HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use it primarily for backup and recovery of individual servers and databases. We also use it for long-term retention.

It helps us

• achieve our RPOs
• conduct successful DR tests
• provide functionality for some of our key, critical customers.

Fortunately, we haven't gone through an unplanned DR situation, but if we were to go into one Zerto would be the top technology that we would use to recover. We would expect it to function as designed to get everything back to working as normal. Otherwise, obviously, it would be a big problem for our company. Zerto is a critical, core piece of infrastructure for the IT infrastructure team. I estimate it would save us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a DR situation.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time involved. It's hard to quantify how much time it would save us because we haven't compared it to other DR products. But if we were to use our in-house data protection backup solution or our storage solution, Zerto would save weeks of man-hours when it comes to setup, compared to those other solutions. And it could save minutes in terms of the recovery point objectives.

The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem.

Zerto is also pretty simple and straightforward when it comes to ease of use. There were no big surprises.

I would like the ability to monitor the performance of some specific components. Right now we're having an issue with local and remote replications with some of the VPGs. Being able to look at individual VPG performance would be helpful. 

Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, "Hey, you're not conforming to best practices." It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on.

Another area for improvement is alerts. We're getting so much noise right now in the 8.5 version. The problem is that we don't know which are the ones we need to act on. We don't know which ones are severe versus those that are informational or notice or debug. They have told us that when we upgrade to version 9 we'll be able to tune some of the alerts. That type of alert tuning, where we can get just the emergency and error alerts, would be helpful, while not necessarily tuning out the informational or notice or debug alerts. If alerts could be channeled to a syslog server where we could filter and see which alerts are the priority that would be an improvement.

We have a network operation center and for us to operationalize this tool with them, we have to be able to deliver each alert along with an action plan for it. That way they can take the appropriate action if Zerto has some type of error. It would help if the alerts didn't just fall on our storage and data protection team. If we could transfer some knowledge and have other level-one teams look at some of the more basic Zerto alerts and try to resolve them, that would help.

I've known about Zerto for several years but I've been actively using it for the last two months.

The stability is pretty good. I haven't seen the software itself break, or the services stop for unknown reasons. 

We did have an issue with a VPG the other day, where it went belly-up, and we had to rethink and do a bunch of baselines. So some type of health monitor that shows both the servers and the VPGs would be helpful.

I haven't worked with the scaling functionality because we only have it in our two major data centers. But I think it would be pretty straightforward and simple to set up scaling.

Currently we're protecting about one petabyte with Zerto. We have some room to grow still with Zerto.

Much like with any technical support—and this is true whether you're talking about IBM, Microsoft, Dell EMC, or any of the big tech players—their level-two guys are definitely good, if you can get one of them. But the level-one guys seem not to be as good. Zerto was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and it shows with their level-one guys. They're not as vested in the product. All the level-one people who were vested in the product probably left. So a lot of the level-one guys aren't very technical. 

We oftentimes have to work with our technical account manager to get cases moved up to level two. Once they're there, they seem to get some movement, which is good. And, obviously, their level-two support team in Israel is very good.

Positive

I was not part of the initial installation, but I've heard that some of the initial pieces are straightforward. Where it gets complex is that I don't know if it was set up according to their best practices.

The pricing follows normal industry standards.

In a previous company, I was involved in the evaluation process that ended with choosing to go with Zerto.

Zerto sits on top of a lot of other technologies. It's like a "Layer 3" for lack of a better term. Some of the other solutions that are "Layer 2" can be more attractive, solutions like Commvault, Rubrik, and Cohesity. They're able to do more native operations at the OS level, like replication. They have more hooks into the operating system to enable you to do that.

However, Zerto's user interface is good. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it gives you the RPOs and RTOs right then and there. It requires some administration from the VPG perspective, but it's able to bridge a lot of gaps.

My advice would be to work with your Zerto technical account manager for the setup and best practices.

Zerto is good when it comes to continuous data protection. We're currently in the middle of some technical support cases with them, cases that I'm watching, regarding some of our larger databases. But so far, there have been no issues with the smaller databases. It's doing its job.

We haven't yet enabled Zerto to do DR in the cloud, but that's something we are pursuing currently. We have had a demo of it but we haven't done a PoC.

Our primary use case is disaster recovery.

We have Zerto deployed on-premises at both our primary and DR locations.

In general, Zerto helps us with our DR plan because it makes things so easy.

Zerto does a very good job of providing continuous data protection. I've been very impressed and would rate it an eight out of ten. Especially when it comes to DR testing, it is very easy to work with and we are able to recover our infrastructure at our DR site within a matter of minutes.

When we have to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved in the process. I've used other solutions and I haven't seen anything that compares to what it can do. It is difficult to estimate the exact time saving because it depends on the workload.

Realistically, you could have a single admin responsible for the restores, whereas with other solutions, depending on how big your environment is, it would take more people. In our environment, it would take upwards of five people to restore our core infrastructure and by using Zerto, it reduces the number of people by about half.

With respect to DR management, Zerto has reduced the number of people involved in the process. I wasn't at the company when they used the previous product, so I'm not sure by exactly how much.

The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time.

It's very helpful for DR testing because we can recover VMs in an isolated bubble and prove our DR methodology.

Zerto is very easy to use, which is one of its big selling points. It takes just a few clicks to restore a VM, which means that it's easy to train somebody to help in a DR situation.

We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work. However, I cannot recall the specific details.

I have been using Zerto since I started with the company two years ago. In total, the company has been using it for approximately four years.

The stability has been very good. I can't think of a time that we've really had any issues that we didn't cause or something maybe with an update. We're running it 24/7 and I can't think of a time that we've had any major issues with it.

From my perspective, Zerto's scalability is very good. We have 60 VPGs and 122 virtual machines that we're using Zerto to replicate to our disaster recovery site. This will grow with any new infrastructure that we build. Any new servers, depending on their RTO or how soon we need to recover them, would be put into Zerto. Potentially, we will add some, although I'm not aware of any major growth at this time.

Our operations department monitors the dashboard just to confirm that our RTO and the VPG health look good. There are perhaps five people in that team, who are watching the dashboard.

In my team, there are three of us that use it, although we don't look at it daily. It would only be if we get reports of an issue or we need to adjust a setting or something like that.

Overall, on a day-to-day basis, there are probably about five people that use it.

I have not personally dealt with the technical support but I know about the experience that my coworker has had. They are typically very helpful and provide good responses compared to other companies in the industry.

Zerto was recently acquired by HP and there is some concern in our organization about what might happen to the technical support, seeing as they were bought out by a bigger company. We're hoping that it doesn't negatively impact the support that we receive.

I have used Veeam in the past and it's similar to Zerto in certain aspects. They both have their pros and cons, but I would say from what I've seen, I like Zerto. It just seems to be a little bit more user-friendly in the UI. Functionality-wise, they're similar. I think Veeam would be one of their main competitors.

I have also used the older product by VMware called Site Replication Manager. It really doesn't compare to Zerto.

I have been involved in some of the Zerto setups and from what I have seen, they go very well. It seems that it is pretty easy to perform the initial setup.

It takes about an hour per site, or per server to upgrade it. 

We deploy and upgrade the solution in-house.

It's usually two people that are responsible for maintenance but it could be four people on the team.

I believe that we have seen a return on our investment. The return comes from time saved in manpower, for example. From what I've seen, it's worth the cost.

I've also heard comments from my coworkers to say that it's an expensive product but it definitely makes you feel more comfortable in a DR situation.

I have not been directly involved in the pricing and licensing. My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price.

We don't use Zerto for long-term data retention and I'm not aware that there are any plans to do so. We use Zerto in tandem with our backup solution, just to be safe. That said, we have used Zerto for recovery in scenarios where we couldn't find the particular data that we were looking for in our other backup solution. 

We have not experienced any ransomware incidents or other situations where we needed disaster recovery. However, Zerto would definitely save us time for that. Depending on the situation, it could save the number of people involved as well.

Although we have not had to use it in an actual event, it helps us in terms of regulatory and audit compliance. If we had a real event, we would all feel more comfortable that we'd be able to restore or be in a better position to have our infrastructure restored in a small amount of time.

We have not yet looked into using Zerto for DR in the cloud but in the future, we're going to look at the option of doing so.

My advice for anybody who is considering Zerto is to do a proof of concept or a trial. I'm not sure what the vendor has available in this regard but I would advise trying it out with a small number of virtual machines.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Zerto runs on a Windows Virtual Server and we have it installed at two sites. There is the production site, as well as the failover DR site.

We use this product almost exclusively for disaster recovery. It is responsible for the automated recovery of what we deem to be our mission-critical servers.

In terms of its ability to provide continuous data protection, this is a product that I trust. We test it quarterly to make sure that what the dashboard is telling us is correct. But, I've used it long enough to know that when I see the dashboard telling me that the virtual protection groups (VPGs) health are all green, then things are working correctly. Our average RPO is usually somewhere between three and 10 seconds.

We used to perform a disaster recovery test once a year, and it was painful because everything was manual. Now that we do it quarterly, we're able to provide management with reports of the tests, which not only makes management happy but also makes various governing bodies happy. We're a financial advisory firm, so it's the SEC that oversees us. That said, I'm sure this holds true in many industries. It allows you to have the reports to prove that you've done the tests. We don't have to ask them to take our word for it.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto has absolutely decreased the time and number of people that are required to do so. For example, if I just want to test and prove that the network is up, it's something that I can do by myself. If I want to have people log in and test applications and stuff like that, I would need additional people. However, it has a built-in test function, so it will create a complete test network that you can run workloads on to show that the tests are successful. Afterward, you can delete the network and you're back just running, waiting for the next time you want to do that. In a situation like this, using Zerto saves eight hours or more and I can set it up and test it on my own unless I want people actually testing applications.

Thankfully, we have not had to use this product to recover from a ransomware attack or other disaster, but it would absolutely work in that case. By replicating the data, if ransomware were to hit the production side, it most likely would not also lock the disaster recovery side. This means that we would certainly be able to bring it up from there. Alternatively, it lets us pick points in time, so we can just go back to the moment in time before the ransomware happened. In a situation like this, I can't say that it would take fewer people but it would take fewer hours.

The most valuable feature is the automated failover, as it allows us to get the essential servers up at our DR site with little intervention.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. You set it and forget it.

It has a nice graphical interface.

The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did.

This would include details like what systems were up. Currently, that's not how the report reads. You would have to be an IT person to read the current reports that it produces. I would like for them to be the type of reports that I can put in front of an auditor or the president of our firm that would make sense to them, without me having to interpret and explain the results.

We are in our seventh year of using Zerto.

Stability-wise, this solution is rock-solid. If it fails, it's not going to be Zerto that fails. It's going to be either that your storage has failed or the bandwidth, or connectivity, is not there. I don't see a way where Zerto would be the culprit in a failure-type instance.

Our company is fairly small and the entire firm relies on it. That said, only one person actively uses it. We have three or four IT staff but Zerto has always been my responsibility.

In terms of scalability, I bet it would be no issue whatsoever. It's licensed according to the virtual machines that you want to protect. The only limitation of the scalability would be how deep your pockets are because it's going to be license costs.

We're a registered financial advisory firm, and we are growing. In the past year to 18 months, we have grown from approximately 52 employees to 70 employees. Everybody relies on it because if we have a disaster recovery type of situation, then everybody is going to expect to be able to work.

It is still a very small number of IT staff, so I can see that as we hire more IT staff to support a larger user base, we will certainly have more users.  At least, I hope not to be the only one responsible for this solution as we grow.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Prior to Zerto, we used VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We switched because it requires a lot of manual upkeep, and there is no automation involved unless you write the scripts. There are lots of freeware sites where you can download scripts, but aside from that, we were spending a lot of time manually writing scripts and maintaining everything. This was really counterproductive for the amount of time we had available in a day.

Essentially, SRM was replaced because of better interface automation and ease of use. 

The setup is very easily done because you tie it into your VMware vCenter. When you put in your credentials, it will recognize everything on your networks. It will recognize storage, whether it be cloud-based or as in our case, at another data center. Once you have those defined, it's just a matter of creating groups that you want to recover, server-wise.

The reason that you would want to do it in groups is that you can set it up in the automation such that it will bring up groups in a certain order. That way, you have a network where the domain controllers come up in the first group, and you can automate stuff from there.

Seven years ago, when I first started to use it, I found it more difficult. I wouldn't say that it was complex but they have certainly made improvements over the years. Where it stands now, if I had to set it up from scratch, I could probably do it in about an hour. Of course, that is because of the way I know the application but in terms of how they have changed the setup, it is certainly more user-friendly than it was compared to where it started.

I remember running into a couple of issues during the deployment, and I contacted their support. They were fantastic and helped me get through it. They made sure that all of my questions were answered, and that it was up and running how we intended it to be used. A lot of it probably had to do with me being a novice at that point, in terms of using the application.

It was a multi-site deployment, with a production site and a DR site, with dedicated storage for each. We have changed the storage that it uses over the years and if I had to do it again, I would use another vendor for storage. A lot of the issues that we ran into were related to the initial storage that we used, as opposed to Zerto issues, even though it was Zerto support that helped me fix them. 

Overall, the deployment was fairly easy. Not because everything went great, but because of the combination of the application being pretty well-written and the support. I would rate the deployment an eight out of ten.

I deployed Zerto with the help of a consultant, contacting support as we needed to. The consultant was NetGain Technologies and they're based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Their service was phenomenal and I would use them again in a heartbeat for this type of deployment. Ultimately, any issues that we ran into boiled down to some issues with the storage we chose to run it on.

I am responsible for the maintenance. 

We have absolutely seen a return on investment in terms of the manhours that have to be put into maintaining and testing this type of product. Thankfully, we have never had to use it in a true DR situation. However, I can guarantee that if something were to happen, even beyond the manhours and ease of automation, that it would pay for itself.

Our network infrastructure runs pretty smoothly most of the time. That said, Zerto has helped us to reduce downtime by approximately 20%. It is difficult to equate this with a monetary value because we have to consider what happens when a client misses a trade or cannot get a hold of their portfolio manager.

If it were an outage of a couple of hours then the person might pay a little more or a little less for a stock that they were trying to purchase. Overall, however, it is difficult to estimate. We aren't a day trading-type firm, so ultimately, I'm not sure that a short outage has any effect on our revenue stream whatsoever.

As a small company, we own the smallest license that Zerto offers, which is 15 VMs. I've not had to contact them or my reseller about purchasing additional licenses or to find out how much they cost.

We spoke with VMware to see what their pipeline was for upgrades or changes to Site Recovery Manager and we also looked at both Cohesity and Rubrik.

I like the separation of the software and the storage, whereas some of those other products are all-in-one. You're buying the software and storage together on the same platform. This means that the scalability would be different.

Sometimes, this is a case of adding shelves for storage. In that situation, for example, you have to start taking the data center rack space into account. Whereas with Zerto, it lets us build upon hardware we already had, even though we use dedicated storage.

Version 9 of this product is out. However, we have not yet upgraded. We're not leveraging the cloud the way a lot of companies do these days, and I know from the release notes that I've read that most of the new features are related to the cloud. There's not a lot of research and development being done on physical data centers anymore.

At this point, I'm very happy with where the product sits for my network. We are now just starting to move things to the cloud, which will take place over the next couple of years, so my assessment in this regard may change in perhaps a few years.

At the moment, we don't have plans to use it for long-term retention. We keep about three days' worth of data in Zerto and then it rolls off. We have other systems in place for long-term retention.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Zerto is to do your homework. In the end, this product checks all of the boxes and it's the one that I would go with.

In the way that we use this solution, which I know is not how everybody uses it, we have storage that is specifically used for Zerto and two data centers. The way it works in that scenario, as long the bandwidth is there, meaning some sort of dedicated circuit between the two sites, it's flawless in my opinion.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be a giant pain. I certainly used to look at it that way in the past.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have two primary use cases. One would be to use it in reaction to a cyber-terror event, particularly ransomware, because Zerto has point-in-time backup. If we find an area that needs to be restored, as long as we figure it out within 24 hours, which is approximately the amount of time we have replicated, we can go back to a point in time. Let's say the files got encrypted at 9:30 AM. We can say restore our 9:29 AM copy of what the data looked like at that point. We have not needed to use that, thankfully, because we've been educating our users very well.

The other case that we would use it for is because we're in a hurricane area. Our particular office is actually in an evacuation area, typically, meaning that we're close enough to the coast that should a hurricane event come through, they generally force us out of the area. What we would do if we needed it, and thankfully we haven't yet, would be to shut down our primary on-prem services to make them a little bit more resistant to water damage. Obviously, if they're not running, they're a little bit less likely to get zapped if there is some water damage. Then we can bring up the copies that we have at our data center and run remotely from that if. It doesn't have a full copy of our entire environment, but it does have a copy of our ERP system, as far as sales are concerned. We wouldn't be able to ship anything, but we could look at orders and help our customers. We could even take orders if we needed to, although we wouldn't be able to process them.

Zerto is a replication solution. It copies our setup which is on-prem to our data center, which is also somewhat local, about 15 miles away. It doesn't really do anything in the cloud other than move data across it. We're not replicating to any cloud-based services like Amazon or Azure. Essentially, we're using it at two on-premises locations: Our primary location, which is what is being replicated, and the replicated copy is being stored at another on-premises location, nearby.

Zerto is purely a business continuity and disaster recovery tool. We don't want to have either one of our primary use case events happen, but if they should happen, it gives us an extra layer of protection. I've got Amazon backups with stuff in completely different regions, but Zerto is more for those two specific scenarios I mentioned. In addition, if somebody deletes a file and it's really important that they have the latest copy of it, Zerto gives us that option. But it really comes down to the ransomware reactions and the hurricane support, because hurricanes are fairly common in this area. The last hurricane event here was before I had Zerto and we had to shut everything down. We really couldn't do much while the hurricane came through. The business wanted something that would give us some protection in that scenario. That's the business continuity aspect. At least we can provide some business capabilities this way. With Zerto, they'll also be able to access a limited functionality version of our system. It definitely provides upper management with a little bit of comfort that we won't be completely down in either a ransomware or a hurricane event.

We're a smaller company. We're owned by a portfolio company, and they're the ones who made a lot of these extra layers of protection happen. Zerto provides me with the comfort of one of those layers. It enables me to make a strong case to my board of directors that, "Yeah, we're good." There's a guy in our board of directors who's something of a tech guy. I can look him in the eye and say, "Hey, we're not bulletproof. We can never be bulletproof, but we're about as close to bulletproof as we can be, especially for a company our size." That's important to the board because they have other companies that aren't as well-protected as we are. I've had conversations with a couple of the guys at those other companies, because they're interested in looking at something like Zerto, and I have been highly recommending it to them. It's a reasonable cost, it provides several layers of protection from ransomware, and if necessary, against natural disasters. I'm very happy to say that Zerto is one of those layers and provides us with very good protection for what it specifically does.

We had two ransomware events prior to being owned by the company that owns us now. Both were events where somebody clicked on a link that they shouldn't have and something ran and encrypted some of our stuff. Now we're much more solidly protected from that, and Zerto is definitely one of the big things protecting us.

If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building. In most cases, Zerto is definitely one of the front lines. It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases the time it takes. As long as it's one of those scenarios in which we foresee using it, it's great. When we did our two failover tests, it was easy to failover to the other location where we have the replicated copies. The last time we had an actual ransomware event, which was before we had Zerto, it took me 30 hours to restore all the data that I needed to restore. I would imagine Zerto would take 10 to 20 percent of that time.

In terms of saving staff time, I only have three people on my staff, so I'm not going to save human resources by using Zerto. That being said, what it does save me is the trouble of having to use another solution that would take a lot of time. I only engage my guys who work on Zerto for six to 10 hours a year, versus having somebody on staff. That's a significant savings for us, because we don't need somebody on staff who knows how to do things with it. It is pretty easy to use for somebody who's familiar with it and uses it on a regular basis. For example, when I do the upgrade, I'll pay guys to do it because that's what they do.

We have secondary, older equipment where our Zerto backup copy resides. We moved that old hardware to our secondary location and got new stuff in our primary location. Our primary location now copies, via Zerto, to the other location that has our old equipment. It's not quite cloud, but it is in a different location. And it's definitely saving us money in the long-term by not having to pay for cloud storage because we have put it on our older stuff, and it works fine for that scenario.

We did a test turning it back on and rethinking it, and that took a reasonable amount of time. A lot of that is not actually limited by Zerto. It's more limited by your pipeline between your backup location and your primary location. Zerto was very helpful, and it's very easy to use from that standpoint. Once you reconnect the two sites, it does a snapshot check of where it left off and then it copies back over the changes that happened while it was running on your secondary site. That's not automatic. You have to touch it. But it's certainly not super-technical.

Our two primary use cases are Zerto's biggest features for us. That's what we use it for. There may be other situations where it can come in handy, but those are our two primary scenarios.

In terms of providing continuous data protection, Zerto has been great so far. Thankfully, we haven't had an event where we have really needed to rely on it, but we have done a couple of tests prior to hurricane season where we disconnect our primary facility. We then go over to our secondary facility where the replicated data is and we bring everything up and then we do remote access to that location to make sure that it's all working properly. It's very capable. I've also done a couple of test scenarios on ransomware reaction where I'll go in and restore a folder, after hours when nobody is in the system, to emulate a situation where we might need to go back and restore kit encrypted files. So far, it's been great.

Regarding the ease of use, there's a web portal that I use to verify that everything is working well. It has a lot of notifications and it emails me if there's anything going on that's out of the ordinary. For example, if the connection to one of my other sites goes down, it will let me know that it's not able to reach that site. I'm very happy with the way the interface works for my needs, and my tech has been pretty happy with it. Our installation is rather small. We only have 14 servers on it. I'm sure there are other companies that have hundreds, but I imagine that they would see the same capabilities. The web portal is pretty well organized and easy to navigate.

I have been using Zerto for just about three years. We just re-upped the maintenance on it and, until that point, we had a three-year plan for it.

We're on version 7.5, but I've had some discussions with my partner where we have the replication stored. We're doing an upgrade, but we ran out of time before hurricane season so we decided to hold off until after that. We're going to move up to 8.5 as soon as hurricane season is over, but I didn't want to risk getting into a situation where we didn't have Zerto working at all. And version 7.5 has been working fine. There was no real need to do the upgrade, other than to stay current.

We're about a version behind. I generally stay at least a half-a-version behind to let everybody else do all the sorting out of anything that they might find with the new versions, and then I jump on the second-oldest version, once that's a little more mature.

The stability of Zerto itself has been fine. We have some network instability that affects it, but I see the alerts come through and it's not Zerto that is having trouble. Zerto itself is very stable.

Scalability is not really applicable to our situation, but I would imagine that it would be easy to scale if needed. We would just buy additional licenses and strategize a little bit about how we were going to add them.

We only have 15 server licenses, but I expect we'll have some growth as we have a couple of projects upcoming. We're probably going to need another server, so even though we're retiring a few servers, I'll leave the licenses. I won't probably be in any position to make it bigger any time soon, but you never know. Our company always has its eye out for acquisitions. Last year we picked up two companies, although they didn't really result in any major increase in our infrastructure. Maybe we'll pick up somebody similar in size to us and all of a sudden we'll need to protect 10 more servers. I don't have any plans for downsizing Zerto.

If I were to nitpick, I would say that I wish I had a better account manager. Our sales guy has changed a couple of times. I would like a little more responsiveness from our account manager. I've had a couple of issues where getting in touch with him has been a little difficult, and I end up just going around him and dealing with support and support has handled it right away.

I've only had to deal with their tech support a few times, and I would give them a nine out of 10. They've been pretty responsive. They've answered my questions. They've gotten things taken care of.

Before Zerto, I just restored backups. We have Veeam as our primary backup system. Veeam is a traditional backup system. In those ransomware events I mentioned, I literally had to go through and restore a bunch of stuff from different servers from our backup repository, which is onsite. I had to go back and restore this folder and that folder and this folder and that folder. I would sort of have to do that with Zerto, but it would be a lot easier. I could just pick the folder and pick the time, and say, "Go." With Veeam it was definitely a much more complicated process.

We didn't "switch" to Zerto, we added it. We still have our other solution. While there is disaster recovery where you're recovering from a disaster, business continuity is how fast you recover from disaster; how quickly you get the business going again. Zerto reduces our RPOs. It was more a case of added protection and it reduces our recovery times—even though thankfully we've never had to use it—compared to the last time we had to recover.

Zerto came highly recommended from our primary VAR, which is Presidio, the place we bought it from. They said it would do exactly what we needed it to do, and the price was reasonable. I took the recommendation, did some research on them. It's possible I looked at reviews on IT Central Station and someone there said, "Oh yeah, Zerto is great." That's good enough for me. I didn't need to spend a ton of time on it. As long as they've got good reviews from multiple sources, which I did find when I researched Zerto, and it came highly recommended from our VAR, those were two pros and I didn't need to go looking for a con.

I didn't actually set up the software. I had to pay somebody else to do that because it was a little beyond my team's capabilities. Our deployment took about six hours from start to finish. The guy that I worked with said that he was pretty happy with it. He had to send in a couple of help tickets, and they were very responsive and were able to help him get through the issues that he had.

He's from an IT support firm called Creative Network Innovations, and they also have an onsite data center, so they offer data center support services in addition to regular IT support services. In this case, Zerto is data-center related. We use Creative Network Innovations because it's related to what they do for us, and they have people on staff who are comfortable working with it. Even though they don't necessarily do Zerto all the time, they were able to step in, take a look at it, and sort it out for us, so that was good.

I wouldn't necessarily say that they're experts in the software, because they learned it for us. They're not typical Zerto implementers, but that speaks to how easy Zerto is to use. They had never really used it, but they were able to pick it up, plug it in, and get it working for us.

In terms of deployment time, the Zerto piece didn't take long. It was about six hours. What we had to do in terms of setting up networking, that was a little different. The whole project, including Zerto, took about 12 to 16 hours. And when we did our first failover test, that probably took another six hours, because we had to figure out all the nuances of how to make it handle the various servers that we have.

It depends on the size of your installation. Because we're fairly small, it didn't require a lot of involvement. Most of it is Windows-based, so it's not that hard to install and set up. Things like getting access through the VPN, which weren't necessarily Zerto-specific, are what took a little time, but the Zerto piece was pretty fast.

It's a backup piece for us. We didn't really get that fancy. We basically identified the servers we needed to replicate offsite. Then we installed Zerto on our primary location and we installed Zerto on our secondary location. And we created the communication.

In terms of users, I'm the only one in our organization who monitors Zerto, and I do very little of that.

I would estimate that if I had to recover from a scenario like the last one that affected us, it would take me 10 to 20 percent of the time it took me at that time. That reduces the amount of time that our system is down and, therefore, the amount of money we're losing because our system is down. It does provide some cost-benefit, but it's hard to quantify, because nobody has said, "In our company, we lose $X an hour when we're down." But when things are down, people are not happy. If nothing else, it means I hear less griping, and that makes me happier.

They have an enterprise-type of licensing scenario, which we didn't qualify for because we don't have enough. Ours is pretty straightforward. It is site-based, but the payment concepts are based on the number of servers. In our case, we have a quantity of 15. When we bought it, there was an initial purchase amount plus maintenance. When it came up for renewal, we did three more years, and it was under $10,000 for my 15 servers.

It's very reasonably priced. It's a little more than $3,000 annually. That works out to about $20 per server per month.

Our backup recovery software, Veeam, is working on a product that will compete with Zerto. But it's still very new. It has not been out for very long, so I don't anticipate us going away from Zerto any time soon. That being said, when our renewal comes up with Zerto, I might reevaluate and look at Veeam and see if their solution is going to cover what Zerto does, because then I have one vendor to deal with, not that I dislike dealing with Zerto. It's just sometimes it's nicer to put all of your stuff into one package because the interfaces are uniform.

At this point in time, Zerto is safe with us. We've got them for three more years, and it does exactly what we need it to. Is it going to be our daily backup and our long-term retention? At this point in time, no. I'm pretty happy with what Veeam does and how it integrates with VMware, not that Zerto does a poor job. Zerto covers a different area.

It's kind of like if you were wearing armor, as a knight of old, but you were missing a piece on your back. If somebody stabbed you in the back, if you had armor there, you wouldn't worry about it. Zerto covers our "back." It covers stuff that Veeam doesn't. It handles point-in-time backups and it gives us a faster recovery in certain scenarios. It's not going to necessarily protect us from a full on-premises failure, because I don't have it doing that. I bought it specifically to defend us from certain types of attacks. We have Zerto handling 14 servers but we have a total of 20 servers. It's not backing up the other six, Veeam is, but that's because I don't need those to be protected from ransomware. I need them to be protected from system failure or catastrophic disaster where our primary location is under 20 feet of water from a hurricane, or the whole thing burns down. Zerto is not going to protect us from that, although it possibly could. We just don't use it for that.

It provides us some niche protection and we're happy with the niche that it protects.

Because we're a smaller company, I would never need a full-time person to do disaster recovery, whereas a company with several thousand employees and multiple billions of dollars of revenue would probably have a team for that. I would imagine those guys would save people if they had Zerto, but that's just me imagining that, rather than it being fact.

If I had 1,000 servers, it might require more of my time, but we have 14. We have a board of directors that wants things to be bulletproof, and they're willing to pay for it. Do we need Zerto? Probably not. Is it nice to have? For sure. But we certainly don't use it in the typical use environment, which I'm sure is a lot more servers than we have. That being said, we still use it, and I highly recommend it, even for companies of our size, although it's probably not the sweet spot for a lot of companies like ours. It's kind of pricey for smaller companies, but for what it does, I think the value is exceptional.

For companies of our size, if you don't have somebody on staff who can use Zerto, you want to find the right help. Your VMware person should be able to help you with it. Make sure that you're comfortable with what you're trying to accomplish. I thought it was a pretty smooth implementation, as you can tell from the time that it took. That might be in part due to the people we enlisted to help us. I can't say that everybody's installation will go that smoothly, but I would imagine that if you have a pretty solid VMware-type person, you should be pretty good with the Zerto piece. It's really a matter of working on the VMware side of it. There is also a little bit of networking, depending on where you're backing up to.

If you're backing up to the cloud, you obviously need somebody who is cloud-savvy who can get the proper connections to your AWS and secure them.

Overall, make sure you have somebody who is VMware-savvy. You don't necessarily need somebody who is specifically Zerto-savvy. The guys that I worked with said that it was pretty easy to work with, even though they hadn't worked with it before. But again, ours was a smaller installation. A Fortune 500 company is going to need a little bit more capability. They're going to want to look for a Zerto-certified implementer, which I presume there are. We didn't bother with that because we're smaller and we didn't really have anything particularly difficult in our implementation.

In terms of preventing downtime, in our situation Zerto hasn't helped reduce that, but it's not because Zerto is not capable of doing so. It's just that we haven't had a situation like that in which it has needed to be used. We haven't had any incidents that required the use of the Zerto fallback.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that I wish I had known about it six years ago. I wish that I had known about its capabilities. Given that it's on version 8.5, it's been around for a while. I really wish we would have had it when we actually had a need for it.

If we ever need it, we're confident in it, given the test scenarios we've gone through where it's been great. It's a nice "warm blanket," and it's good to "cuddle" underneath it, because I don't have to worry about it. If I have an event, I'm pretty confident that I can get us back up and running quickly. Is it going to be instantaneous? Of course not. But it's going to take significantly less time than it would take if I had to react via a manual backup.

Zerto is "the bomb." I'm definitely happy we got it. Overall, it's reasonably priced. It's one of the less expensive business continuity and disaster recovery layers that we have. That being said, it doesn't do everything. We're a smaller shop. There are only three people on my IT team, including me. It's definitely been a very helpful tool and comforting to know that we have it in place. It makes it easier to sleep at night. For what we need it for, it does everything we need.

Zerto is a nine out of 10 and maybe even close to a 10. It's solid. It's a good product. It does what we need it to do. Since we haven't actually had a live event, I can't say that it's perfect, but in the tests we have run it through it has been great. The only blemish has been dealing with the account manager, which could be situational. I've only had to deal with him a few times. The last time he didn't even respond to me. That being said, it's been three years, and maybe he's moved on and nobody is monitoring his email box. And when I reached out to support, they took care of me right away. So the account management is a minor blemish. Everything else, as far as the product and support go, has been fantabulous.

We have typical use cases for it: resilience and disaster recovery. They have some other functionalities that their software can help account for, but we are using its disaster recovery and resilience, which are kind of its core functions.

I have used it in many scenarios, including a temporary data center move in Europe. I had to move all my resources from Belgium to Budapest, and then back, once our data center was physically moved across town in Belgium. I am not sure how this would have been accomplished without Zerto. 

With Zerto, the move was incredibly easy to do. It was click of a button, wait 10 minutes, and everything is up, then turn on the data center. Once the data center was relocated and rebuilt, click a button, and wait a few minutes, then it now runs back to the original site. It was that easy. The data center move part was obviously the hard part, as it should have been, not keeping the applications going at a secondary site during that time. That was a pretty big success with Zerto and our largest use case for it: a data center move.

We are currently using Zerto with some more modern databases, application servers, and tertiary systems to provide redundancy and resiliency to our crown jewel application. We have been doing a lot of DR testing scenarios, part of which relies on Zerto and part of which are other mechanisms. In general, when we have done our recent testing using the Zerto portions, once we say, "Okay, we are doing this now," it is taking less than three minutes on average for the systems to be fully back online at the new location once we start. That includes booting all the Windows VMs up. The actual VMs were ready to go and functional within 30 seconds. However, some of them are larger Windows machines and those take their time to boot, getting services online and connected to everything. So, the Zerto part was literally under a minute in these test scenarios to clear a total failure and initiate our disaster recovery function.

The near real-time replication is probably the biggest value of this solution. There are some other ways to get that done, but this seemed to be the easiest and cheapest way to get near real-time replication. In most instances, our RPO is about five seconds, which is pretty aggressive and not that taxing to achieve with Zerto.

The ease of use is pretty high. It really isn't very complex to use. They did a good job with the UI, and it is fairly obvious where you need to click, what you need to click, and what you are doing. There are good confirmation screens, so you are not going to accidentally take down or move loads that you are not trying to. It is fairly user-friendly, easy to use, and you don't need to read a manual for three weeks to start using it.

Previously, our main need for Zerto was actually database cluster servers running fairly old software, SQL 2008 on Microsoft Windows clusters with none of the advanced SQL clustering functionality. Our environment is all virtualized. The way we had to present the storage to our host machines in VMware was via raw device mapping (RDM). Technically, Zerto can do that, but not very well. We have gone to some different methods for our databases, which don't actually use or rely on Zerto because the solution wasn't that functional with RDMs. This is an old, antiquated technology that we are currently moving off of. I can't really blame them, but it definitely is something they thought they could do better than they could in practice.

They had a bug recently that has come up and caused some issues. They currently have a bug in their production versions that prevents their product from functioning in some scenarios, and we have hit a few of those scenarios. Aside from that, when it is not hitting a bug, and if we're not trying to use it for our old-style, old-school databases, it functions incredibly well.

I had an early Zerto certification from their first ZertoCON conference. I received a certification from them in May 2016, so I have been using it for at least five years. I would have been one of the initial users at my company, so they have been using Zerto for at least five years.

Stability is reasonably good, but I wouldn't say excellent. We have had some odd issues with vRAs, which are little VMs that hang off of every VMware host that we have. Those aren't consistent, but they do occasionally happen. As I referenced earlier, there is a bug in the system right now that can affect my VM recovery. It tries to put too many requests into VMware at once, and VMware will timeout those requests, which causes Zerto to fail. That has not been constant throughout our use of Zerto. It is usually a flawless operation, and that is why I can still say good to very good, even though they currently have a bug. It is very uncommon for them to have anything that affects the platform negatively.

Scalability hasn't seemed to be an issue. We started out with two sites connected in the same city. Now, we are running the connected infrastructure of Zerto on three different continents. Some of those continents have various cities and/or countries involved. That has not given us an issue with scalability at all. It seems to be fairly flexible in adding whatever you need it to do. As long as you have the bandwidth capability and reasonable latency between sites, Zerto seems to work quite well.

10 to 12 people are actively in Zerto, or even know what it is besides a word that an IT guy uses to say, "It is okay." Generally speaking, their titles would be network administrator, network engineer, or senior network engineer. 

For all our sites, most of our IT staff wouldn't be allowed to mess with it. Because if you hit the wrong buttons in Zerto, you can take down an application. So, there is a fairly small list of folks who would be able to get into this. Only a few sites can actually access the management console. They are located in Louisville, Kentucky; Belgium, Budapest, and Melbourne, Australia.

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. They know the product very well. I have had a couple misfires at times, but they are pretty good in general.

One of the issues that we had early on was regarding some of the storage functionality, especially regarding RDMs. I had contacts and conferences with the Zerto development staff, whom I believe are in Israel, about the ability to ignore disks in Zerto for my virtual protection groups (VPGs). What they can do currently is mark them as temporary disks, then they will do a one-time copy, and that is it. However, some of those temporary disks are extremely large, so it wasn't a great answer for us. I would like the ability to ignore disks instead of still trying to replicate every disk on a VM as being protected by Zerto. The biggest thing that they can do right now is improve their product. This would have been much better a few years ago rather than now. Now, we are finding other ways around it.

We previously had some storage-based replication, which we are currently still using, but nothing that really fits the same mold that Zerto does.

Zerto's database storage replication is not good with RDMs. We are still doing storage-based replication for those. 

Our new schematic is self-replicating. It doesn't require any type of Zerto replication or storage-based replication, so that was a need removed.

It was quite straightforward. You just install the software, point it to your vCenter instance, and then deploy your vRAs, which is done automatically. Updates have been the same, e.g., quite straightforward. The only challenge with updates is if you have multiple Zerto instances that are linked to each other. To be able to replicate to different sites, they can't be out more than a half a version. For instance, I am running version 8.5 on all my sites that are currently running Zerto, but I couldn't be running those if I was running 7.5 anywhere. That would have been too far out of appliance. That is more of a minor challenge than a problem. I don't consider that to be a shortcoming, but it is well-documented, easy to figure out, and also pretty straightforward.

The first site was also kind of a learning experience. That deployment took less than a day from, "Okay, let's start the download," to, "Look, it's doing something," and you need to stand up two sites to go from site A to site B. That took less than a day to get them up and functional in at least some capacity, protecting some machines and workloads.

We generally try to perform all functions in-house instead of bringing in a third-party or contractor service to help for deployments. That was the model that we followed. We read the documentation, had Zerto's number handy in case we ran into issues, and deployed it ourselves.

There are probably only five of us (out of the 12 who have access) needed for deployment maintenance. Their titles would be network administrator, network engineer, or senior network engineer. 

It is fairly simple to deploy and maintain. We do product upgrades every six to 12 months.

We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal.

Zerto has reduced the time involved that staff would spend on a data recovery operation. We don't have dedicated resources for disaster recovery. It is a scenario where, "Everybody, stop what you are doing. This is what we are all working on right now." We haven't had a reduction in headcount because of Zerto, but we have reduced the use of existing headcount.

DR management is less time-intensive and resource intensive. Therefore, there are less staff hours involved because of Zerto, but not less headcount.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime in any situation. The easiest one to point out was the data center move. It took minutes to move an application to a different country, then minutes once again to move it back. That would have been hours at best to days with the other solutions that we had at our disposal.

Even though we are on-prem, the licensing model was changed to more of a cloud licensing model. We pay for blocks of protected machines. You need to buy a block for use and pay for maintenance annually based on the block size that you have.

When they changed their licensing model, pricing might have gotten a little more expensive for some use cases, but it has been pretty straightforward.

It is a little easier to use than Cohesity or Rubrik, but we haven't really had another DR platform in place. 

At the time of evaluation, we did not have a good snapshot-based backup platform, such as Cohesity and Rubrik, so that was not much of an option. The only thing we were aware of and investigating was VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which is VMware's built-in system, SRM, and played around with it. In comparison to Zerto at that time, Site Recovery Manager is a nightmare. Zerto was definitely the easy button when we were last investigating solutions. Zerto was better in terms of ease of use, visibility, and costs. Frankly, these are all the metrics that we looked at, and Zerto worked better than SRM as well as it was easier and cheaper.

Do a PoC. Test it along with other solutions that you are looking at and make a decision. Our decision was easy, and it was Zerto.

We are changing the infrastructure supporting our primary crown jewel application and will be utilizing Zerto more heavily in that. We are expanding the amount of application servers as well as adding some database servers that Zerto will be responsible for, and currently aren't. We are expanding using Zerto because we are expanding the assets for our application. That is happening currently. We have been working on that switchover for the last 12 months. We are getting close to actually deploying all those changes in production, so that is a fairly recent and ongoing task.

We haven't had to deal with a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We have a combination of luck and some pretty good security measures in place to where we haven't had an impactful ransomware event, CryptoLocker event, etc. In that event, I don't think Zerto would probably be the first thing that we would try to utilize. We have some pretty good backup mechanisms as well. We would probably look to those first to restore from backups. We have a fairly aggressive backup schedule with many servers backed up once an hour or more, which contain critical data. That is probably where we would go first.

There is a need to have both DR and backup in one solution, but it is not important. There are better backup methodologies that we use and they cover more use cases.

We are not utilizing any cloud resources for DR at this point. Our applications are very CPU and memory intensive, which becomes very expensive to run in the cloud.

We have other mechanisms for long-term retention.

Biggest lesson learnt: Disaster recovery doesn't have to be the biggest challenge in your organization.

I would rate Zerto as eight out of 10. The rating may not sound great, but it is pretty high for me.

We are an electric utility and we have some pretty critical workloads. We have identified the most critical workloads in our environment and have implemented Zerto as a protective measure for them.

We try to keep our critical workloads protected, which are a subset of our systems. For example, we're not going to protect a print server with Zerto.

The fact that Zerto provides continuous data protection is key for us. We have tested on a regular basis, and in one case, we tested our entire ERP system. It is a pretty big workload that includes Linux servers, databases, and other components. It's about a 45-minute window to get it back up and running. For our test, we moved the entire system to our DR facility on a weekend, ran it for an entire week from the DR site, and then brought it back the following Sunday. It worked flawlessly.

I really like the 24-hour DVR-like rollback. For example, we had an issue a few years ago, when we still had an Exchange server on-premises. One of my staff came in for the morning to do vulnerability management, saw that some updates needed to be applied, applied the updates to the Exchange server, and it totally broke it. Everybody's email was down. To resolve things, we went to Zerto, rolled back to before the updates, and it was all done in less than five or 10 minutes. It was really quick. All of the email functionality was restored and it popped up and said, "Hey, you need an update." I said, "Please do not do that update." It was pretty good.

Zerto is easy to use and the interface is very intuitive. We have never had an issue with using it. We just have a one-man team to perform failbacks or workloads. It is very simple to do and during our test with the Exchange server, it was only a matter of a few clicks. It's always been an excellent product and they've only improved it over time. We're really pleased with it.

The integration with VMware is really good.

It would be nice if we were able to purchase single licenses for Zerto. As it is now, scaling requires that we purchase a multi-pack. It hasn't been a big deal for us but it would still be helpful to have a little bit more granularity on the license count.

The only timeline or limiting factor, in my opinion, is how long it takes to replicate. That all depends on your infrastructure, and we happen to be pretty fortunate that we have a nice pipe in between the two locations, between here and our DR site. If you don't have that limiting factor, it's just a matter of time. You just wait long enough for it to replicate over and then you're covered.

I have been using Zerto for approximately seven years.

We do the updates regularly and Zerto has never given us problems. We work with a lot of different technologies and we have a lot of problems, but Zerto has not been one of them.

We haven't had much opportunity to explore scalability at this point. We're responsible for another organization's IT, as well. They're a sister company of ours and they're smaller than us, so we do all of their IT and we have them on Zerto. They're using us as a DR point.

From an expansion perspective, we scaled up from our initial install to include theirs as well, which I think we got pretty close to doubling our license count.

We are 100% deployed at this point. If we were ever to add another sister company, which is possible because we have other sister companies where opportunities may arise. A lot of the time, they're so small that they can't afford IT, so it's easier to have us manage it. In cases like this, we may have an opportunity to deploy Zerto.

We have a very small team of three people, so Zerto does not affect our headcount. There is me, who is the manager of IT or manager of information services. Then, we have our desktop technician, and then we have our network administrator.

We have never had to use Zerto's technical support for anything major. Any time that we have had to contact them, it has been for minor stuff and it's worked out fine.

A long time ago, when we had an EMC SAN, there was a VMware plugin that served as a replication solution. However, it was terrible and it never worked.

Zerto is a major upgrade that is easier to use and switching was excellent.

Replacing our legacy solution with Zerto has definitely saved us time and improved the quality of our process. I never felt like I could trust our previous solution, which was a big deal because when you're talking about backups, trust is a major factor. You have to be able to trust your solution and feel like it's going to work in a bad situation.

Zerto is one of those things that you love to have but you hate to have to use because it means that something bad is going on. That said, if there are serious problems then you want to have something that's rock solid. For us, that's Zerto, and we feel strongly about that.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had some training with some Zerto engineers on how to set up the recovery groups and other things, but once that was set up, we made several changes later on as we played with it. Overall, it was very straightforward to configure and I think that we only had an hour of training.

The deployment took us a couple of weeks to get everything figured out, although it wasn't necessarily Zerto that was the hold-up. We only had a certain number of licenses, perhaps 15 in total. We spent time trying to determine which were our critical workloads, and there was some internal debate about it. From the Zerto perspective, there weren't a lot of issues.

It didn't take a lot of time, just a couple of weeks to get us up and going. We were actually up and technically running within that same day, but to truly boot it and get it where it needed to be, it took a couple of weeks. It was a new technology to us at the time, so it took a while to get up to speed with it.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we just tried to identify the critical workloads, find the ones that really needed to be protected and start to make those recovery groups. Then, we organized them in such a way that things worked properly. For example, the components of our ERP system do have to come up in a certain order. Finding all of that stuff out and fine-tuning the process was part of our strategy. Then, we slowly started moving those workloads across. We broke it down into groups and we did those groups one at a time until the implementation was complete.

Our in-house team was responsible for implementation.

Maintenance-wise, we just keep it updated. Our network administrator applies the updates and checks the health from time to time. We have a dashboard on our big screen if we feel the need to monitor it. If we walk by and it looks like a protection group is in the red or yellow, then we look at what needs to be done to get the problem straightened out.

Price-wise, it's right in line with what we would figure. For what you get for it, it's really a good value, and we've never had any problem renewing it or anything like that.

License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it.

Licensing requires purchasing packages that consist of several licenses, and they cannot be purchased one at a time.

We paid for an hour of training that we took but otherwise, there have been no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We began looking at Zerto for several reasons including the cost, ease of use, and really, the flexibility of it. When you want to switch it over and do a different workload, it's not that big of a deal.

When we first began to consider using Zerto, we had a discussion with a grocery chain that is close to us. It's a specialty grocery chain and they have exotic foods sold out of two different locations. Christmas is their busiest time of year and they have several cash registers at each location doing transactions constantly.

They had to use Zerto during the middle of that Christmastime rush and failover, from one site to the other, all of their point of sale systems. They never lost a penny in transactions. For us, that was a big testimonial. They have a similar size of environment to ours as far as server infrastructure goes, so we didn't even look at anything else.

At this time, we don't use Zerto for long-term data retention. Instead, we have some other technologies in place for that. We have Veem and we have some SAN replication and we have some network-attached storage, as well. We use Zerto as our first line of defense. For example, in response to a ransomware attack, we would use Zerto for sure to roll back before that event happened.

We have not had a ransomware attack, at least not yet. We fully expect that, if it ever does happen, we'll definitely utilize Zerto. It is essentially our insurance policy. If we ever have a ransomware incident, that would be our first line of defense to recover from it. In fact, we really haven't had many opportunities to use Zerto, thankfully. Zerto is one of those things that are great, and we're glad we have it, but you hope we never have to use it.

At this time, everything we do is on-premises but having DR in the cloud with Zerto is definitely something that we want to do in the future.

It is not important to us that Zerto offers both backup and DR functionality. For backup, we have it covered in other ways. Being in the utility business, we're very big on redundancy. In fact, we have backups to cover the backups and we have about five different levels of them that we utilize. Zerto covers the front line, and when something bad happens, we can roll back within a 24-hour period using it. Then, we have deeper levels handled by other products like Veeam. Funnily enough, Veeam kept telling us that they would add Zerto-like features, and at the same time, Zerto kept telling us that they would add Veeam-like features. We continue to use both of them.

I've recommended Zerto to several IT professionals that I've talked to because it's such a good product. I give them examples of what we have done.

Overall, it's a fantastic product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We mostly use it just for disaster recovery. We also utilize it for our quarterly and annual DR test.

It is on-prem. We have a primary location and a DR location.

Since we are at a bank, there are certain protocols in place where we need to have RPO and RTO times of two hours or less. Zerto does a great job of setting those times and alerting us if those can't be met. We have our help desk actively monitoring that. It is extremely helpful that Zerto lists what is falling out of compliance in regards to RPO and RTO. It has been great in that regard.

If we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the number of people involved by half versus companies of similar size who don't have Zerto.

We have had patches that have broken a server. We then needed to have it right back up and running. We have been able to do that, which has been a huge plus. 

The real-time data protection is the most valuable feature. We are able to quickly spin up VMs instantly. 

We have also utilized it, from time to time, if our backups didn't catch it at night. If something was deleted midday, this solution is nice because you can use Zerto for that. 

I would rate Zerto very high in terms of it providing continuous data protection. We have had multiple instances that took days with our old DR test (before I was at my current company) and DR tests from other companies where I worked that didn't have Zerto. Now, we can realistically do DR tests in less than 30 minutes.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. If 10 is absolutely dummy-proof, I would give the ease of use an eight.

It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default. However, we have done it with other things. It is pretty handy.

I would like it if they would really ramp up more on their PowerShell scripting and API calls, then I can heavily utilize PowerShell. I am big into scripting stuff and automating things. So, if they could do even more with PowerShell, API calls, and automation, that would be fantastic.

I have been using it at my company for almost four years. My company has been using it for six years.

I would rate stability as eight and a half out of 10.

I would rate scalability as eight out of 10.

We monitor and use it every day. Our current license count is 150 VMs. I could definitely see us increasing that license because we keep adding more VMs.

As big as our company is, we don't have a very large infrastructure sysadmin group. I wouldn't say that Zerto has reduced our staff in any kind of way, but it definitely has helped the small amount of people that we have.

We have around 20 people using it: 

• Our core admin group is four people, including me. To put that in perspective, we have a $10 billion bank and our core infrastructure team consists of just those four people. The core admin group does administration, creates VPGs, and executes the main day-to-day operations. 
• We have a few users who are just monitoring it only. This is a read-only role. 
• We have our help desk, which is basically read-only, but they actively monitor RTO and RPO every day, all day long. They leave up the dashboard on a huge TV and just keep an eye on things.

I would rate the technical support as nine and a half out of 10. I thoroughly enjoy the fact that they are located in Boston, and you feel like you are talking to someone just like you. They do an excellent job of following up and escalating anything that is needed. I rarely have to call Zerto support, but I am confident that anytime I need to, then it will be resolved.

We stay in close contact with our main local rep.

My company never used anything quite like Zerto. We still use things for backup and recovery, such as Dell EMC Avamar, which used to be NetWorker. We also use RecoverPoint for applications, but it is not at all the same. There is actual real-time recovery. It is kind of a different animal.

I have had to redeploy it a few times with data center changes and such. We went from your typical data center to Cisco UCS Blades to VxRack, a VMware Dell EMC product. With that, I had to deploy it from scratch.

It was pretty straightforward. There is plenty of very easy to follow documentation when it comes to implementing it. There is also a lot of training provided so you can understand it before you implement it. Those two things make it pretty easy.

Just to stand it up and get everything going, that took an hour or two. The overall implementation was over the course of three days, because our core is heavily utilized.

We had a ZVM Virtual Manager on our production side and another on our DR site. Most of our data is replicated from production to DR. We do have some that are in the DR replicating back, but not a lot. Our main concern was between both sites, because we don't have a very large pipe. Even though Zerto's compression is pretty good, we didn't want to send that data all back over. Our main priority, when we set it up again, was that we were able to retain a lot of the data at our DR location and remap it by using preseeded disks, which was huge.

At least two staff members are required for deployment and maintenance. Whenever an update is released, we try to do that fairly quickly. For quarterly updates or major releases, we try to stay on top of them. Then, whenever we deploy new systems, applications, or servers, depending on the RTO and RPO, we add Zerto to those. That is daily, depending on how much workload we have and how many servers we are deploying. Those two people add those groups and such configuration into Zerto.

From an implementation standpoint, just follow the guide and check their support page for things. Worst case, reach out to support if you have already paid for it. It is pretty straightforward.

Zerto has helped reduce downtime. We have had servers go down and could easily spin them back up at our DR location almost instantly. Instead of taking an hour, it took a minute.

On average, it saves us three to five hours a day.

We pay for 150 VMs per year. It is not cheap.

Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well.

Zerto did really well with presenting their solution to the management here, really getting people involved, and helping them understand what and how it could be used. At the time, their real-time recovery was pretty far above anybody else available, and even still somewhat.

Other solutions would take an entire workday to recover our core infrastructure. With Zerto, we are done within an hour for all our major systems.

As far as the GUI goes, Zerto is more user-friendly than a lot of other products, such as Avamar and Commvault. It is fairly easy to use, but I think the GUI interface of Zerto is pretty far above the rest.

We use Avamar, and I don't see Zerto replacing Avamar for the simple fact of retention and how expensive the storage is. Using an RPM storage is pretty pricey, especially to try to rely on that for a long retention of seven years, for instance. 

When it comes to purchasing, I highly recommend Zerto all the time to friends that I have at other companies. 

It is just for DR. We keep an average of three days of retention, e.g., journal history of three days. However, it is not always the same for all products. We don't really keep it for backups. That is more of a convenience thing.

Currently, we don't utilize the cloud. It may be an option in the future. The cloud was a bad word for our bank for a long time, and that is starting to change.

Biggest lesson learnt: DR tests don't have to be so painful.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.

We use it for disaster recovery. We use it for some testing. And we use it for hot backups on databases.

This past summer we had multiple hurricanes down south. We host for our clients, and what we did was proactively move them from their location down south up to our Boise data center in Idaho. We were able to do that with Zerto.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. I was actually part of a project to move a data center, and we used Zerto to move it. We moved 20,000 virtual machines and the downtime was just a reboot of each machine. Before, it probably would have taken at least six people in multiple teams to do it, whereas in this move it was just two engineers from the same team who did it.

In addition, we recently had a corrupt database that we recovered using Zerto. If we didn't have Zerto, we would have had to do a restore and we would have had a loss of data of up to 24 hours, because the backups were done every 24 hours. In this case, we were able to roll the database back to a point in time that the DBAs deemed had good data. There was very little data loss as a result. Using Zerto in that situation saved us at least eight hours and from having to use multiple teams.

In that situation, for the recovery we would have done a restore from backup. The problem is we would have had X amount of hours of data loss. I don't know how long it would have taken the DBAs or our developers or app owners to reproduce the information that would have been lost. That could have ended up taking days. I've seen it take days in the past to recreate data that was lost as part of the recovery process.

Another point is that the solution has reduced the staff involved in overall backup and DR management. The big thing is that it reduces the teams involved. So rather than having the SAN team involved, the backup team involved, and the virtualization engineers, it ends up being just the virtualization engineers who do all the work. It has reduced the number of people involved from six to eight people down to a single engineer.

The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution.

Having been in disaster situations myself, one of the things that a lot of companies miss is the fact that, during a test, it's all hands on deck, but during a disaster not all those hands are there. I don't know what the statistics are, but it's quite infrequent that you have the ability to get the technical people necessary to do technical stuff. I was also part of the post-9/11 disaster recovery review, and one of the key conversations was about situations where an organization had the solution in place but they didn't have the people. Their solutions were quite complex, whereas with Zerto you can do it with a mouse. You can do it with non-technical staff, as long as you have your documentation in proper order.

I've been doing disaster recovery for 20 years and, in my opinion, the solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features. The back-end technology, the split-write and the appliances, they've got that down very well.

There's room for improvement with the GUI. The interface ends up coming down to a personal preference thing and where you like to see things. It's like getting into a new car. You have to relearn where the gauges are.

I'd also like to see them go to an appliance-based solution, rather than our standing up a VM. While the GUI ends up depending on personal preference, the actual platform that the GUI is created on needs to go to an appliance base.

Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it.

I've been using Zerto for five years.

We had a rough start, but in defense of that, we were doing a lot of going long-distance with what we had.

The thing that I liked most about the problems that we had was that Zerto wasn't afraid to admit it. They also weren't afraid to put us in touch with the right staff on their side. It wasn't a big deal for me to talk to their developer. Normally, when you're at that level, the developers are shielded from customers, whereas with Zerto it was a more personal type of service that I got. We had a problem and they put me in touch with the developer who developed that piece of the solution and we brought it to resolution.

It's very scalable. We grew from just a few hundred to a few thousand pretty quickly, and there were very few hiccups during that process.

Out of the gate, when you call their number, they could do better. 

The thing is that I've developed such a good relationship with all of them, at all levels at Zerto, that I know who to call. If you're off the street and you call in, you're going to get that level-one support who's going to move you through it. When I call in, they put me right through to the level-two support and I move from there. It's like any support, if you know the right people, you can skip the helpdesk level and go right into the engineering.

The disaster recovery solution for the company I'm currently with was the typical restore from backups. They were using SAN replication as part of it. 

Personally, I've used many solutions over the years, starting with spinning tape, boot-from-disk, and then as we virtualized the data center, we started doing SAN-based replication. I've deployed and supported VMware Site Recovery Manager under different replication solutions, and then moved into Zerto. Prior to Zerto I used several different vendors' products.

Having been in disasters, living in Florida and experiencing them, I understand what it takes to recover a data center. I worked for my city in Florida and volunteered in the emergency operation center. Not only did I sit in technical meetings on how to recover computers, but I also sat in meetings on how to recover the city. So I have a different perspective when it comes to disaster recovery. I have a full view of how and what it takes to recover a city, as well as how and what it takes to recover a data center. Using that background, I pull them together.

As a result, I first look for a solution that works. That's key. If it doesn't work, it's out the door. The second factor is its ease of use. It has to be very easy to use, just a few clicks of the mouse and you're able to do a recovery. Zerto meets my requirements.

Not only was the initial setup simple, but upgrades actually work and backward compatibility during the upgrades work. I've been doing IT for 25 years and it's one of the few solutions that I have come across where backups work, not only doing the actual backup, but they're compatible with what you have in place. Upgrades are very impressive and very seamless.

I started with working with Zerto during the 4.5 version. Right after we deployed that we went to 5.0. The length of time really varies depending upon your engineering platform process. I did the PoC and all the documentation, and then I did the deployment into production. I spent a few days on the PoC because I needed to know what its performance impact was going to be on the host, on the VMs. Then I had to see what the replication impact was going to be as well. 

And documentation took me a couple of weeks. Because I've been in disasters, when I do documentation I do it so that I can hand it to anybody, literally, including—and I've done it—to the janitor. I've handed the documentation to the janitor and I've had them sit down and do a recovery. I'm picky on documentation. 

The actual sit-down at the keyboard to do the deployment, after everything was in place, including getting a service account, getting the VM deployed, etc., was quick. In one day we had it up and running.

I tend to do it myself because I'm old-school. I want to know how it works right from the ground up so that if I have to do any trouble shooting, I know where not to go to look at things. If you understand how something works, you can troubleshoot a lot faster.

I'm the lead architect, engineer, and troubleshooter. We have about four other people who are involved with it. We have several people because of our locations. We have more here, in the Idaho area, than we do in our other data center. We have one down in the southeast, hurricane area, of the United States. They're not expected to do a whole lot of disaster recovery, whereas we are.

I don't dive too much into the pricing side of things, but I'd like to see better tiering for Zerto's pricing. We do multi-tier VMs. I don't think I should be paying a penalty and price for a tier-three VM where I don't need a really tight SLA like I do for a tier-one.

Also, if we're looking to replace the data center backup solution, I have VMs that I may not need for a week in the event of a disaster. I'd like to see a backup price per VM, rather than the tier-one licensing that I currently pay for, per VM. I'd like to see better tiering in regards to the licensing.

We have Commvault, Cohesity, and Veeam. Veeam is probably the closest to Zerto for ease of use. The problem is that Veeam doesn't have the technical background of the split-write that Zerto has. Veeam can be very painful. It can't protect any VM in your infrastructure. Its process of doing snapshots is very painful. Whereas with Zerto, it doesn't matter how busy the VM is, it can protect it. Veeam does not do it that way, but its GUI is pretty easy to use. But again, if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how easy it is.

Commvault and Cohesity are both complicated solutions. Cohesity is like Veem, it is snapshot technology. Its GUI is okay but it's a little cryptic and that's the thing that I don't like about it. With 25 years of doing IT, I can tell that the interface that Cohesity designed was done by Linux engineers. It's very kludgy with multiple clicks. You've got to know where to go. With Zerto, it's plain and it's simple to use.

Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use.

What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication for many years. If you're doing long distance, you have very high latency and you need to compensate for that. I worked with Zerto developers and we were able to tune replication to meet our site-to-site requirements. That was a key thing, and that's missed a lot of times. When people deploy the solution, they're not always keeping up with the SLA, and it has nothing to do with how it was deployed. It has to do with the pipe and the latency between site-to-site. That tends to be missed when deploying replication.

It is on our drawing board to look at Zerto for backups and long-term retention. I would say we're going to end up using it. It makes sense, at least from my standpoint, to keep things simple. It already has the data, so why not use it to move it wherever?

When it comes to the fact that it provides both backup and disaster recovery in one platform, I had never thought about the backup piece. When they announced it, it just made sense to me as an engineer with a logical mind. "Hey, I'm already holding the data, shoveling it across states. Instead of putting it here, why not put it over here at the same time?" So I was very excited about a two-for-one product. My company has backup solutions and they're struggling with them. I'm looking to replace their backup solutions with Zerto, probably in 2021.

We're also still looking at doing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We've done some testing with it. In my previous company we were using it and deployed it around the globe. Due to border restrictions, we had to go to the cloud with it. It was big because we were able to go to the cloud and we didn't have to stand up another data center. I'll be conservative and say that it saved us a few million dollars.

I give Zerto a nine out of 10. The only reason that I'm not giving it a 10 is that I'd like to see the GUI made into an appliance.