HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

We needed to meet the requirements of the client, and, previous to this solution, we would not have been able to meet the distance. That's why we implemented it.

The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The near synchronous authentication is great. It's critical for our organization.

We haven't had to use Zerto for blocking threats, however, we like that we have it as an option.

We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud or the AWS platform. It can do it. We just don't opt to use it that way.

We've used the solution to protect virtual machines.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Our RPOs are eight seconds. It blows past RPOs out of the water. It's great.

The speed of recovery is excellent. We've only had to test it and never used it in production. That said, it works better than anything we've used previously. 

It's easy to migrate data. 

Its ability to keep users collaborating during a data migration is good. It goes very quickly, so it's not a disruption.

The impact on our RTOs is great. It far exceeds what we've needed it to do.

It will save us time in a data recovery situation.

It's helped us reduce our DR testing. It has gone from hours to minutes under Zerto.

It enables us to make better use of our staff. We have reduced the number of staff involved in overall DR management. 

Their data backup and restore have some ways to go. We looked at replacing our traditional backup system with Zerto and found it was lacking about a year ago. We have Commvault, which is very customizable and feature-rich in comparison. Their offering needs to be more robust.

I have used the solution for close to six years.

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it. 

The scalability is very good. It can scale out to quite a lot of VMs.

I've contacted technical support once or twice. It was for integration and customization and they've been great.

Positive

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very straightforward. It took about a day to set up. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The only maintenance is the annual upgrade. It's pretty much set and forget.

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

It's hard to quantify the ROI. 

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

We did look into VMware. It didn't meet our requirements.

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're solving the issues of disaster recovery with it. So, our main use case is disaster recovery. We use it to do real-time replication of our data so that if we needed to failover for whatever reason or we had a disaster at our primary data center, we would be able to spin up in our colo disaster recovery location with minimum downtime. Our delay is about five seconds. So, if something negative were to happen to our data center, our DR copy would be within five seconds of the original copy, which is pretty good. We are also using it for testing.

Our setup is on-prem. It enables you to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but we didn't go that route. We went the route of creating our own colo location. So, instead of leveraging Azure or AWS, we decided to maintain our own facility. Our primary data center is on-prem, and our disaster recovery location is a colo location that we control.

The current version that we're using is 9.5, which is the latest. When we installed it, it was probably version 8.

The mere fact that we're able to do live testing has definitely helped us with deployment times. It has helped us with troubleshooting as well.

It saves effort, time, and money. It saves us the effort of having to make sure that information is replicated. It saves us the time that would be required to build that ad hoc, and it allows it to be more of a point-and-click operation than something for which we have to dedicate more time and effort. Especially in our use case, we're not replicating a crazy amount. We're only replicating about 40 virtual machines and about 13 terabytes of data. It's not a small amount, but it's not a crazy large amount either. To be able to load all those 40 machines at one time with one click and then bring them up either in production failover or production test is fantastic. We haven't really been able to find any competitor that can do that at least as easily as Zerto. That was the driving force.

It has helped to reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing. We can now do it in minutes, whereas previously, we could never do a valid test. We could only test that our backups were copied. We could never spin them up and run them all. Barracuda would do point-in-time backups, but we didn't have any place where we could actually deploy and test them all. That's not necessarily a hundred percent on Barracuda, but from basically not being able to do it, we are now able to do it within a few minutes. 

It has saved all the time that would've been spent validating copies of virtual machines. It can now be used to actually test that everything is connected, everything is spun up properly, and everything is connecting and speaking properly. So, there has been a tremendous amount of time savings. People who were responsible for doing it have saved time because they don't have to spend an entire day testing to make sure that the backup is copied properly so that they can be recovered. Now, we can do a test failover in a few minutes and be able to validate it like that.

It helps to protect VMs in our environment. It has been great in terms of RPOs. Prior to using Zerto, depending upon the level of disaster, it took us hours, days, or weeks to recover. Now, the average recovery is nine seconds. That's pretty big. We went from hours, days, or weeks to seconds and minutes to recover.

Its overall impact on our RTOs has been fantastic.

Its main feature is continuous replication. We are able to have continuous replication, and we are able to have the information available as per recovery point objectives (RPOs) and how much data to retain. The real selling point was to be able to have those statistics and be able to test and show that the replication is occurring properly and then to be able to do live passive testing.

We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit.

In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them. 

Everything is meant to be simple. When something doesn't work, even though what you were trying to do appeared to be very simple, there are probably a lot of pieces behind the scenes. So, to be able to narrow down where in those 100 steps something went wrong can be a little tricky. When there is a failure, there should be a more detailed explanation of what the error is and how to remediate it. Currently, it's a little vague. A part of that could be because we use Zerto on top of Hyper-V. VMware still has a very large market share over Hyper-V and a lot of the information and a lot of the deployment plans are geared towards VMware. So, sometimes, there are new features that first roll out to VMware and then come to Hyper-V.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It's a very stable platform, but sometimes, we've had instances where we've upgraded versions and went from version 8 to 8.5 or to version 9 to 9.5, and there were issues. When you deploy, depending upon how many host machines you have, something might go wrong with the deployment to a host. In that case, you have to do a decent amount of work so that you can remove your virtual machine and restart the underlying host, which is something that you try to avoid doing, but sometimes, that's required in order to resolve the issue so that you can do the upgrade properly and allow that. When there is a problem like that, it can affect the performance of the system, but that falls more under maintenance and upkeep. In general, it does run pretty smoothly. It comes down to the fact that whenever there is a problem, it's a problem. That's the same with anything. Everything works until it doesn't, but in general, it works more than it doesn't, which is what you want. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

Their tech support is pretty good. We've had issues where we have reached out to them, and in general, they're pretty responsive and helpful. A few times, we've had them jump on to do screen shares and pull information and do deeper dives into some of those errors that didn't have detailed inputs about the area we need to look into, and their tech support has been pretty good. Based on the help that they provided for the issues we had, I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were using point-in-time backups provided by Barracuda. The issue with that was that we were taking point-in-time backups, and we were saving them in the cloud, but if we didn't have a location to restore the data to, the backups weren't very useful. They were useful from the backup standpoint but not from a disaster standpoint. In such a case, our primary data center would be wiped out. We would have our cloud copy, which would probably be a day old, and then we would have to take that cloud copy and download it somewhere where we don't have machines. So, we would have to buy servers or buy something to download our backup copies to and then spin them up. That could potentially take weeks. Now, we already have the hardware in place, or if it was a cloud, we would leverage the cloud, but we already have the hardware in place. So, at any point, it's a matter of enabling, going live, and saying failover, and then basically, having our DR copy become live. So, the time to recover was the main reason for going for Zerto.

We still have the Barracuda solution in conjunction. A lot of that is due to the fact that we already have a long-term contract. We have a five-year contract with Barracuda. We probably don't need to renew that, but there are benefits of both. We have kept both solutions because they do slightly different things. The way we use Zerto is that it's focused mainly on disaster recovery. Barracuda gives us more of a long historical recovery for easily recovering things such as files. We have backups of virtual machines that might go back four or five years. You might argue that it is not worth it because a lot of the data that is multiple years old might not be of value.

The way it would work with Zerto is that we could keep a live copy within Zerto for 30 days. After that, we would have to take that data and throw it somewhere else for long-term storage, which would incur additional costs and adds a little bit. Because we already had Barracuda, we leveraged Barracuda for long-term retention. We don't use Barracuda for disaster recovery anymore, but we use it for point-in-time recovery. We take a backup that gets shipped to the cloud to have an extra copy that is just there, which then becomes part of a historical backup where we could go back six or seven months, whereas Zerto is only for recovering files up to a few days. Anything older than those few days would be recovered via Barracuda.

Zerto can do a backup for or recover data longer than that period of time, but it becomes a little bit different process. When we looked at Zerto three years ago, the ransomware, journaling, and being able to go back a few hours and restore your entire environment back to a point in time were nice features, but they weren't the selling point. The selling point was disaster recovery. So, that's the main thing for which we're using it. We are not looking at the ability to go back 30 days to recover a file. I definitely see it as a plus, but because it wasn't the initial selling point, and the way that we architected things, we don't necessarily use that right now. However, when our contract with Barracuda ends, instead of renewing, we could consider just buying long-term retention through a cloud provider and then maintaining a longer history with Zerto.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done. We were pretty much able to have it up in a few hours, but it also depends on your use case and the complexity of your deployment. Like anything, there are a thousand ways to skin a cat. So, it depends upon how you want to have it set up. It depends on:

• How complex groundwork do you want to put in?
• How isolated do you want your test case to be?
• How isolated do you want different things to be set up?

There could be a little bit more complexity, but in general, it's pretty simple to get going. Obviously, there is a lot that goes into it, but the actual work of setting it up, once you have those decisions made, is pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy.

We definitely did a lot of planning, but we did the actual deployment or the actual configuration of it before we engaged with the professional services aspect of our deployment plan. When we bought the software, we had a project management plan and support from Zerto directly. We pretty much did all the setup ahead of time by ourselves. So, in our case, the setup was very simple and very easy.

It does require some maintenance. There are always service updates that are available, and occasionally, there will be little bumps in the road that require maybe reinstalling or updating something. In terms of general maintenance, as compared to other solutions, its maintenance is probably a little bit less than other solutions. Maintenance is still required, but it doesn't require an extreme amount of maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

When we went to locate this software, we worked with ePlus. They made several recommendations on different solutions, and from those recommendations, we narrowed it down and picked Zerto.

I liked them a lot at the time. The sales rep that we had there was fantastic. Unfortunately, a few months after our project was purchased, our sales rep left the company, and then we just never really connected with any of the new people. That has not necessarily something to do with ePlus. They're a large, great company, but what really separated them and made that project beneficial was the account manager that we had during that time period. He was fantastic.

In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie.

We did look at other similar solutions, but what made Zerto the solution that we went with was the fact that it included the recovery of the actual virtual machine. Other solutions had the ability to do the same kind of synchronous or near-continuous data replication. However, if we had the underlying data replicated but our virtual machine's copy or our virtual machine configuration was different or was not at that target location, we would have to then configure those machines to load the underlying data. The feature that made Zerto useful was that it handled that and replicated the virtual machine information as well. So, we didn't have to do that. Once we configure and specify it to replicate a virtual machine, all the data that's associated with it and its configuration is replicated. We don't have to deal with additional steps.

Three years ago, when we were looking at disaster recovery options, a lot of the solutions were targeted at replicating the underlying data but not necessarily how to get that data usable. Getting the data usable part is often the trickiest and the most time-consuming part. So, when you don't have to take that into consideration because it's already being copied and it's current, your downtime associated with a failure event is reduced. That was definitely a selling point for us.

We looked at Veeam, and we looked at how we use Pure Storage for our underlying data storage. They have the capabilities of doing synchronous, real-time replication, which has improved a lot in the past three years. So, the limitations that made it less appealing a few years ago might have been removed now, but at the same point, that's only the underlying data. We would still have to recreate virtual machines that will spin up that data. There is no other real solution that I'm aware of that does this as nicely. Even some of the other Microsoft native solutions aren't as nice and user-friendly. They definitely don't give you the ability to do testing. We couldn't spin up a replicated copy without causing issues. Zerto allows us to spin up a test version of our production software or our production VMs without affecting the production copy.

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.

We use the solution for running demos for HPE partners and customers, regarding disaster recovery and backup.

Although our primary use case is to show demos to partners and customers, we think it's really valuable.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery and that the RTO takes less than ten seconds. It's a reallypotent tool.

The near-synchronous replication is really good and an advantage for customers. This feature is really important because we can show it to customers and partners, helping recovering from ransomware, and does provide huge value.

You can protect your VMs in the environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful. 

Also, the ease of use and speed of recovery are wonderful. 

I'm happy with the solution, but I would like Zerto to support other hypervisors too

And the price could be cheaper, but it is reasonable.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It's very stable. 

The scalability is really good. 

We have used SRM from VMware and RapidDR from Simplivity. In comparison to those products, Zerto is really simple to use and helpful. 

We are constantly trying new products. Zerto has the lowest RTO, you can recover a lot more quickly than using other solutions. 

The initial setup is very easy.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

Our clients think it's quite expensive but I advise them to consider all of Zerto's features.

You need to start with 25 VMs, which sometimes is too much for SMB clients in some countries. It would be better if they had the option to start with a license for less VMs, like 5 or 10.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten because of the low RTOs, the ease of use, and how helpful it is for clients.

Our environment primarily integrates Zerto with VMware. This includes offering Zerto's self-service portal, which integrates seamlessly with Cloud Director. Additionally, we have Zerto integration at the vCenter level in situations where we don't use Zerto Cloud Manager and its self-service portal. This variety reflects the different use cases within our current processes. Since Zerto is our primary offering for disaster recovery solutions, we tailor the implementation based on customer needs.

We implemented Zerto to safeguard our private cloud infrastructure workloads. While disaster recovery is its primary function, we also leverage Zerto for data migration.

Our RPO with Zerto is under five minutes. The RPO time is dependent on the bandwidth. 

We have asynchronous replication with Zerto.

Zerto integrates well with Asynchronous Continuous Delivery tools. However, unlike SRM, Zerto offers protection during workflow rollbacks. This rollback functionality, along with its centralized reporting and UI management, makes Zerto an attractive solution.

Zerto offers a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, eliminating the need for physical data centers. In this instance, we leveraged Zerto to protect a private cloud workload running VMware and ensure its seamless recovery in Microsoft Azure. Disaster recovery in the cloud is crucial. As part of the private and hybrid cloud infrastructure team, I'm involved with a service in our catalog that runs workloads in a private cloud but configures disaster recovery primarily for the public cloud, Azure in our case. This is important for both the customer and the organization that provides the service.

Zerto offers significantly faster recovery times compared to SRM. SRM's recovery process involves multiple steps, requiring a detailed checklist to ensure the correct sequence is followed within protection groups and recovery plans. This complexity is a common issue with other data recovery products. Ideally, any product, not just from a design perspective but also from implementation and operation, should be user-friendly. It should be intuitive and easy to operate to achieve its intended purpose. This is a key reason we chose Zerto over other data recovery solutions.

Migrating data with Zerto is incredibly easy. It performs a continuous replication of our data in the background, even while our primary server is running. This live replication ensures all changes are captured before the server is shut down. In other words, it includes everything, resulting in a seamless migration process. Triggering the migration is also straightforward. We simply need to choose whether it's a move operation or a scale-over operation.

It helps reduce downtime during migrations. While there might be a brief interruption when workloads are shut down, there's no data loss. However, downtime for disaster recovery depends on the specific application's RPO. RPO isn't a fixed value; it varies based on how much data loss an application can tolerate.

It helps to reduce our overall DR testing. The solution is designed so that we can trigger the app or a move operation within three steps. Making it easier and quicker for the administrator or customer that is working on it.

Zerto's user-friendly interface simplifies operation and management, allowing us to minimize the number of people involved in overall backup and DR management.

The user interface is very user-friendly. Additionally, the journaling feature allows users to restore their progress to any point in time. This is a valuable feature, especially since similar products, like SRM and SCX, don't offer this functionality. In my opinion, this journaling capability makes Zerto unique.

Zerto integrates with vCloud Director to protect workloads deployed there. However, it would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation. For example, Site Recovery Manager recently introduced integration with VMware Aria Automation, allowing the protection of workloads deployed through Aria Automation. This functionality, including site recovery management, is currently not available in Zerto. Zerto's strength seems to lie specifically in its VMware capabilities, which could be an area for improvement.

Another point to consider is the potential for Zerto drivers to cause issues in ESXi environments. In some cases, users have reported problems and discovered that the Zerto drivers are not verified by VMware. While HPE is a technical alliance partner for Zerto, improved collaboration between VMware and Zerto regarding driver validation would be valuable. This information seems to be missing at the moment. We are currently in touch with our technical account manager to clarify this.

I have been using Zerto for over five years.

Most Zerto issues we experience are at the ESXi level, likely due to the Zerto drivers. However, these issues are not currently impacting our work.

Zerto is scalable.

The technical support is quick.

Positive

I also use SRM but I believe Zerto is better because it's easier to integrate with other systems. While SRM also offers integration for workload protection through VMware Aria Automation and a SIM connection application similar to replication, it may have some limitations. For instance, Zerto might require an agent to communicate with the source system, which could be a disadvantage. This suggests that there might be features offered by other vendors that Zerto could incorporate to improve its functionality.

The initial deployment is straightforward. Zerto has introduced an appliance, making deployment even easier by removing the need for patching and object installation.

One member of our deployment team is needed for the deployment.

As a Zerto partner, we do all the deployments for our customers and provide comprehensive training.

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.

We primarily use Zerto for DR as a service but also for high availability purposes. It's mostly deployed at our on-prem colocation data center. We also do a little on the cloud, as well. 

Zerto makes DR a lot easier. We don't have to spin up copies of VMs or copy applications and databases. Zurto just takes care of all that for us. We just did our annual DR test, and it worked exactly how we expected it to. We're big fans. We like the fact that when you migrate DR, it will automatically be configured for us. For example, it sets the IP addresses because they have different IP ranges and various data centers.

It saves a lot of time during disaster recovery. In our tests, we just hit a button on Zerto, it did its thing, and the solution just let us know when it's done. In the meantime, we could go do other things instead of having to, copy app configs, .ini files, etc.

The near-synchronous replication is great. That's one of the reasons that we went with Zerto. I've had a great experience with it and never had an issue. Having this functionality is critical, especially for DR. If our main data center goes down, we need to flip it and have everything almost identical to what it was when the data center went down. We use it for production high availability, so if that host goes down, Zerto will just automatically forward to the replica that it has on another data store.

The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint.

We have used Zerto for around 10 years.

Zerto is highly stable. We've never had any issues or lost connections between the agents on the VMware host.

Zerto is scalable. We're running it in five different data centers worldwide, and we haven't had any performance issues. It covers 70 hosts across all our data centers.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. We haven't had to use support much because it just works. Once we had an issue with a VM that wouldn't upgrade, and they sorted it out for us pretty quickly. I've only used it once, but it wasn't a time-critical situation. If I contacted them during an actual disaster or DR test, then I could see how quickly they can work.

Positive

I've never used anything besides Zerto, but I've done the failover process manually. Zerto just makes it much easier and faster than a manual failover process.

In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster. 

Zerto is reasonably priced for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime. 

The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.

It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.

I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.

We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.

Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.

There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.

I've been using the solution for three or four months.

It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.

We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.

The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.

We've never had to contact technical support. 

Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes. 

We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.

We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover. 

The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use. 

We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.

The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We have critical servers at remote sites that failover or are replicated to our main data center in case of an emergency. If a remote site has a failure, we can spin up that virtual machine from our data center.

We operate a hub and spoke design with a centralized data center hosting our main instance, reaching out to roughly 78 remote locations. We handle the VPGs through the centralized management console at our data center.

We also use the Zerto to replicate from a primary host to a secondary host in case the primary goes down; we have a kind of cold box to which the solution replicates.

Our final use case is if we are updating a plant's entire server rack, and we use Zerto to replicate the old servers onto the new ones, which results in less downtime.  

The product significantly decreased the time it takes to deploy new servers; we can work on them, build them, and then failover the old VMs to the new server with minimal business impact. What previously took hours to migrate the VMs with vMotion typically takes 30 minutes with Zerto, which is a phenomenal time saving for us. Our plants also have the reassurance that when we replicate their main servers back to a data center, we can keep their business running even if they have a total loss of a server rack or power.

The solution has helped to reduce downtime; we had a situation where a plant had its server fail, and we could failover their server to our data center and had them back up and running within 30 minutes. The required parts for a fix took three days to arrive, but thanks to Zerto, they did not have three days of downtime. Additionally, we just updated our hardware at our plants from HP servers to Dell, and we had to move 10 to 15 VMs per location from the old servers to the new ones. We completed this relatively significant move- roughly eight TB worth of data- in 30 to 45 minutes versus multiple hours, a remarkable reduction of potential downtime. Depending on the plant, downtime can cost $100/minute and potentially much higher if they are into online sales.   

The product helped to reduce our organization's DR testing; we previously used a Hitachi failover or manual VM move, but now we have Zerto VPGs at all sites. We can click the failover button, and it's done about 30 minutes later. It's good not to have to failover manually. Regarding time saved, we can get testing for a plant done in 30-45 minutes, resulting in between two and six hours' worth of savings.

The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days.

The solution is very straightforward, especially after using it a few times. We had users who were daunted by it, but once we walked them through how easy it is to failover, they felt pretty comfortable. Zerto is easy to use and doesn't take long to learn, which is nice.  

We like the near-synchronous replication feature, and it's essential as we want to reduce the amount of data lost during a failover. The RPO and RTO are excellent, thanks to Zerto, and we have some sites with poor bandwidth, so we understand the limitations we're working with. Near-synchronous replication allows us to roll back to a specific hour or minute in case of a failure, which is a great feature.  

One of our primary uses for the solution is to protect VMs in our environment, which has an excellent effect on our RPOs. We had a data breach several years ago, and Zerto helped us quickly get back up. We like it a lot because we can failover within minutes once we detect an issue.  

I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent.

We've been using the solution for over five years. 

Zerto is very stable; we only have problems with sites with poor bandwidth, and there's little we can do to get around that. Sometimes VPGs get outdated because those sites can't copy the data fast enough, but the application is very stable.

The solution scales exceptionally well; we add more licenses when required and keep running. We currently have over 400 licenses.

I recently contacted technical support, and I rate them seven out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used Veeam, Commvault, and a Hitachi solution. We switched because Zerto has a better RTO and RP, and it's much easier to use than Veeam. The Hitachi solution was very cumbersome as it was CLI only, and we had to unmount and remount storage.

Comparing the ease of use with other solutions, Zerto is excellent; once we have the VPG, there's a large failover button which allows our entire team to carry out the function. It's elementary. After showing a team member once or twice, they can operate the tool independently. The graphics and GUI show us the failover progression, so we don't have to wonder if it has taken place or how long is left. The tool keeps good stats and informs us of the step it's on. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, but we operate the solution with one team, our server team. Regarding maintenance, a minimal amount is required to keep up to date with patches etc. We occasionally run into an issue that necessitates upgrading to a newer version; for example, we were trying to move some vast data stores, and Zerto support said we needed to increase the timeout count. We keep fully up to date with security patches, and two staff members are responsible for maintenance. 

We have seen an ROI with Zerto, though it's hard to quantify precisely how much. It saved us a significant amount of downtime, and plants lose money when they're down, so it's a hidden ROI in that respect.

As far as I know, the pricing is around $1,000 per VM, but Zerto is changing the pricing model to more of an enterprise-class license. I don't know if there are any additional costs or fees.

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.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery replication between two sites.

We started to use this solution to help with disaster recovery planning and fast recoverability.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have two different SANS by EMC, VMware as our DOS network operating system, and we have a mixture of Windows, Linux, Red Hat, and Cisco switches.

We haven't done DR in the cloud because we don't do anything in the cloud.

We haven't used Zerto for immutable data copies because everything is on-premises. We just use it in a VM environment for the VMDK replication.

It's made us feel more secure, and we used it a couple of times for failover, so it's an essential part of the business operations.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been business critical. It's almost as important as a running production server.

It reduced our downtime. We can recover in five to six minutes versus 12 hours. That amount of downtime would have cost our organization $30,000.

The solution saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware. We got infected, noticed the infection within seven minutes, and restored it to a point in time. We failed over to our disaster site, deleted the infected server, and 24 hours later we replicated back to our corporate site.

It helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It's easier to plan, and the procedure is the same no matter the operating system or the applications installed.

It reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery. It also reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management, but we have not reduced our workforce because of it.

Real-time or near real-time replication is the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential.

The ease of use is great. You just have to be familiar with it, know how to set up your virtually protected groups, and know what fits your environment the best.

I love the solution's near synchronous replication. It's business critical to our organization.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment.

It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual.

Zerto hasn't replaced all of our legacy backup solutions.

I have been using this solution for about nine years.

I would rate the stability 10 out of 10.

I haven't had any issues with scalability. We don't have any plans to increase usage and buy more licenses, but we will if we need to.

Technical support is really good. We've used the solution for more than eight years, and we've only needed to call them three or four times.

I would rate technical support 10 out of 10.

We previously used VMware DRS. We made the switch to Zerto because of reporting and ease of use.

There was a learning curve, but the setup was pretty easy. For our deployment model, we have one VPG per server, so it's one-to-one.

For maintenance, there are quarterly patches, and we set up testing of our VPGs every six months.

Deployment was done in-house.

We've seen ROI in active disaster recovery and failover.

I wish it were cheaper, but I would purchase it again at the same price.

We haven't reviewed any other product in the last eight years, but if I can say that I can get six to eight seconds RPO and RTL, that's incredible.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is just easier to use, it's not as cumbersome, it's straightforward, and training is easy.

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.