HPE Zerto Software Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using Zerto for over eight years.

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

We use Zerto to protect approximately 300 VMware VMs.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We looked at Veeam and NAKIVO.

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

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

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

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

I use it for yearly disaster recovery testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for over seven years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support are excellent. 

Positive

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

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

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

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

We compared Veeam and Commvault against Zerto.

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

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

We implemented Zerto to improve our backup speeds and data recovery time. Zerto is deployed across multiple departments, and around 12 admins and analysts currently use it. 

Zerto has improved my organization in multiple ways, particularly its ability to scale. We have a massive environment that is undergoing cloud development because we are not a very old company, and we needed something that could help us. It's doing its job. Zerto supports multifocal scenarios across the cloud and on-premise.  

The solution has had a positive effect on our RPOs. The time is faster with Zerto. Another benefit is reduced downtime. Compared to what we used before, I'd estimate it reduces downtime by 25 percent. The solution has saved us time in a data recovery situation. I'm unsure how much, but it's a lot of time. Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by about 30 percent. 

Zerto has simplified compliance with industry regulations by including audit logs and official reporting to support regulatory compliance. It has also simplified our workload because it can do so many jobs.

The best feature of Zerto is the fast, automated backup and recovery. The data lift for applications is short, with minimal data loss. Zerto has improved my RTO because we can replicate and easily manage our data, which has positively impacted my company.

Zerto is easy to use if the installation is done properly. Its near-synchronous replication is wonderful, but I'm still learning how to use it. 

Zerto's analytics could be more detailed. The analytics report seems to be more difficult to read. 

I have used Zerto for 19 months.

I rate Zerton nine out of 10 for stability. It's highly stable. 

I rate Zerto seven out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Zerto support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Azure's backup option. It was a little bit cheaper, but Zerto's recovery is faster. It's a little bit more expensive but much quicker. 

I wasn't part of deploying Zerto, but I believe it was straightforward for them. It required a four-person team and took around two hours. After deployment, we occasionally experience some software bugs that must be investigated. 

We've seen a 10 percent ROI with Zerto compared to what we had before.

I rate Zerto two out of 10 for affordability. The licensing model is somewhat complex. Adding more flexible and less costly options would help.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10. I would recommend Zerto to others. 

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and backup of our application server.

Zerto's ease of use is moderate.

The near-synchronous replication is good.

We use Zerto to help protect our VMs.

Zerto improved our recovery point objective, but to achieve long-term data retention we had to invest in additional local storage.

From an IT resilience perspective, our UK-wide implementation ensured a swift recovery, solidifying the strategy's effectiveness.

It has enabled disaster recovery in the cloud. This is important from a software recovery perspective to keep things running.

The most valuable aspect of Zerto is the recovery speed.

The recovery processes of large datasets in the Cloud have room for improvement.

The backup functionality can be improved.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We used various solutions in the past including Veeam and Quest AppAssure.

We came to the end of what we could do with AppAssure so we moved on to Zerto.

The initial deployment was difficult. The deployment took a couple of weeks and required around four people.

While Zerto excels in disaster recovery, its backup capabilities fall short. To ensure proper data protection, we require a separate backup solution alongside Zerto for disaster recovery therefore the price for Zerto is high.

In our search for a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, we considered both Veeam Cloud Connect and Zerto, ultimately choosing the latter.

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.

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

The solution meets our high availability and disaster recovery needs.

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

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

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

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

It helps protect virtual machines in our environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't have any visibility on the pricing. 

We're a Zerto customer.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

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

A lot of our focus area has been around capacity planning that includes virtual machine rightsizing and then construction for failover and resiliency-type models. The other area that is important to us is looking at data in motion, data at rest, and data in transit.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted to be able to go ahead and focus a lot on workload migration and disaster recovery.

I can quickly restore data by reverting anything with more or less a nightly backup. I can pretty much have the data through recovery checkpoints, and each of the checkpoints can only be around five seconds apart.

When I need to work a lot with VPGs, it has a lot of capabilities for that. Monitoring is also very important for us. We do work with Splunk, and I am looking a lot around for logs, metrics, and traces. The capabilities that I get are system throughput, and CPU and RAM input/output.

I have used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have pretty much followed a 3-2-1 strategy. We have three copies of production data and two backup copies. We have two different media and then one off-site copy. It has this offering there.

It's helping very much in terms of the malware. They have a ransomware protection capability.

I have used other solutions jointly with Zerto. What is happening is that they have a focus on isolating and locking with a cyber resiliency vault, and what I have been doing more or less around the vault is working with the Delinea Privileged Access Manager solution. So, some areas have intersections with other tools in our stack. I would love to continue seeing more use cases out of Zerto so that I do not have to defer this anywhere else.

It has enabled us to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I think of it as a cloud migration tool. Having DR in the cloud is very important for our organization. I use it with Microsoft Azure.

With Zerto, I have seen five-second near-synchronous replication, so there are thousands of checkpoints in one day, and then afterward, I can have a periodic backup. I can space it out between twelve-hour snapshots. We can have one to three checkpoints per day. I can recover to the state seconds before any sort of attack, and I can utilize Zerto's in-built orchestration and automation. I could easily fail over the entire site without any sort of disruption. Those are the things I see very much in terms of positives. There is a lot of information that it can gather with synchronous replication. The other thing is that I have seen other disaster and backup service offerings, and they very much focus on getting a container image installed or some sort of binary file and then deployment from there afterward.

I find it easy to migrate the data. Once somebody understands how Zerto works, particularly around areas for analytics and automation, with the reference architecture, they will be able to quickly deploy it.

I see a lot of visibility in terms of proactive management with SLA monitoring, run metrics, and other things. We are able to test infrastructure using live and personalized data. It, in turn, becomes very much of a team effort.

Zerto provides complete visibility in terms of storage and consumption data. We get to know the capacity and application volumes. I can also address compliance aspects, such as PCI DSS which is important for us as part of the RPO.

They have an intelligent, predictive infrastructure, so I can just pretty much determine the required compute storage and other server networking resources, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.

It also saves recovery time. We pretty much monitor that information. In terms of time savings, we are able to ensure that we can set up a backup quickly, figure out the integration details with the use of APIs, and meet our requirements around client security. Afterward, there is the cost consideration. Better documentation on the restoration process would be helpful.

Ransomware is one area where we are using Zerto. If we were utilizing another solution, that might have only been AWS-specific, and we might have not gotten much assistance in proceeding with their public cloud vendor as a result. We might have to figure out what we can do around working with an XDR or another mode of ingesting that data for any vulnerabilities and how to focus on encryption thereafter. If we were to consider another vendor, some of them may not have support for Azure. They might be AWS-focused.

Zerto has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. We can create failover tests seamlessly, and we can do this routinely. We are able to save time and look at how we can discern between RTO and RPO.

Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Our team size is still roughly the same. We have not seen our headcount change as a result, but we do not need to hire external consultants to support a project.

If I wanted to focus on operational recovery, which may be recovering instances in the database with a 15-second data loss, there are systems administrators designed to take care of that. With Zerto's offering, someone can utilize the Zerto solution as opposed to depending on any sort of manual human intervention.

The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center.

Zerto has near-synchronous replication. I like it very much. They had an acquisition and are now a part of HPE. I see it very much as a robust solution.

A slight disadvantage of Zerto is that it requires the Windows Server operating system as the base OS. Over time, I would like to see more offerings in that regard. There should be more deployment options other than just the Windows operating system.

The implementation is very quick and painless, but it would be good to have more information that is not case-sensitive. In the server portal, some fields are case-sensitive. It took some time for me to understand initially.

If a VPG goes down and an application host is not responding, I want to have a little bit more flexibility to automatically point the recovery to other hosts. I would like to see a little bit more flexibility to automatically sustain two applications in their most optimal state. If the VPG is going down and any of the recovery hosts are in maintenance mode, there should be a way for maximum flexibility so that it can automatically utilize Zerto to point that recovery to other hosts.

I want some more information about how to work with bare metal drives. I have been doing some work in capacity planning for using MDM and FormFactor cable and then looking at system throughput, App latency, and a lot of scripts in Linux. I would like to have a little bit more information for anybody needing to work with bare metal drives.

I have been using Zerto for several years.

I have not seen any service disruption that impacted us. If anything like that were to occur, they would communicate it ahead of time.

It is scalable. We have more than 20,000 endpoints.

I do reach out to Zerto, and if there are any questions, we have a ticket in-house, so everyone is working on reviewing it at the same time. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. There are no negatives.

Positive

We were not using a similar solution. 

By bringing in Zerto, some legacy work has been discontinued. There is operational recovery, application migration, and application cloning. These are the three areas where Zerto has helped us.

We have a cloud version. It is a public cloud.

Its initial deployment was straightforward. I have been trying to focus on capabilities and encryption and how a long-term retention repository works, at least looking at the data capture. Another thing is utilizing some information with APIs and cloud scaling. I have broken down a lot of my use cases, and we have Zerto on the public cloud. Based on that, I was able to figure out how to work with features like compute as well as storage.

Its implementation took about two to three months. In terms of maintenance, it requires maintenance. We focus a lot on metrics such as RTO and RPO monitoring. Somebody can also put it in maintenance mode operation.

We had Zerto representatives, and we also had work done in-house. 

I work with a team. Other colleagues are also involved in the effort. We have a team of around ten employees.

We did look at a few other vendors' offerings, but we decided on Zerto. Our organization has a partnership with them, and the other thing was that there were a few industry events, and they were able to effectively make a pitch. Their demonstration was very effective. It was also something in which the client was interested in.

To those looking to implement Zerto in their organization, I would advise creating use cases of their own and then trying to see how Zerto effectively helps them. A few areas where they can work are gathering information with the virtual machine rightsizing and being able to go ahead and create resiliency models. Afterward, they can look at compliance. For us, PCI DSS and locating the public cloud environment being used, which in our case was Microsoft Azure, were important. After they have created use cases on their own, they can come to Zerto and see how they are able to effectively handle it. If they are able to think through what they need, they can come up with specific questions and then get Zerto to effectively deliver.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

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

Zerto is easy to use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

I am currently using Zerto.

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

Zerto is highly scalable.

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

Neutral

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

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

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

I use Zerto to monitor replication, configure protection, and manage disaster recovery and performance.

We implemented Zerto to manage disaster recovery and also for faster performance on backups and failovers.

Learning how to use Zerto can be easily achieved with some training and practice.

Zerto has helped us reduce downtime, retrieve backups faster, and manage our workload more efficiently.

Zerto has reduced downtime by 20 percent and helps protect the VMs in our environment.

It is 25 percent faster at recovering data compared to IBM Spectrum Protect.

Zerto has helped save four hours per week in recovery situations and has reduced our disaster recovery testing by 30 percent. We have used five percent of those savings towards other value-added tasks.

It has positively impacted our IT resiliency strategy.

Zerto enables disaster recovery in the cloud which is important.

Zerto provides real-time analytics and monitoring, enabling our organization to quickly identify and resolve issues. 

Zerto makes my work easier. Replicating my settings helps me recover point objectives faster and retain policies.

The most valuable feature is the customization that allows me to set my protection group myself.

While Zerto provides good service, I find the pricing to be high and believe there is room for improvement. I would like to see Zerto implement a pay-as-you-go model.

While Zerto offers scalability, its implementation can be more challenging in larger organizations, indicating room for improvement in its scalability features.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

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

I would rate the scalability of Zerto seven out of ten.

The technical support responds promptly to our requests.

Positive

I previously used IBM Spectrum Protect but Zerto provides a quicker recovery time. With IBM the recovery process for particular data is manual but with Zerto it is automated.

The initial deployment of Zerto was straightforward and took two hours to complete. Two people were involved in the deployment.

We have seen a 20 percent return on investment.

Zerto is priced high.

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.