not have to put a lot of time in - as long as you pay attention during the initial phase. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If the reporting and alerting functionality were better, I'd rate it ten out of ten.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It requires little care and feeding. Not a lot goes wrong with it. It just works.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

The solution has not replaced any of our legacy backup systems. It hasn't helped us to reduce downtime, as we haven't had any yet. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The only issue is that someone would move the VMs involved around. If you have a global team, make sure they understand the strategy and everyone is on the same page so that issues like that don't arise. We had silos on our side and once we dealt with that, we were fine.

We know we have the capabilities to do disaster recovery in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center. We're replicating about 150 miles north of us. That's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years for us. We're making a pivot to where we know we're going to have to go that way with some of the cloud solutions. We have not had to use it for data recovery due to ransomware. We have gone through the industrial hardening of our environment. We have been rated as very mature as far as our security stands. We have actually had some counterparts that experienced some issues and they didn't have anything in place, and it was very bad for them. Luckily, we have not had to use it in that capacity. We feel really good about its capability from the testing we've done. We know we can use it for malicious attack response. We have tested it to help protect VMs in our environment and we have found that it will work for that. We got decent results with testing and I was very impressed. In terms of it reducing our overall backup and disaster recovery management, it hasn't. We needed two staff members for the last two solutions we used. This year we will need three because I will also be involved with Zerto. Zerto has replaced our DR and replication legacy solution. We're using Veeam for our backups but Zerto has replaced everything replication-wise. It saved costs to manage them by 20%. My advice would be to do a POC for its concept and everything you get. Get it. Do it. It's a good product. I have friends that work with other companies that provide similar services and one of their engineers told me that you can't beat Zerto. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten. Currently, we have a separate product that we use for backup, which has immutability features. However, we do not currently employ Zerto for immutability purposes. We have considered using the cloud for disaster recovery, but currently, we maintain the same hardware at both locations. However, since we conduct all of our firmware testing and upgrades on our disaster recovery site first, we have decided to keep our own disaster recovery site instead of attempting to do it in the cloud. We could easily transfer data to the disaster recovery system. One of Zerto's functions is to replicate data from virtual machines or migrate entire virtual machines, although we haven't utilized it for that purpose. The only maintenance required is typically software updates. Whenever a new version is released, we must go through the process of upgrading Zerto. Other than that, unless there are any issues, it generally operates smoothly. We just need to ensure that we know the number of virtual machines we would be replicating so that we can obtain the correct licensing. Otherwise, we will have to backtrack. If we underestimate, we will need to provide additional licensing. It is important to determine this information upfront, as well as the bandwidth between our site and the replication location, as it also affects our recovery objectives.

I give Zerto a ten out of ten. We utilize Zerto for our disaster recovery, and we employ our storage appliance for local snapshots. No maintenance is required for Zerto. I suggest using Zerto to have the servers in different Virtual Protection Groups so that they can prioritize the most important aspects of the business.

Before implementing this solution, in terms of preparation for disaster recovery, you have to identify the business applications that are critical to your environment. You have to scope that out and make sure you have your VMs accounted for because licensing depends on the number of VMs. With a product like Zerto, you have to know the number of VMs and the size of data you are going to sync. These are the two factors that you have to look into for disaster recovery. Zerto is way better than other products. Installation is done with the click of a button. Everything happens in the background. You do not have to worry about it. As a product, we have not had any issues so far. However, we have not yet done a full-fledged disaster recovery. We have done minor testing, and we want to do major testing. As of now, I am very happy with the product. It does not need any further modifications. It is simple. It is nice. It is easy to execute, so I would keep it that way. We have not yet used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have been playing around to migrate a VM and see how it works. So far, we have only used it to sync up the SAP side. Our SAP stuff is already synced up, and we have done some testing of it, but we have not done any disaster recovery. I have not had a chance to assess Zerto for blocking unknown threats and attacks. We are mainly interested in using it for disaster recovery. Overall, I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for a migration tool, this is a great migration tool that will help you move workloads between data centers. It's agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure. And you have to look at whether you're moving a large amount of data or a large number of servers. Think about how much downtime your business can afford for moving those applications. If you're looking for something that can move an application with minimal downtime, this may be a solution for you. Or if you're moving large amounts of data, but you don't want to be down for the whole time you're restoring or moving, a synchronous product like this may be a solution for you. We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Azure environment and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests into Azure, and still keep our production environment up and running. We've tested certain workloads failing over into Azure, including a standard Windows or Linux box, and specific things like SQL Server, Oracle, et cetera. It has been going well so far and we're at the point where we're defining our protection groups and security in Azure for all of our critical workloads. We have not yet used the immutable data copies feature, but I was just at a conference and had some meetings with Zerto, some of the product professionals and engineers, and that is something that we are strongly looking into. That's because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then you're still in a bad situation. Putting the data into an immutable repository is something that we are definitely looking into. Especially in the industry that we are in, cybersecurity is a big issue. We have also not used it for blocking threats and attacks. But the ability, in conjunction with immutable data and putting that into a vault, to look at the data that is being replicated in real time and scan it, would be a great benefit. We do use some of the best-in-class tools for that kind of protection, but this would just be another layer to help with that. It's an interesting feature and another tool that would add a layer to our cyber protection. Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in backup and DR management. We have a pretty lean team. We try to cross-train our employees on the different products that we use. But Zerto did help to simplify the process because we can get people trained on it. They can assist in covering for other people in the group when they're out. The training only takes a couple of hours to go through the tutorials.

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.

In terms of maintenance of Zerto, we do our monthly reboots of the servers so that they stay up to date with the Microsoft patching. And anytime that Zerto has updates to their software, we make sure that we stay compliant with that. And once every year or 18 months, we update the cert on the servers. My advice is to look for a product that is easy to use and easy to learn and allows for scalability and DR testing that works well.

I give the solution a ten out of ten. When we bought Zerto, our goal was to be able to failover to the cloud. However, we have not yet fully adopted the cloud, so we have not yet upgraded our license or paid any connection fees. Our goal is to upgrade the license once we are ready, but that has not happened yet. Zerto's ease of use, and straightforward use, is the reason we chose it over other solutions. We don't want to be in a situation where, during a crisis, we have to hunt around and try to figure out how to use something. It's nice to have something that is straightforward and easy to use, instead of adding stress to an already stressful situation. We are still using other products for backups. We have not really ever used Zerto for backups. I know Zerto has changed its licensing model, but when we initially started using Zerto, we had to license every VM for basic protection, which was more costly than other backup solutions. I know Zerto has changed and we can now buy a backup license for VMs. However, due to the time, we are locked into a certain backup product, we will look at other potential solutions when the contract expires. We have Zerto deployed across two of our data centers. We have one person that maintains and monitors Zerto with an additional person who acts as a backup. The maintenance consists of updates and tweaking of journals for VPGs. If we have any specific use cases that we want to discuss with the Zerto team, they will often arrange a peer meeting with organizations. Zerto did that for us when we were using Meditech MAGIC so that we could make sure that anyone else with experience running it could help us. We were able to do a trial run with Zerto to get confident. I suggest taking advantage of doing a trial to make sure Zerto meets our needs, and if we have any unique workloads, then talk to the Zerto account team to try to arrange a conversation with someone else who is doing the same thing.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Zerto is a great solution that does exactly what it advertises and I definitely recommend it. Zerto requires regular updates and maintenance. However, it is mostly a "set and forget" system, which is very convenient. This allows me to focus on other tasks. Zerto has its own use cases, so we cannot replicate an entire site, but if we have to select certain products or applications that need to be replicated, such as a DR site, then it is an excellent solution to use. However, Zerto is not suitable for everyone and it would be difficult to do it on a large scale. For specific applications, it is great. I could not replicate my whole data center with Zerto, as it would be too complex. Nevertheless, Zerto is great for certain applications.

Overall, Zerto is pricey and it fulfills a very specific need, but it is incredibly worth the investment if uptime and recoverability are priorities.

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.

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.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable. We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly. I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. Zerto did not reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery, overall backup, and DR management because we already run a very lean staff; there are eight of us on the server team, and we manage over 3000 servers across the company. On the other hand, Zerto enables multiple staff to do the failovers rather than one of two specialized employees. None of the time saved in DR testing has been allocated to value-add tasks because the time saved occurs outside our regular business hours. Comparing the solution's speed of recovery with other disaster recovery tools, Zerto is excellent and rapid; we can restore everything in the VPG simultaneously. A tool like Commvault is single-threaded, so we would have to restore VM by VM, which is very limiting. VPGs are excellent because we can restore everything within them and get on with life. We have not used the tool for immutable data copies; we use our pure storage. When we had a ransomware attack, the solution didn't initially save us time as they attacked our Zerto environment and took it down. Once we had it back online, we could speed up the recovery, and we've since hardened the product with additional security.

It is meeting our RPO expectations and we are happy with the RPO.

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. It's given me tremendous peace of mind and confidence that the network can be recovered quickly and accurately. I would suggest future users take some time to do an in-depth trial. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. In my job, a decision is sometimes obvious, but it's tricky in other instances. You might need to draw up a weighted scoring model and check a couple of suppliers. This time, it was so clear. It's hard to quantify the pleasure of getting a nice piece of software that just works.

I would advise others that the cost of this solution is justified based on the value you receive. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It's a pretty set-it-and-forget-it type of tool, and it's very reliable. So, I would rate it an eight on a scale from one to ten.

Overall, Zerto is a very good product for us, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

When evaluating Zerto, I would advise others to try to think of any potential scenario to test with and use it to prove whether it does or doesn't work. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I would advise others to test drive the solution themselves. They should play with it, see how it works themselves and try to break it. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

If you're in the middle of conversion between different platforms, regardless of if you're moving from on-premises to host it or from one environment to another, Zerto is agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Zerto a ten.

The best way to look at it is from an ease-of-use standpoint because when you look at VMware's version, it's a little bit more complex even though it is native to where we use it. That's why we went with Zerto. Considering what we use Zerto for, I'd give it a ten out of ten because it is our primary solution.

If you want something that you can set and forget, Zerto is a solution you should look into. If I were to rate Zerto on a scale from one to ten, I'd give it a nine.

You don't have to evaluate Zerto; it just works. I would give it a ten out of ten; I have no complaints.

It has been very consistent in keeping up with our RPO and RTO and we have been very happy with it. Zerto hasn't replaced our other backup solutions, just so that we have redundancy. We don't own the license for long-term retention with Zerto, so we have an offsite backup in addition to the production environment replication. Give it a shot. It's quick, it's easy, and reliable, and you can run an evaluation pretty inexpensively. You just need another location that you can replicate to for that.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10. For those who are interested in this solution, my advice is to evaluate it, test it, and buy it.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done, but once it's running, it's very simple. If it's set up right, it literally involves a few clicks. Testing and failover can be done in a few clicks, which makes a very complex thing simple. So, if you set it up and you have the groundwork done, then with one or two clicks, you could do major testing, and you could do major failovers. From that standpoint, it's extremely simple to use once it's up and running. They have a lot of other features that we don't really leverage 100%. We use it only for disaster recovery, but it also contains features for ransomware where you can recover files. Although we don't use that feature, that's definitely a benefit. We have recovered files from time to time but not because of ransomware. We maintain a history of up to 30 days for each of the virtual machines that we have. We have a different solution to recover files older than 30 days. We don't really use Zerto for immutable data copies, which goes into the ransomware where you expect not to be corrupted by ransomware. We use it, but we've never had a case where we had to recover from a ransomware instance or anything like that. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery and continuous replication. We have a separate backup tool that takes point-in-time backups. In terms of the 3-2-1 rule for our organization’s recovery strategy, our separate point-in-time backups give us three locations. At a point, we have three copies of the data in different stages. It hasn't reduced our downtime in any situations because we didn't need to do disaster recovery. So, from that standpoint, we don't have any baselines before or after. It hasn't directly reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, but the amount of time required per person or the time required by people for validation has greatly reduced. We never had anybody dedicated to it as their only function, but the amount of time that's required to do testing is significantly less. So, there has definitely been a saving of time. Similarly, there has been no change in the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery management. In theory, it wouldn't because, in most IT organizations, a lot of people wear different hats at different times. We didn't have a dedicated person or a dedicated team only to validate backup and recovery. Compared to other solutions, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Go for it. It's the best-of-breed for high-availability replication solutions. It really is dead simple to use and easy to implement and maintain. It's not one of those solutions that you have to spend hours a day managing. You look at it for five minutes a day and forget about it. The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that high availability, having a good replication solution in place, doesn't have to be a big, complicated, scary mess. It can be simple. It doesn't have to be some huge hurdle that you have to overcome.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployments. In terms of the cloud we are using, we are using Azure. We are using our own Cloud provider; we are using VMware Cloud Director. I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities. They are a very good product, however, they are not perfect just yet.

We're a Commvault and Zerto customer. We are on Zerto 8.5, and we are evaluating version 9 update 3. I have no impression on the scalability of this solution, because we haven't really grown yet. We have 300 endpoints and we've always been in that range. I can't tell how Zerto fares if there's more than 300 endpoints. We have a primary asset owner who uses this solution, who gets feedback from other IT infrastructure teams of whether their servers need to have a low RPO/RTO. That single asset owner will then put those in Zerto. For deployment and maintenance, we have the primary asset owner, then there's a backup person. The primary asset owner does everything, but if the asset owner isn't available, the backup person will help with support roles. We don't have plans of increasing Zerto usage, as we've always had a relatively static critical VM count of around 300, e.g. we've gone down to 260, we've gone up to 300, but it's always in a range that's close to 300. My advice to people looking into implementing this product is that if you have less than a 24-hour RPO/RTO and you need it to work in your target location, then there's no other product for it other than Zerto. My rating for Zerto is a nine out of ten, because nothing is perfect. Nine is the best rating I could give for this solution, but the key takeaway is that it is a single use case product and it does the job.

The main thing is to make sure your network infrastructure is designed properly. Zerto is only going to be as successful as the network infrastructure and the automation that is created around it to help with a failover situation. In our particular situation, we have a stretch network situation, which means we don't really have to do a lot of the automated scripting that most people might have to do, surrounding re-IP-ing the environment and DNS updates. We're in a unique situation. Because we are a telco, we own our entire network and we have the ability to stretch our network to a location that's a state away. That scenario doesn't apply to a lot of other business situations. Other institutions may not have that luxury, in which case their scripted automation, and how well that is set up, would be critical. Because we weren't doing backup and DR management before, Zerto has probably increased the amount of staff we need. You don't need staff in place for things that you aren't doing. HPE bought Nimble and made Nimble not as good. Hopefully, the HPE acquisition won't have a negative effect on Zerto. That's a deep concern among all people who have had to deal with things that HPE bought. They need to keep to the original intention and vision without diluting it within some other HPE product or some other HPE offering. I have no interest in seeing Zerto losing its functionality or having it rebranded as some other problematic HPE solution. We bought this as a purpose-built solution to do exactly what we want and that's the way we would like it to stay.

My advice would be to work with your Zerto technical account manager for the setup and best practices. Zerto is good when it comes to continuous data protection. We're currently in the middle of some technical support cases with them, cases that I'm watching, regarding some of our larger databases. But so far, there have been no issues with the smaller databases. It's doing its job. We haven't yet enabled Zerto to do DR in the cloud, but that's something we are pursuing currently. We have had a demo of it but we haven't done a PoC.

The only lesson I would pass on is that when we updated VMware, that version of VMware wasn't supported with the version of Zerto we were running. That could be a "gotcha," so make sure the hypervisor is supported under the Zerto matrix. Request a trial. It's simple enough to install and configure on your own. My advice would be to see, firsthand, how easy it is.

We don't have any plans for long-term retention. They talked to us about it. But at the moment it's not in our forecast to look at that. We don't have to failback because we just fail to a bubble, in other words. We don't want to bring down production because we're going through migration of our ERP. So we fail it over into this bubble. And that's what we're using. It is the test failover that we're using in that environment. Then in that environment, everything is isolated. That's how we use it today. We have never had to failback back to our main site. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The main thing to figure out before going with Zerto is, from a business point of view, what your company needs. What level of protection do you need? What regulations do you have to conform to? Can you survive with a seven-second difference in the data? Is 15 minutes enough or not? Also, you need to take into consideration, from the licensing perspective, not only the Zerto licenses, but that you need to have a license for ESX, vCenter, hosts, and hardware. You need to count everything before you decide to go with Zerto. In our case, we're doing private cloud, and we needed to build that private cloud first. You have to decide if that is workable for you or you're okay using Azure or some other public cloud provider. Once you work through all that, Zerto will definitely be very good for you. One issue we decided on, from a business perspective, was to divide our users into two groups: level one and level two. Level one users should be able to connect after 15 minutes and level-two users will be brought back after all level-one issues have been resolved, which should be within a couple of hours. When the business made that decision, we created the groups. We're also working with Zerto as a ransomware backup solution. Right now we are using seven-day journaling but we're putting it on external storage or cloud. We're thinking about a one-year solution where we can go back to any particular point in time, bring the server back, and get all the files. We upgraded our version so we can start to use external storage. Zerto is one of the greatest applications we have for security and vigilance. They did everything so well that I don't know how it can be improved. It's one of the best solutions among all the different components I have. I would rate most of the other solutions we're using between seven and nine out of 10. Only Zerto is a 10, along with my malware solution, Minerva Labs. Both companies are from Israel and I always grade both a 10 when I talk to others.

It is a really good product for creating yourself a DR site that you can basically fire up in an instant. If you're looking for getting a hot site for your company and you are looking for something that in the event of a disaster or ransomware can quickly restore files for you, Zerto is a good product for that. I don't think it is terribly expensive for what it does, and it is really easy to use. I would definitely recommend Zerto if you're looking for a hot site setup. We have not had to use it for ransomware yet. We've been fortunate. That was actually one of the reasons we did get it back in 2015. At the time, we were getting hit by ransomware. We've invested heavily into security measures since then and haven't gotten hit with ransomware. So, we haven't had to use it for data recovery in situations due to ransomware, but it is a part of the incident response plan in case we do have to use it that way. We do not use Zerto for long-term retention. We will probably evaluate the idea, but right now, we're pretty happy with the long-term retention product that we use. At this time, there is no firm commitment to switch over. Zerto has not particularly reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. It has probably reduced the manhours required to maintain, but we're a Jack of all trades staff, so everybody has their hands in everything. So, it really hasn't reduced the number of staff, but it has reduced the overall hours of maintenance a little bit. It has also not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management. There is still a decent amount of staff involved in the overall process, but the overall hours for maintenance have been reduced. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that having a good DR configuration setup doesn't have to be a painful process. Zerto is a good software for just giving you that capability without you having to have a deep background and a lot of complicated software. The ability to restore and the ability to have a DR site on the fly is really valuable to our company. So, that's what we've been doing. I would rate Zerto a nine out of 10.

It is a good solution. It doesn't work for everything, but for certain use cases. You can't restore your entire site with it. However, if you need to restore or replicate a certain number of production and mission-critical applications, it is a good solution for that. I like Zerto. We have big databases, so it does take a lot of storage to replicate it, but I think it is a good solution. I would recommend it. I would rate it as eight or nine out of 10.

When we first decided to implement Zerto, it wasn't very important that it provides both backup and DR in one platform. In fact, realistically, even now, while we have it and we used it on a limited scope, I'm not sure that it's needed. With respect to our legacy solutions, I'd say that the cost of replacing them with Zerto is net neutral in the end. My advice to anybody who is considering Zerto is that it's an awesome product and it won't steer them wrong. That said, there are some issues such as the licensing model and the situations where VPGs falling behind suspends the replication. Overall, it is a good product. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We do not currently use Zerto for long-term retention, although we are looking at the feature. I highly recommend Zerto. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to go through all of the best practice guides and be sure to review whatever database they have in there. This way, they keep themselves efficient. Also, it is important to keep in mind that it's only at a VPG level that everything is consistent. So, if you have multiple servers and applications that need to be consistent with each other, then, they really should be in the same VPG. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We initially started with the on-premises version, where we replicated our global DR from the US to Taiwan. Zerto recently came out with a cloud-based, enterprise variant that gives you the ability to use it on-premises or in the cloud. With this, we've migrated our licenses to a cloud-based strategy for disaster recovery. We are in the middle of evaluating their long-term retention, or long-term backup solution. It's very new to us. In the same way that Veeam, and Rubrik, and others were trying to get into Zerto's business, Zerto's now trying to get into their business as far as the backup solution. I think it's much easier to do backup than what Zerto does for DR, so I don't think it will be very difficult for them to do table stakes back up, which is file retention for multiple targets, and that kind of thing. Right now, I would say they're probably at the 70% mark as far as what I consider to be a success, but each version they release gets closer and closer to being a certifiable, good backup solution. We have not had to recover our data after a ransomware attack but if our whole environment was encrypted, we have several ways to recover it. Zerto is the last resort for us but if we ever have to do that, I know that we can recover our environment in hours instead of days. If that day ever occurs, which would be a very bad day if we had to recover at that level, then Zerto will be very helpful. We've done recoveries in the past where the on-premises restore was not healthy, and we've been able to recover them very fast. It isn't the onesie twosies that are compelling in terms of recovery because most vendors can provide that. It's the sheer volume of being able to restore so many at once that's the compelling factor for Zerto. My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is to get a good cloud architect. Spend the time to build out your design, including your IP scheme, to support the feature sets and capabilities of the product. That is where the work needs to be done, more so than the Zerto products themselves. Zerto is pretty simple to get up and running but it's all the work ahead in the deployment or delivery that needs to be done. A good architect or cloud person will help with this. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that it requires good planning but at the end of it, you'll have a reasonable disaster recovery solution. If you don't currently have one then this is certainly something that you should consider. I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

We're probably on the latest version or one version behind. We very lightly use the product for very specific things. We have a couple of things that are very high data rate, very high IO, for which we cannot use traditional snapshot-based technology and we are using that to do a long-term backup. The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We have maintained exactly what we had. It's simplified it so it's possible to have a reduction, however, we haven't done any reduction from that. The biggest piece of advice I could give is if you want the best-in-class for failover and replication, as well as ease of management, there is no better product that I've seen so far. Whether hardware or software combinations, this has been the simplest deployment and it just works. I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

At this time, we don't use Zerto for long-term data retention. Instead, we have some other technologies in place for that. We have Veem and we have some SAN replication and we have some network-attached storage, as well. We use Zerto as our first line of defense. For example, in response to a ransomware attack, we would use Zerto for sure to roll back before that event happened. We have not had a ransomware attack, at least not yet. We fully expect that, if it ever does happen, we'll definitely utilize Zerto. It is essentially our insurance policy. If we ever have a ransomware incident, that would be our first line of defense to recover from it. In fact, we really haven't had many opportunities to use Zerto, thankfully. Zerto is one of those things that are great, and we're glad we have it, but you hope we never have to use it. At this time, everything we do is on-premises but having DR in the cloud with Zerto is definitely something that we want to do in the future. It is not important to us that Zerto offers both backup and DR functionality. For backup, we have it covered in other ways. Being in the utility business, we're very big on redundancy. In fact, we have backups to cover the backups and we have about five different levels of them that we utilize. Zerto covers the front line, and when something bad happens, we can roll back within a 24-hour period using it. Then, we have deeper levels handled by other products like Veeam. Funnily enough, Veeam kept telling us that they would add Zerto-like features, and at the same time, Zerto kept telling us that they would add Veeam-like features. We continue to use both of them. I've recommended Zerto to several IT professionals that I've talked to because it's such a good product. I give them examples of what we have done. Overall, it's a fantastic product. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

You'll be happy with Zerto. The biggest lesson I have learned from Zerto is to be patient. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

I've actually pushed us to use Zerto for our backups with the solutions team for quite a while, since version 6.5. I don't think they plan on doing it just because we already have two other backup offerings and they don't want to complicate our Zerto infrastructure. From my understanding, we're not planning on doing it. But with every release, it gets so much better and it's just a matter of time before we revisit it. My advice would be to follow best practices when it comes to back-end infrastructure. We have made some changes specifically to track certain things like swap files and journal history. Previously, we had everything going to production data stores and now we have dedicated journal data and restore data stores for swap files, which helps us to thin out the noise when it comes to storage. Storage implementation is very important. Make sure to go through all the training. The training on MyZerto is free, very straightforward and it's very informative. That's one of the things we didn't do initially but it wasn't really as available as it is now. I would rate Zerto ten out of ten.

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.

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.

Looking ahead, I have seen that the next version of Zerto will support Salesforce replication. This could be something that is useful for my customers. The biggest lesson that I have learned from user Zerto is that every organization should have a disaster recovery plan. My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to calculate how much it will cost in the event of downtime or a disaster, and then compare it to the cost of Zerto. Once this is done, people will opt for a disaster recovery solution. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

If you want something that's easy to set up, with a single pane of glass, and that doesn't take a backup administrator to admin, Zerto is the way to go. The only lesson we really learned, and this has been resolved now, is that when we initially started using Zerto there were some hiccups when it came to Linux servers, hiccups that we had to work through. Support was very helpful and resolved it for us, but it made it a little bit of a manual process. In the later releases of Zerto, they've resolved those issues. They just had to work out some kinks.

I would definitely advise them to give Zerto a chance and PoC it, if they desire. It is the best solution in the marketplace currently and has maintained that for quite some time. I would give them a nine (out of 10). I really love the solution. I want more Zerto, but I can't afford more Zerto. I would love to protect everything in our environment, but we do have to make a business decision to do that because there is a requisite cost.

When trying to think of improvements I cannot think of anything to critiques at this time because it does behave so amazingly well. I've been involved with other SRM implementations and SRM is very complicated to put together and to configure, whereas Zerto is just so easy out of the box. Overall, the solution probably has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe millions. Some of the important lessons we have learned are you need to plan your DR carefully. That is the most important. Also, make sure that your applications are grouped together, be cognizant of the different virtual networks they go into. For example, If you have a web frontend DMZ that goes into one component, where the application and the database are in another place. You need to be careful on what networks you are sending them to at the replication site, be aware of that. I highly recommend Zerto. I speak about the product all the time. I think that it is priceless what it does for us. I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Definitely take the free trial and put it through its paces, because you really can't break anything with it, given the way that you can do the testing. It gives you a good opportunity to play with the tools without having to worry about causing any problems in the environment. We have plans to evaluate the solution for long-term retention. I'm going to start testing some of their features once we upgrade to version 8.5, and then we'll evaluate if it makes sense to do that or not. We do have other backup products that we're evaluating alongside of that though. The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. We already run a very lean engineering team. I got what I expected. I'd actually been trying to bring the product in since 2014 but I kept not getting budget funding for it. I feel satisfied with what I ended up with and I'm glad that we were able to move forward with the project.

Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use. What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication for many years. If you're doing long distance, you have very high latency and you need to compensate for that. I worked with Zerto developers and we were able to tune replication to meet our site-to-site requirements. That was a key thing, and that's missed a lot of times. When people deploy the solution, they're not always keeping up with the SLA, and it has nothing to do with how it was deployed. It has to do with the pipe and the latency between site-to-site. That tends to be missed when deploying replication. It is on our drawing board to look at Zerto for backups and long-term retention. I would say we're going to end up using it. It makes sense, at least from my standpoint, to keep things simple. It already has the data, so why not use it to move it wherever? When it comes to the fact that it provides both backup and disaster recovery in one platform, I had never thought about the backup piece. When they announced it, it just made sense to me as an engineer with a logical mind. "Hey, I'm already holding the data, shoveling it across states. Instead of putting it here, why not put it over here at the same time?" So I was very excited about a two-for-one product. My company has backup solutions and they're struggling with them. I'm looking to replace their backup solutions with Zerto, probably in 2021. We're also still looking at doing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We've done some testing with it. In my previous company we were using it and deployed it around the globe. Due to border restrictions, we had to go to the cloud with it. It was big because we were able to go to the cloud and we didn't have to stand up another data center. I'll be conservative and say that it saved us a few million dollars. I give Zerto a nine out of 10. The only reason that I'm not giving it a 10 is that I'd like to see the GUI made into an appliance.

My advice would be that when you need a tool to bet your business on, as a last resort, make sure you evaluate all the options, test them, and don't be cheap. The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that a third-party company can do a better job of protecting the workloads than the vendor. It does a better job than VMware and Microsoft together. In terms of using the solution for long-term retention, we're evaluating Zerto's offering. It's a new feature. We already have an established backup system, using Symantec. In a couple of years, when we need to refresh Symantec, we might consider it. But at this point we don't use it and we aren't considering it. We use the Veritas NetBackup solution. They split from Symantec so Veritas is separate, but it was a Symantec solution for backup. We don't use Veeam, we don't use Cohesity, we don't use Rubrik. The only potential is to replace our Veritas/Symantec backup product, in the future, with Zerto Long Term Retention. If we have a DR situation, we are not planning to fail back. It's not part of our DR strategy. If we need to fail-over a production data center, it means that this data center has been destroyed, it's a smoking hole in the grass. We will be running continuously from the DR data center, which is a full-scale data center. I would rate Zerto at nine out of 10. There are new features that they're working on, which will be nice to have. That's why I won't rate it a 10, but overall it's a really good, stable, easy-to-use product.

Zerto can do what it says it can do. It can absolutely provide sub-second recovery point objectives, but with a couple of caveats. The caveats tend to apply to large companies like mine, and by "large" I mean if you have over 2,000 to 3,000 virtual machines, versus a small to medium-sized company that maybe has 50 to 500. Once you cross that barrier, you're getting into a larger environment that you're trying to replicate with Zerto. A couple things can break down. Zerto's product doesn't control the path between your source production data and the destination you're trying to send it to. There can be tons of bottlenecks on that path; you can be going around the world. If the bottleneck doesn't exist there, their product can absolutely do what it says it does. It's up to the customer. The people using Zerto have to understand that they own the bottlenecks in their environment. If there is a bottleneck between production and the targeted DR, the RPOs are going to slip. You're going to go from sub-seconds to minutes or hours. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto's product. It's the fault of the design of the customer's environment and what they brought it into. That doesn't just exist for the pipe between the two sites. On the destination side, the side that's receiving this data, the storage layer underneath needs to be more performant than the production side. That's somewhat of a strange concept for a lot of customers and people coming into the Zerto solution. They see the marketing side of, "10 seconds to RPO" and say, "Yeah, I want that." But what it means is that you've really got to look at your hardware and you've got to have class-A hardware the whole way through that Zerto pipeline, for their product to do what it says it does. Zerto makes that very clear. They don't recommend hardware; they're not in the business of supporting other vendors. But they have a published list of best practices. The best practices clearly say everything that I just said. They also have best practices around managing your workload I/O on the source side, so that you don't overwhelm their product. But not everyone follows best practices. Certainly, when we implemented it we said, "Yeah, we get that. We understand what you're telling us. We understand that's a best practice, but we're not going to do it anyway, because it's too expensive," or we didn't have it in budget for that year. So we knew it and we went in without following them. A couple of years later, when we got to a tipping point, we realized, "Okay, we need to go back and align with some of those best practices," things we didn't think that we had the time to align with back in 2016. We've made that journey painfully with their product, but they were very upfront with us on what the requirements for their product would be. Overall, I would rate Zerto as a solid eight out of 10 for the core disaster recovery offering.

I would recommend doing the free proof of concept exercise with Zerto pre-sales engineers and work with them to discuss your environment and then review their recommendations on implementation. From time to time do the free training. I highly recommend doing that. Get your hands on this software and try it out first before doing the production implementation. The biggest lesson I have learned is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be hard. I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. I don't rate many things ten, but Zerto offered me exactly what they're upfront with, what it will do, and it's doing exactly what they said it would do.

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).

We don't know what we're going to do for long-term retention. We use it for DR purposes only. But we are still looking at the long-term retention and what to do with it. I would say if you're looking for true DR protection with minimal recovery time, then Zerto is probably going to be the one. If the objective is minimum time to recover, then this is the product you need to buy. If you want to spend time trying to set up again in a disaster, then there are a lot of things out there and for ransomware too. We have about a five-minute window where once data is compromised beyond five minutes, it's useless. So we need to keep the window to about five minutes. Because of that, Zerto is really going to have to do that at this point in a cost-effective way to recover. I like Zerto. You learn different things as you use it more and more, so you become more competent with it as you use it. I know that if you do have an issue, as with most other vendors, the easiest solution is to provide the logs as soon as you can, and then they're better prepared to respond if you do it that way. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect.

Make sure you know how long it's going to take to do your initial seeding. If you've got a lot of data, and you're doing it over a pretty good distance, just make sure your pipe is big enough for the initial seeding. Once the seeding's done, pipe size doesn't matter, but the initial seeding can take a good amount of time over a small-ish pipe if you're replicating a lot of data. For our largest servers to seed can take a full week or to 10 days for one server, for our large file server to seed is about seven terabytes, but we don't have a huge pipe at our DR site. We negotiated to increase the pipe size temporarily while we were doing the seeding, and that reduced the time drastically on how long it took to seed. I can't really give a number or what to look for. I would just have that conversation with Zerto about how long a certain pipe is going to take. How long is it going to take to seed using whatever pipe size based on the amount of data that they have. Make sure all of your notifications are set up well when it fails. It takes a little tweaking and making sure that everything is set up right, but when you want to make sure you're notified if you get outside your SLA on how long the backups are trailing, making sure all that's set up properly is key. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

My advice would be to plan out your Move groups and work with your business to get everything validated so you can back up on the other side. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

It has not saved us time in data recovery situation due to ransomware just because we thankfully haven't had any issues. I've done some testing and in those types of situations, it would be greatly beneficial. But I have not had any of those situations currently. At this time it has not helped to reduce downtime in any situation. We don't have it replicated in the cloud at this time so it has not saved use money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I would recommend Zerto to anybody considering it. My advice would be to make sure that after implementing the product, go through and accomplish the training labs so you know how to use a product really well, develop a disaster recovery plan in the event that you should need to use the product, and work closely with your Zerto engineer to ensure that the implementation fits your business needs. The biggest lesson I have learned is how valuable real-time replication of data can be in the event of a disaster and how valuable that functionality is in the event of a disaster. It has the potential to save the company many days' worth of lost business. If I could rate it an 11 (out of 10), I would. But we'll go with 10.

Take a hard look at it. Don't pass it by, don't be scared off by the price. Definitely take them up on the proof of concept. Have the team come in and do that. You'll be pleasantly surprised. They talk about technology that can just actually do what it promises. I've been doing this for over 20 years and sometimes you get jaded by the fact that people over-promise and under-deliver. Zerto was definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. The solution went in so easily that I had to do a double-take when my guys were telling me, "Hey, it's already up and running." I said, "It can't be done already." I'm used to complicated deployments. They promised and it does exactly what they said it would do. Don't be so skeptical. Keep an open mind to it and explore the possibilities. I just sat through ZertoCON. They put a lot of emphasis on long-term retention. It really started putting a question out there as to whether you need a different backup and recovery solution. We use a different partner called Rubrik for backup and recovery. The challenge that we have with Zerto is that we're only protecting 30 VMs, whereas with Rubrik, we're protecting all 200. There's a little bit of a dance between value and return. So we're not using Zerto for long-term storage right now. We're evaluating it. I don't know if it makes economic sense to do so, but we are taking a look at it. And we're not protecting all 200 servers because of cost. In terms of using the solution for a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes, knock on wood, we have not had to use it in that capacity just yet. We have a very mature cyber security posture and we haven't been popped by ransomware in the last year. But it does give me peace of mind that we also have that ability. That's just another layer of our cyber security posture and we know that we're protected against those threats. So there's definitely a peace of mind around that. The only folks using it are on our IT team, about five or six of us. Five of my guys use it on a regular basis and know how to manage it. I'm the sixth guy. If I ever have to get in there, we're in trouble.

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

Don't hesitate. Go out and do it now. Don't wait two years like we did. Push harder in order to be able to get the solution in place, especially since we know it will work better for you. Don't just take, "No," for an answer from senior management. The application is phenomenal. They continually add new things, more plugins, and modifications to the way things work. It just gets better as they go. We don't plan to use the solution for long-term retention at this time, but we are looking at going into a hybrid cloud solution in the near future which we may be using long-term retention for to make a duplicate copy of everything we have in our Massachusetts data center into a cloud solution. Whether it be an Azure or Amazon location on the cloud. While I can't really speak to whether it would allow us to do it, the application is set up to create a duplicate of the actual servers in Arizona. That's how it works so quickly. If we ever had a problem, I could always revert back from the duplicates that we have out in Arizona using the application, if necessary. Luckily, we haven't had a need for that, and hopefully never do. I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

The biggest lesson from using Zerto is the failover capability and the testing capability. Those are two very useful things. If somebody calls me and they need to test something in a test environment, I can use the test failover copy of Zerto to bring up that virtual machine, or machines, and test things without affecting production. The other thing that is impressive is that you really can bring up a virtual machine almost immediately. I would definitely give it a 10. I have no problems with it. I'm very happy with it.

Make sure that they can demo what you want done before you move forward. We had a problem with the SQL clustering. Make sure that the equipment that you're using is certified by all the vendors that are involved, like VMware. Now that we have the solution working, we're very happy. We've had it working for the last four to five months. We were able to test it with a test platform and it worked amazingly.

Know your use case and then do a thorough proof of concept with your use case to see whether the solution works for your environment and your specific use case. Have a well-defined project plan and negotiate your way with the vendor. The biggest lesson our organization has learned in using Zerto is that you should understand the product very well. You should understand what the product is capable of doing and leverage the options and features that are available in the product to the optimal extent.

Zerto is literally the best vendor that we deal with overall as an IT Department. They have always delivered, and have always been top-notch. I highly recommend them to ANYONE, regardless of whether or not they already have a DR solution. Zerto is better.

When we implemented Zerto, we only utilized some of the features. This was mostly because of our needs at the time and partially because the other parts were not up to what we needed. They have since greatly improved on these parts, like the backups features, but we aren't really looking for Zerto to handle those items today. We have never regretted implementing Zerto and I would not trade it for any other product.

It is good to implement a proof of concept of Zerto to test it out. I highly recommend it for data center moves.

If you are looking for an extremely easy solution to implement and is highly effective then this is your baby.

Don't underestimate how good it feels to rollback data instantly. It makes me look like a Wizzard at my desk.

It has been a great purchase, and we have no regrets. Not much can be improved in this solution as it has performed to what we had hoped and has the features we currently desire.

I'd strongly suggest carrying out a proof of concept if you're looking at this part of your IT solution.

Overall, this solution is quite enhanced compared to other, similar solutions in the market. I recommend trying this solution.

No.

Make sure that you understand the limitations of any software before you dive in. Make sure you document your use cases and have the vendor show you how it can perform those tasks.

For the most part, we are very satisfied with Zerto and its features.

My advice for someone thinking about Zerto is to do the trial run that Zerto offers, you will be impressed. If you are looking to get RPO's of 30seconds or less, Zerto can do it. I typically see 8-18 seconds RPO. Needless to say this depends greatly on your WAN link. I highly recommend going to Boston in 2017 and meeting the staff at Zertocon!