HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use it for failing over our production servers in the event of an emergency so that we have minimal downtime to continue business operations.

We only use it for failover to on-prem. We do not use it for the cloud.

Zerto was one of the first failover solutions that we implemented in the organization, so the benefits are pretty drastic. It is hard to compare it to any other solution out there because we do not have anything to baseline it on, but it certainly increases the confidence of our end users. We are able to react in the event there is an issue. The fact that we are not waiting for hours to restore operations is something that we find valuable.

We protect VMs in our environment with Zerto. We are very happy with the RPO results.

Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support.

We learned that we got a new account representative supporting our account. I found this out today. Apparently, this is something that they kicked off at the beginning of this year, but there has been a failure in communication in letting us know who is the proper channel for us to reach out to if we need assistance. 

While going from the major version 9 to 10, they introduced a new requirement for ECE Licensing, which is not something that we knew about at the time of our last renewal. We purchased it for a couple of years, and as far as we knew, we were in support. It was only when we were in the middle of the upgrade and had set up the entire environment and tried to put it up, it asked for a license key that we did not have. We were told by the support team to reach out to our account manager. She has been a bit slow to respond. It just seemed like lip service. The timing kind of worked out because there was a conference as early as that. They have been trying to fix it and communicating about it. I am hopeful it will be resolved, but I just cannot say for sure how soon or how fast they can remediate it.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

It is stable.

We have not had any issues increasing the number of VMs being protected as long as we have licenses. We have over 100 VMs.

They are responsive, but when things need to be escalated, it is very unclear who is going to be the person to ensure that things are resolved. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I was not involved in its deployment.

It is hard to say, but the value is there. At the end of the day, the benefits of having a failover solution outweigh the cost.

I did not participate in the evaluation of other similar solutions.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. We are interested in the technical abilities that it offers, but we would like to see an improvement on the support side.

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's very critical for us. For example, with SQL, we used to use Always On to protect databases at the database level, to give us high availability and DR. But now, in Azure, we don't do that. If we wanted to do that, we would have to have a SQL Server on the protected site and another up and running on the DR site and those machines would always have to be up and running. To save on costs, instead of using Always On, we're now protecting the VM as a whole, thanks to Zerto.

It's also the main tool that we use for our annual DR tests for all of our production applications. Once a year, for one week only, we do a failover of those critical production applications from the primary site to the DR site and we let them run there for that week. Zerto does the failover and the DR site becomes the active site while everything replicates to the former primary site. Once the week is over, we do a failback and Zerto is the main tool that we use for that, and we repeat the whole process. We're then good for the whole year. Zerto is protecting those VMs.

Another advantage is that Zerto has decreased downtime for us. It could have been a situation where we were down for weeks because of something that Azure did on their end. Even though Zerto has a partnership with Microsoft Azure, sometimes Azure makes changes that are disruptive. There was one change that affected our ability to replicate our critical workloads and it was a rough one. For that week, Zerto found a workaround because they were not getting any progress on resolving the situation from the Azure team. Zerto applied the workaround in their code and we were good, but that was a rough situation. Zerto goes out of its way to help its customers. We've had issues but Zerto has been very responsive.

The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick. Our SLAs are 24 hours, but Zerto could do what we needed, on-prem, in seconds, and in the cloud, in minutes. Zerto is way ahead of what our SLAs are.

Sometimes we do failover tests to make sure that we will potentially have a successful failover or migration. It's very flexible and does its job very well. And one of the things I love about the product is that whenever you do a failover, it gives you the ability to either commit or roll back. Some of Zerto's competitors don't have that ability, at least in Azure. That's critical for us because after we have DR tests on a weekend, we have users sign off on their applications that everything is fine. If something isn't right, we can always roll back to how everything was right before we started the DR test. And if everything is working great, then we commit.

Since we are primarily in the cloud now, Zerto definitely needs to update its platform. When we were decommissioning one of our on-prem data centers and going to Azure, there were issues. And with Azure, it's still limited in the way we can manage our resources there. Zerto hasn't quite kept up to date with how certain elements run within Azure.

In Azure, there is something called resource groups. You cannot create a resource without a resource group. You can apply tags to resource groups and that tagging information is very critical to our company because we now have 95 percent of our production environment workloads running in the cloud. We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group.

When it fails over, it uses the name of the group that you created within Zerto. The VM is failed over with no problem in a reasonable amount of time. But the problem then becomes that the resources are part of a resource group that has no tags. It does not follow our naming commission for resource groups and then we're stuck. It's not as easy just renaming the resource groups.

These components are very critical for us but they are missing in Zerto. They're aware of it because we've had feature-request meetings with our Zerto account team. They're working on it for the next release and have mentioned that they are going to be making improvements to the product. But for now, it's lacking.

Also, a downside with Zerto is that there is a lot of management overhead when running it in the cloud. On-prem, we used to have one Zerto management appliance, but in the cloud, we have about 20 to manage to protect our VMs. Zerto has mentioned to me that, for the next release, they're building it from the ground up and it will be much better in the cloud, with more cloud focus.

Because of the experience that I had with Zerto running on-prem, where we only had one appliance in each of our data centers, I deployed one in Azure as well. Little did I know that there were limitations and that more appliances had to be deployed because of all the replication of the traffic and the number of VMs that we were trying to replicate. But Zerto stepped in and helped when it came to that.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

They're very helpful. They always want to understand your situation and, even if they're not sure, they do their best to help and fix the problem. 

For on-prem, there were always references, but for the cloud there is a bit of a knowledge gap. I would always get workarounds, fixes, or KB articles for on-prem, but the cloud implementation is where the documentation is lacking. But the team does its best. It depends on who you get. Some know Azure, or cloud, and some still lack that knowledge. But if they don't know, they get the right person on the call.

Positive

We were a VMware shop on-prem and we were migrating to the cloud from on-prem VMware to Azure, so the tool that we were using to protect VMs through DR would no longer work. We used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for years when we used to be solely on-prem. 

We started looking for a product to help and, at the time, Zerto was the one that stood out among the competitors, and it was a solid product, so we started using it. Zerto is definitely a more effective product. It is a lot quicker when bringing our VMs up on the DR side, and even when we do a fallback. And Zerto is a lot easier to use than VMware.

The initial setup was not straightforward.

And maintenance is required for upgrades when there are newer releases, especially when it comes to Azure. There are newer releases that contain fixes and improvements and we do update the version of the Zerto appliance. They are running on Windows Servers, so we also have to patch the operating system. In Azure, there are a lot of SKUs with different pricing. Depending on the utilization of a VM, we sometimes make changes to the family types to save on costs at the VM level.

I did it with our Zerto account team, which included our sales engineer. Just the two of us were involved.

Zerto saves us a lot of time. One team member alone can handle the DR test using Zerto, whereas before, when we used SRM, at least two or three people were involved from the VM perspective and from storage. VMware was integrated with our NetApp environment and that meant at least two or three team members were involved. But with Zerto, just one person uses the product for a DR test.

We looked at Azure Site Recovery. We were close to going with it. It did have the ability to do resource group selection, but there were two showstoppers at the time that prevented us from going forward with it.

When we were looking at Azure Site Recovery, it seemed that it had a better cost per VM, but Zerto was not that far off. And we were more comfortable using Zerto to protect our VMs than the other products we were testing.

My advice is that if you're in the cloud, you really should test the failover of your VMs. If tagging is not a key component, you'll be fine. But if it is, that is a huge problem. And expect a lot more management overhead when it comes to managing Zerto in the cloud.

In terms of our RPOs, Zerto is consistent. From time to time, it may run past our SLAs, but that's because there are network or VM issues. And that happens very rarely. It almost always meets our RPOs.

The ease of moving data varies on the size. A good thing about Zerto is that it does give you a little chart indicating the step that it's at in the replication process.  But even if it's a small VM, it does take some time, including setting it all up and starting the synchronization. It's not instant.

We use it for storage and replication. In our organization, our team is responsible for the disaster recovery process.

Before, we were able to test about 16 virtual machines in production. Now, we can do the same exercise with 180 virtual machines, in less time. And previously, we needed our whole team to execute the manual process with Hitachi. Now, we use half that number of personnel in this exercise.

The speed of recovery is definitely better with Zerto versus the previous mechanisms we had. It has helped to reduce downtime without a doubt. On two occasions when we used Zerto for recovery, we reduced the downtime by about 80 percent.

We had an issue with change configurations in a database and we couldn't roll back those changes. We used Zerto to recover the state of the virtual machines to 10 minutes before the changes.

It has also exceeded our expectations when it comes to RTO.

The replication and recovery features are the most valuable. We have been able to recover files with Zerto. First, we enable the virtual machines on the recovery site and then we navigate to find the file that we need. On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem.

It's an excellent tool for the replication of VMs.

We had some issues with replication, especially on Linux, but we have already resolved them.

I would like them to enable more backup configuration features. I'm not sure if Zerto can give us immutable files for ransomware protection. That could improve the backup.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

The stability gets a high grade from me. I don't recall any issues.

Our principal site is located in one city and the recovery site is in another city. They are connected by an extended LAN.

In terms of scalability, it is good because, on the two occasions that we have done the upgrade process, they were "hot," meaning we didn't need to turn off our servers and that's very important for us. We always have our tools available.

We have opened cases on several occasions for update processes and for issues that we had at a moment when we were doing an exercise and replicating a VM to the recovery site. Their response was immediate and they were very efficient in coming up with resolutions.

Positive

We didn't have any previous backup solution.

The pricing is a little more expensive in comparison to other tools.

Knowing the backup options that Zerto has, we could be using it to back up our entire company's virtual machines, but we are just using its replication and backup for some virtual machines, but not all of them. That's because we are limited in terms of our license. We are only replicating about 30 percent of our virtual machines, those that have been identified as the most important for the organization.

We checked out Veritas Risk Advisor and Veeam.

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

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and backups.

When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto.

It's the easiest way to do disaster recovery. It's less complicated than VMware.

Compared to the ease of use of other DR or backup solutions, Zerto's dashboard is the easiest. The user interface is much simpler, and maybe, that's what makes it easier.

Zerto helped reduce downtime when our data is corrupted. We're able to restore it relatively fast. There may be downtime of about half an hour for us, but the users don't see it; it's transparent.

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other DR solutions is about the same.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in DR situations. We went from ten people to two for the whole organization.

It also reduced our organization's DR testing by about 30%. We've actually been able to move a lot of our resources (people) to AWS Innovation.

Zerto can improve the dashboard by making it even more simple. Right now, there's a lot on the dashboard, and it can be overwhelming. If you're an experienced user, then you'll find it easy to use, but if you're a beginner, it will take you some time.

We've been using it for seven years now.

Zertos' stability is very good.

It's very easy to scale, but the only problem is that there are additional costs associated with it. 

Zerto's technical support is excellent. When you open a ticket, they get back to you right away. If you mark it as a priority, then you have instantaneous access to support. I would give technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have VMware products and tried to implement VMware Site Recovery Manager. However, it was just a little too difficult for our environment.

At first, the initial deployment was complex, but now it's relatively easy. For someone experienced, it is not a problem.

We have five data centers, and we started with one and deployed it in phases. Because there are lots of firewalls and access, we picked one data center and then built the next one.

We implemented it ourselves, and it took about a year to deploy it across the whole system.

For a long time, we needed disaster recovery that was more than IBM's, which is in Colorado. We needed something on-premises that was instantaneous. That's what Zerto offers, and that's the ROI we have with Zerto.

The last time I looked at pricing, it was very good. It's much cheaper than VMware by far.

We looked at VMware Site Recovery Manager and IBM, but they didn't work well.

The best way to look at it is from an ease-of-use standpoint because when you look at VMware's version, it's a little bit more complex even though it is native to where we use it. That's why we went with Zerto.

Considering what we use Zerto for, I'd give it a ten out of ten because it is our primary solution.

It is mainly for disaster recovery of our public-facing website.

I oversee the infrastructure team. I'm the lead for the infrastructure. It is not one of the technologies that I've primarily managed. As an infrastructure lead, I have my hands on every project, and it is hard for me to just focus on one. Especially because it is more of a disaster-recovery type solution for us, as long as replication is going fine and there are no issues, we don't really go in and play with it much.

It does what it claims to do. I can't say whether it improves anything. It is just the fact that we want to make sure our public-facing website is up 24/7, and Zerto gives us the capability of doing that.

It hasn't reduced downtime because we haven't experienced any downtime yet. We've done annual testing to make sure that it is working properly. So far, so good.

The replication is valuable. We have two data centers, and it is replicating from our main data center to another data center. In the event that there is an issue with the first one, it just goes over, and we have the website up and running. It does an automatic build. It keeps our website up and running without interruption. It is constantly replicating. It has the most up-to-date information, at least until the main one goes down, and then it automatically brings up the other one. It is already pre-configured with the network and everything else. So, the website is up and running in seconds.

The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime.

Zerto is more of a set-and-forget-it type of solution. As long as the replication is continuous and there are no issues, I don't touch Zerto. We don't have a lot of workload that needs to be up. We just have our web server and our applications here. Those are two main servers that we get up and running in a disaster-recovery type situation. I can't give any area of improvement from a real-world experience because we haven't had that issue, but from testing, Zerto has been working great. 

It is not something that goes beyond what our use case is for. When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way. When I started working here, my predecessor who was managing Zerto had no documentation. So, I had to take over. No one else knew how to manage Zerto. So, there is just that type of learning process. That's why management wants to standardize on one solution so that it is easier to cross-train, but that's not Zerto's part. It just happens to be our environment and our management style. Zerto as a solution has been great for us.

I've been using it for about three years.

It has been stable for us. We had networking issues that caused the replication to break, but once we had that resolved, replication was seamless again. The
networking issues were on our side.

I don't have much input for its scalability because we only have a maximum of three servers that we need Zerto to bring up and get running as soon as possible, in the event that the main data center goes down.

It has been great. I've only requested support twice. The support engineer that worked with me has been great. I believe it was for the upgrade process, and he reached out to me and informed me that there was a new version that fixed a lot of the bugs from the previous version. He worked with me to get both data centers up to the latest version. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I haven't used any other one. Rubrik just happens to be coming out with a similar solution, and because we use Rubrik, management wants us to take a look at it and do a comparison between the two.

Aside from working with the network team to get all the networking pieces configured, it was pretty straightforward. Installing the agents on the servers and doing the initial replication took the longest time because we have close to a terabyte of data that has to be replicated from one data center to another, but other than that, it was pretty seamless.

It gives us peace of mind. It hasn't happened yet, but it does happen. Based on our annual testing, we are pretty much happy with what Zerto has done or can do.

Zerto is pretty reasonable. I haven't checked to see how much Rubrik is going to quote us for their solution. At least for us, the price doesn't play a big factor in the decision-making because it is a pretty small deployment for our use case.

We're currently evaluating Rubrik because we use that as our primary backup solution, and they just came out with a technology that's similar to Zerto. My managers, the executives, and I are in discussion on possibly looking at their solution and comparing it to Zerto to see which is the right fit for us.

In terms of ease of use, I haven't played with the Rubrik one yet just because they just announced it, but Zerto is pretty straightforward. I went in, and I did all the configuration myself within about 30, 40 minutes.

It is a great solution for what it does, but every company and every department has its own use cases. It is just a matter of evaluating different solutions that are available and picking the right one for your environment. For us, Zerto happens to be the right one.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10 just because it fits our needs for the solution and the environment we're in.

We mostly use it for disaster recovery purposes. We do a lot of migrations as well, e.g., VM from one site to another. We use Zerto for that, as we have hundreds of VMs that we protect as our main DR position using Zerto.

In general, our DR position is entirely based around Zerto. We use it for everything. We just have a couple things that we don't put on it. There are a couple of Oracle things that we replicate with different methods, but we pretty much do everything related to DR with Zerto.

We are not using it for backup. We are using it for continuous DR and replication between two on-prem sites. 

We have two data center sites with bidirectional replications. Each site protects the other site and we have our VPGs that go back and forth.

We perform more DR testing now because it is so easy. For example, what we are doing right now is baselines on our recovery time objectives, determining, "Okay, if we recover one VM, it takes this long. If we recover another VM this size, it is this long." Then, we recover 10, 100, and 800. That way, we get kind of a forecast, when we add VMs, about how that will affect our DR stance.

When we need to move a VM from one data center to another, it is replicated there. We don't need to do any snapshots of storage. We just make a VPG for it, do a move action, and it is just there. It works really well.

The test features have been really good for us. Our DR testing goes very quickly and easily now for all our stuff with Zerto. We have our priority recovery process, where we cover our databases for our app servers and web servers. All our teams pretty much get their VMs very quickly. The RPOs are very low. 

It is very easy to use. There are a lot of training materials online on the Zerto portal, which make it very simple to learn and use. You could go from not knowing how to use it to fully understanding all of it in a day. This can be done by using the Zerto University, getting your little certification and making your boss happy. It is pretty easy to set up VPG-wise.

You have a 24-hour journal. The amount of disasters and things that you can recover from using a 24-hour journal is huge, e.g., ransomware. We haven't had to do that yet, but the possibility is there. It is good to know that you can go back as far as you need.

I would like to see the app be more like the analytics site. Right now, when you go into the analytics, you need to zoom in real tight on your browser. You get a lot more from the analytics site than you do from the app. If they made those two more similar, it would be really useful for day-to-day monitoring of your stuff.

I don't like the evacuation process. The host evacuation process could be a little simpler too. It takes our maintenance a bit longer, when we are doing host maintenance, because we still need to evacuate the vRAs manually. I know they tried to make it more automatic, but it is not quite there yet.

I have been using it for at least three years in my job function.

We have had no problems with it. Stability-wise, I can only say positive things because we haven't had any real negatives with it.

It is very scalable. If you add a data center, then you just add a ZVM at that data center, link it up, and add your vRAs. After that, you are ready to start making VPGs. It is very simple to set up.

We don't have issues with scaling. If a vRA is getting a bit overloaded, it makes little vRAs. So, it kind of handles itself. We have our vRAs at the maximum size, as far as CPU and memory, that they can be. Our RPOs are really short, so we are doing pretty well for our size.

Zerto's support is always responsive. I have never had any problems with it. Our lead Zerto engineer does a lot more stuff than I do as far as with support. Typically, I will escalate to her. If there is an issue, then I defer to her. However, as far as my experience with support, I have experienced nothing but good things. The learning portal, myZerto portal, and analytics are very good. I don't have to use support very often, which is a good thing.

If I were to rate it, I would probably rate it as 10 out of 10. Every time that I have needed them, they have been responsive and quick. I haven't used them that much, but when I have, they have been very responsive.

Positive

We have used SRM, who is Zerto's main competitor. 

SRM was pretty quick. However, the speed of recovery with Zerto is so simple. It can failover, e.g., do whatever kind of failover you want it to do. You choose your VPGs, then you are off. It is really fast and simple. A lot of people could handle using it pretty easily.

I haven't found it to be hard. When you add a new host, you just go to set up and add a new host, then it builds a vRA. It is pretty easy to manage alerts. It will tell you exactly what is wrong, e.g., this doesn't have enough scratch disk, so you need to go update that. Or, this host is offline, e.g., you forgot to evacuate it, so then you need to take it out of Zerto. So, it will alert you to that stuff.

I have done my share of deploying vRAs. Though, our lead Zerto engineer handled most of that stuff from the initial setup.

We have definitely seen a return on investment. We can move any of our VMs from either of our data centers back and forth very easily, bringing them back and doing tests as frequently as we want. We will be doing two tests next week. At previous companies, we did one test a year. Now, we are doing different stacks, e.g., if we do 20, 100, or 700 VMS, then it will be this long. So, we can forecast additional workload and how much that will affect our DR position.

Zerto is definitely a lot easier to manage. My whole team knows how to use it, since it is very simple to use and intuitive. There are a couple people who use it and I am the secondary person. We have someone who basically lives in Zerto. She adds stuff on a daily basis and we are always on top of our updates. We are always looking at whatever new features come out. We try to maximize our journals. We are up to 24 hours on a lot of them. Our average RPO is eight seconds, and that is pretty good since we have 1,500 VMs and 280-plus VPGs. We have a pretty big on-prem environment. So, the good thing about it is the frequency and ease of testing because Zerto is very simple to use. DR has enough problems to deal with and Zerto makes things a lot easier.

We have looked at Veeam and SRM. We examined the marketplace, Gartner, etc. This product that management chose, and we are pretty happy with it.

Give it a try. Move some VMs back and forth to see how easy it is to use. The one-to-many is pretty good. We have two sites, so it is not a very big deal for us to do that, but it is very useful. 

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10. I love Zerto's CDP solution. It is really easy to use. It does everything that we need it to do and scales easily.

Our primary use case is disaster recovery, as well as data center migration when we went to a new VMware infrastructure platform.

The first benefit was being able to sleep better at night knowing that we can recover instantly. Because we do public safety, we have some databases that are terabytes in size, and were we to have to recover them using standard backup software, it would take a significant amount of time. With Zerto we can recover instantly in the event of an emergency. 

And when we went to a new data center, we had the ability to do a cross-center migration of the systems, and we found Zerto was much faster. We could migrate 25 to 30 servers and have them up and going in less than five minutes in the new environment, with very minimal downtime.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We find that we really only need one person to manage it. That person was able to write up documentation so that any of the other system administrators can jump in and handle it, because of the ease of use.

For me, the most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops.

Also, the ability to adjust the journal is important. If there were a ransomware event and we were not able to recognize that ransomware event for, say, four hours, we could go back, literally per minute, to the previous 24 to 48 hours to have instant recoverability. That, to me, is the big value of the product: to have our systems up with very minimal downtime.

We've been using Zerto for three to four years.

The stability has been excellent unless there is an issue with something on our end. For example, if a virtual replication appliance exists on a specific host and we take the host offline, Zerto will flash alerts at us, which I love. Zerto is always telling us when there's an issue with recovery. But the application itself has never gone down.

We haven't even noticed any over-utilization across our circuits, with the ability to throttle how much it's using. And once the initial sync is done, it's just kilobytes to keep it in sync. We don't see any downtime from using it. We haven't had a disaster situation recovery yet, but when we do, we're confident because our tests with it are successful.

Scaling has been easy in that we had multiple data centers that we needed to combine into one. It was very easy to create "spokes," where we installed different Zerto appliances in the other data centers and then linked them to the master to migrate them over. From a VPG perspective, we've had to scale out and it's never been a problem.

We have about 250 virtual servers. We had about 100 and we recently purchased another 150 licenses so that we could protect the entire environment. We're in the process of applying those licenses to all of them. We haven't applied all of them yet because we like to categorize which Virtual Protection Groups we want them to be in, so that they spin up at certain times. We like to think that out a little.

Their support has been very good. I haven't had to open very many tickets, but the few times I have, I have gotten a response within an hour or two. The support is good. They handle everything all the way through to completion and then they say, "We'll keep this ticket open in case you have any more issues."

Positive

We used VMware's SRM, which was a great solution; there was nothing wrong with it. But with Zerto, it's like riding a bike. Once I learned it and knew how to do it, I could let it run and do its thing. Maybe a month later I would have to jump in and do something, and the user interface is so easy. I don't have to relearn or remember how it works.

Zerto is quite a bit better when it comes to ease of use, compared to SRM. It's very user-friendly. With SRM, I definitely had to do some learning and read some things. With the VPG, it was almost self-explanatory, such as how to set up VPGs, how to recover things, how to do a failover, and how to do a test. Even as a proof of concept for management, I was able to take a VPG, delete a bunch of files on it, and then recover them from a few minutes prior. It was so user-friendly that even my management was able to watch me do it and understand what was going on.

SRM was just kind of there, in place, and it worked. Zerto is the one that I've really dug into and got my hands dirty with. Once we started utilizing it and realized how quickly we could recover. We realized that it could be used for migrating to a new data center. When we called Zerto we found out that that is a use case people use it for. From a speed perspective, the servers were down for less than five minutes when we migrated them. It was really fast with very little downtime.

The whole process was extremely straightforward. I did a little bit of learning in the Zerto University on how to do a quick deployment. There are not a lot of steps to the quick deployment. After just a few steps we were up and going, almost instantly.

After the installation, it prompts you to log in, and as soon as you log in, it starts telling you what to do. It says, "You need to deploy your virtual replication appliances." And then it says, "Great. Now that you've done that, you're ready to create VPGs." It was almost like the application was literally telling me what to do next.

We deployed it ourselves. I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it. But the initial deployment didn't need any technical support. It was that easy to deploy.

We looked at a few other solutions. Zerto was the one that really stuck out, especially once we were given a proof of concept.

Definitely try it out. I was able to leap right into it and use it immediately and do a test case within a matter of minutes. I was able to show management the ease of use and the ability to recover, and of course, that makes management happy.

We are using it to decommission a data center, then moving the data over to other data centers that will still persist within our environment. Also, we now have a more robust disaster recovery for a lot of our non-vital, non-critical applications.

From a management perspective, one of the biggest benefits is to see the excitement of your engineers having a tool that truly enables them, really making their lives easier. That is something that I love. When we came out of the PoC, their eyes were just wide with excitement of what was possible now.

The replication would be the best feature. It increases our DR capabilities. We put a lot of time and effort into DR overall. For the amount of time that it takes to test and go through those activities on a regular, recurring basis, well, this cuts down on the time commitment, not just by the infrastructure team, but by the application teams and all their peripherals. Even just from a man-hours perspective, it is a huge cost savings. You cut down three hours per application, and an application has anywhere from three to 12 developers plus others who support that application. So, you are probably looking at 20 people times three hours, then times however many applications we have, which is in the thousands. That compounds pretty quickly.

We have been officially using it for three weeks.

It seems as though everything on the scalability factor checks out. However, we will see that very soon in our use case.

We have thousands of applications and servers. There is an exorbitant amount of data. 

The support that came in and engaged with us, setting us up through the PoC, were fantastic. Coming out of it, I already have five engineers who have gone through multiple levels of certifications. So, it appears as though that technical expertise, to be able to improve themselves, is right there at their fingertips. It seems highly available. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

We have used Site Reliability Manager (SRM), which is capable, but to a lesser degree. Zerto is 10 times to 100 times easier to use. It is amazingly fast.

I was not involved in the initial setup or deployment.

From the team, the deployment was very straightforward. The proof of concept that we ran took a little over a week. They were able to stand it up from scratch, deploy, and run several tests of varying complexities. Everything went smoothly. We put a contract and agreement together in record timing for our company.

We had a terrific hands-on proof of concept with the Zerto team, where they came in and worked with our infrastructure engineers. Our engineers were completely amazed by the solution's capabilities. As quickly as we could get our licensing in place, we did. Now, we have had our licenses assigned for the last two or three weeks.

From our perspective, we are already thin-staffed as it is. So, Zerto has allowed us to focus on other things that are equally important.

We have not been able to apply ROI yet, just because of our circumstances. We are waiting on teams to move out of the data center. However, we are now poised and ready. Once that onslaught of requests come in, that is when we will really see the return on it.

If you are a numbers person, the benefit far outweighs the cost from any other competing software or service provider. When you are talking about trying to keep a reduced amount of engineers in the happiest state possible in their work environment to do the workload that they had traditionally done with double the amount of people on their teams, this tool relieves all the stress that they are carrying with them on a daily basis, even though they don't have to implement it on a daily basis. I have seen that firsthand. That return on investment is almost invaluable.

They could iron out the licensing aspect of it, so we might be a bit quicker when implementing and starting to use it. At the same time, our sales rep and all the supporting team members from HPE and Zerto were great and very flexible. It is hard to be critical of that.

We have not done another valuation recently. Zerto was the first in quite some time.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.