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I use Zerto for backup and restore.

With both Veeam and vCenter, the restoration process took a considerable amount of time. Zerto bragged about how their restoration was much faster, and it was true. It seemed unrealistically faster when they described and said that they could restore a VM within minutes. With vCenter and Veeam, when we restore a VM, depending on the size of the VM, it can take hours. Zerto proved true, and we have tested it numerous times now. We have done restorations via Zerto, and it truly does a full restoration of a VM within minutes. That was the problem we needed to solve, and they provided the solution. We are very pleased.

We are able to do a restoration so quickly because it backs up in near real-time. Of course, nothing is going to be in real-time, but it is as near real-time as possible. Instead of copying a larger amount of data, it is able to copy just delta data which is in a compressed form so that replication is more frequent. If we need to do a restoration, we will be missing less data.

Its interface is like any enterprise-grade utility. It is complex and not easy to use, but it is learnable.

We were able to see its benefits after some time. That was mostly because we did not have a good opportunity to test it in production. The initial onboarding came with an opportunity for us to do a test backup and restoration, but that was test data. You find the true value of this platform when you use it in a production environment where a stakeholder is involved and there is data that if you do not restore will lead to problems.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. The restoration time is in minutes versus hours. That goes a long way towards our RPO. With our previous platform, it took two hours, and with this platform, it takes five minutes. It has also had a positive effect on our RTOs.

Zerto has helped us to reduce downtime with a restoration time of five minutes versus two hours.

We have not had to use it for restoration because of ransomware. We were using a couple of VMs to test migration to a new database. While testing that migration, we caused damage to the VMs. We then used Zerto to restore them prior to that damage, and it was fantastic. The restoration was quick and effective, and we were back in production in minutes versus hours.

Zerto has reduced the time spent on DR testing but we still do the same number of DR tests throughout the year to make sure. It just takes a lot less time.

Zerto has improved our confidence tremendously, and it has reduced the RPO of any potential restoration needs.

I find Zerto's ability to restore a virtual VM much more quickly than Veeam or vCenter's restoration capabilities to be incredibly valuable. 

I cannot think of any features that Zerto does not have. They probably have a lot of features that I do not even use. I am primarily interested in Zerto as a backup and recovery mechanism, and it does a phenomenal job of that. It is an enterprise-grade tool, and enterprise-grade tools tend to be complex. They can be a little difficult to use at first until you learn them. It is not reasonable to suggest making it easier to use because it is an enterprise-grade tool, and it is very robust. Therefore, it is not going to be easy to use. I just have to spend the time to learn it and become good at it. I am very pleased with it as is, but the ease of use of the restoration utility could be challenging initially.

I have used Zerto for just over a year.

It is 100% stable. We have had no downtime with it, and we are pleased with its uptime and stability. We have great confidence that it will be available and usable when needed.

I have not personally contacted Zerto customer service, but Todd, my sysadmin, is the primary point of contact for Zerto. He has contacted them for issues or day-to-day troubleshooting. When there is an upgrade to be done, he always reaches out to them to get guidance and ensure that he is doing the upgrades correctly. They are very good to work with.

Positive

We were using Veeam. There were no security concerns. It was more about performance. The restoration took approximately two hours with Veeam compared to five minutes with Zerto. The benefit was obvious, but there were no concerns about data security in the backups, protection mechanisms, or air gaps on either platform. It was just about the performance.

Neither one is easy to use. They are both very similar. Veeam is probably a little bit more complex than Zerto. Zerto is already doing a slightly better job than Veeam in ease of use, but they are both very complex and difficult to learn at first until you learn them.

Anything new is always going to have a level of difficulty. It was difficult, but Zerto's onboarding development team helped us every step of the way. As we crossed bridges and had problems, that team jumped right in the middle of it and helped us resolve each and every problem until we were a hundred percent satisfied.

To fully set it up, from the kickoff call until I was satisfied that it was fully functional, it took about two weeks. There was probably a month's worth of preparatory work done in advance of the actual kickoff call and deployment, including some information gathering. You could include those 30 days prior as part of that work. Technically, it was about two weeks from the kickoff call to fully deployed and fully functional.

It is a one-person job. One person primarily takes care of it, but we have three of us who are kept abreast and familiar with the process so that we do not have a single point of failure. It is definitely something that one person can handle.

In terms of maintenance, it requires periodic patching and upgrades.

It is an enterprise-grade product. When you buy enterprise-grade tools, you have to expect to pay a higher price. It goes back to the idea of you get what you pay for. If you want an old cheap tool, you pay cheap prices to get it. If you want a good-quality tool that is robust and does a good job for you, you have to pay a higher price to get that, and Zerto is no different. We pay a little bit higher than the cheap tool price, but we get our money's worth. I am not dissatisfied with the price.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is nothing that is absolutely perfect, but Zerto does a pretty good job of getting as close to perfect as they can.

Commvault handles our backups across both cloud and data center environments. It manages our short-term backups on-premises, followed by a transfer to disaster recovery for data older than 30 days, ultimately migrating them to long-term storage.

We are seeking a solution for secure and encrypted backups that comply with both our information security policy and the data retention requirements for database archive logs. Additionally, these backups must fulfill all customer service level agreements for all storage under our responsibility, including NAS, SAN, and any other backup methods specified in our service catalog.

Our deployment model is a hybrid of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. We primarily use AWS as our main cloud provider, with Azure as a secondary option.

We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies.

We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations.

Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages.

Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks.

It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs.

It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements.

The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights.

Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action.

To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices.

Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure.

By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA.

It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices.

Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms.

It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities.

In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent.

It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.

The features I find most helpful in Commvault are its ability to perform incremental backups and significantly reduce backup times for our diverse multi-architecture, multi-environment environment. This includes everything from Cisco equipment to IBM equipment, as well as SAN and NAS storage. Commvault allows us to back up these systems quickly and efficiently, and even recover data at equally impressive speeds.

Commvault could benefit from increased automation to streamline processes and enhance predictability. This includes automating routine tasks where appropriate, which would improve efficiency and reduce the need for support tickets. Additionally, when support is required, automating elements of the process and providing faster data access would enable quicker issue identification and resolution, preventing potential SLAs from being breached.

I have been using Commvault Cloud for seven years.

We haven't had problems, so Commvault is a very stable product from our perspective.

Commvault is highly scalable. We've successfully extended its reach by replicating the on-premises environment in the cloud and leveraging additional capacity across other utilized environments. This flexibility aligns well with the subscription licensing model.

We don't send many support tickets because Commvault is very reliable. We mainly handle user inquiries about how to use the product, conduct regular quarterly reviews, and provide dedicated technical account management.

Positive

Our primary backup solution has been Commvault, although different teams have utilized IBM Tivoli and other capabilities like Rubrik in the past. Commvault's stability and cost-effectiveness have solidified its position as our preferred choice.

The initial deployment was straightforward, except for some network connectivity issues related to specific aspects of connectivity, e.g., bandwidth, latency, and routing. Thankfully, there were no significant problems with the tool itself.

Our strategy was to be able to connect globally, from our data centers to our cloud solution.

Our deployment involved six individuals: two working on AWS, two on-premises, and two at the disaster recovery site.

We implemented our solution using Accenture, our third-party managed service provider. This was beneficial because we could leverage our existing relationship and account team, who were familiar with our environment. Their expertise proved invaluable during upgrades and major changes. Furthermore, we obtained the necessary technical skills and support from both Commvault and Accenture.

Preventative measures against outages limit their impact on customers, thereby maintaining near-perfect SLAs. This translates to increased customer satisfaction and minimal business disruption, which essentially constitutes our return on investment.

Using a subscription-based license has been advantageous. We've been able to significantly reduce costs by tailoring our spending to our actual usage. This is a stark contrast to the earlier model with its prohibitively high fixed-price licenses.

After evaluating Rubrik, we compared it to our existing backup solutions: AWS backups used by other teams and the IBM Tivoli TSM environment. The key differences between these options lie in their deployment and recovery capabilities. Some solutions are cloud-based, while others require on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, some have limitations in recovering data from specific environments, making them less suitable for multi-site backup scenarios.

I would rate Commvault Cloud a ten out of ten.

Transitioning from various solutions made implementation quite smooth. However, due to its extended use, we lack a comprehensive baseline for evaluation. We simply don't have enough prior cases to compare Commvault's implementation difficulty against.

Our company has implemented a large-scale global deployment with 5,000 endpoints across multiple data centers, regions, locations, and cloud providers.

We perform standard upgrades on both the Commvault servers and the storage environments NAS and SAN we deploy. These upgrades are determined by the operating system requirements of the Commvault servers. For short-term backups, we utilize on-premise storage, while long-term backups leverage AWS cloud storage.

While customer references are valuable, the ability to tailor our environment to meet our specific needs is equally important. This means defining the backup architecture based on the specific requirements of each application, like SIP shares and databases. Each application has unique needs, so understanding those requirements is crucial for crafting the right architecture to fulfill them.