HPE Zerto Software Reviews

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.

It's on-prem only, and we're replicating part of production data centers to the DR location. We use it 100 percent for DR. Zerto, as a product, has a lot of capabilities, but we're only using it to replicate servers for disaster recovery, on-prem.

Providing DR for the entire organization is a big improvement, compared to the previous way we did DR. With the old DR tool we identified the systems that we wanted to protect and we installed agents and installed a server in the remote location and pretty much treated every physical and virtual server the same way. That tool was agent-based and required installation and maintenance of a server on the remote site. Now, the effort involved is a fraction of what it was before. We just click the VMs that we want to protect and they are protected.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in DR.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. With our old solution, something that took 10 to 15 minutes of outage, required one reboot, which took less than a minute, with Zerto. That amount of downtime would have cost our company a couple of thousand dollars.

Zerto's support for different hypervisors is a valuable feature because we have a mixed bag. We have VMware and we have Hyper-V. For us, that was extremely critical when we made the decision. We wanted a single tool that is able to replicate all our virtual servers. At this point, I think the only tool on the market that can do that on-premise is Zerto.

It does a great job of continuous data protection. That's why we're using it for DR. It has the journal, the recovery points. It's doing its job. It's a good tool.

It's extremely easy to use with a very intuitive interface. You can set up a VPG (virtual protected group) and add VMs to it in a couple of clicks. Everything is in a single dashboard and you can do everything from there. If you need some granular information, you click the Analytics and get your RPO or RTO and how much data you would lose if you do a DR at this point in time. 

They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement.

Another area of improvement is support for clusters. They have very limited support for Microsoft clustering.

Also, integration with VMware could be improved. For example, when a VM is created in vCenter, it would be helpful to be able to identify the VM, by tags or any other means, as needing DR protection. And then Zerto should be able to automatically add the VM to a VPG. 

There is definitely room for improvement. But what they have implemented so far, works pretty well.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's pretty stable. 

We're always one version behind. The current version is 8.5 and we're running 8. We always wait until at least Update 1 before we upgrade. So when v9 is out, we'll probably upgrade to 8.5, Update 1, or whatever the current update is. Because we are a little bit behind and we're running on a very stable, mature version, we rarely experience issues.

We're running thousands of hosts. Scalability is not a problem.

We plan to keep the product. It's doing a good job.

Our experience with their technical support has been good. But keep in mind that we have a pretty high-level, Premium Support agreement with Zerto. We have a dedicated technical account manager from Zerto, and he has direct access to the developers.

We used Double-Take DR which treated all the physical and virtual servers exactly the same way with agents. Zerto replaced it.

We switched because it is a little bit inefficient to treat all the virtual machines as separate physical servers, because on the DR site you need to install them, you need to configure them. You need to put the agents on both sites and configure the replication relationship. It's very complex. And whenever you need to patch or do some maintenance on the target site, it's double the work because you patch the source and you patch the target—you have a live server at the remote site. With Zerto, as soon as I patch the VM at the source, the updates are replicated to the target immediately.

Zerto's ease of use is very good compared with other similar solutions for replication.

The initial setup of Zerto is quite simple. You build a SQL instance. You build a Windows VM and install the ZVM on it. You integrate it with vCenter and then, from the ZVM, you make sure your firewall ports are open and you push the VRAs down.

Deployment takes a couple of hours, for a relatively big environment. It would typically require 30 minutes of DBA time, an hour or two of Windows engineering time, and another person from VMware for another hour.

It doesn't require any staff for day-to-day maintenance. It's used by our operations team, which is close to 100 people; those are people who have access to it.

It's quite easy and straightforward. We do it with internal labor.

The way we use it there is no return on investment. You can think of Zerto as an insurance policy. We use it to protect our business, but we actually hope that we'll never put it into action.

It's not the cheapest tool, it's expensive. But it's doing a good job.

We pay the standard license, maintenance every year, and we pay for our technical account manager, which is pretty much Professional Services, with our Premium Support.

We looked at other solutions. We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides. 

We also compared Zerto with our previous disaster recovery solution, which was called Double-Take DR.

Zerto is much better. It is not a cheap solution. The fact that we decided to buy it when we already had all the licenses for VMware, bundled in our ELA with VMware, should tell you how big of a difference there was.

My advice would be that when you need a tool to bet your business on, as a last resort, make sure you evaluate all the options, test them, and don't be cheap.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that a third-party company can do a better job of protecting the workloads than the vendor. It does a better job than VMware and Microsoft together.

In terms of using the solution for long-term retention, we're evaluating Zerto's offering. It's a new feature. We already have an established backup system, using Symantec. In a couple of years, when we need to refresh Symantec, we might consider it. But at this point we don't use it and we aren't considering it.

We use the Veritas NetBackup solution. They split from Symantec so Veritas is separate, but it was a Symantec solution for backup. We don't use Veeam, we don't use Cohesity, we don't use Rubrik. The only potential is to replace our Veritas/Symantec backup product, in the future, with Zerto Long Term Retention.

If we have a DR situation, we are not planning to fail back. It's not part of our DR strategy. If we need to fail-over a production data center, it means that this data center has been destroyed, it's a smoking hole in the grass. We will be running continuously from the DR data center, which is a full-scale data center.

I would rate Zerto at nine out of 10. There are new features that they're working on, which will be nice to have. That's why I won't rate it a 10, but overall it's a really good, stable, easy-to-use product.

Our use case is 100 percent disaster recovery between two different geographies. We have a very large private cloud offering. We've got about 1,200 customers and almost 10,000 VMs that are under Zerto protection. Every one of those virtual machines needs to be replicated from Waltham to Chicago, from the East Coast of the U.S. to the central U.S. Likewise, we have a European business with the exact same flow, although it's much smaller as far as number of VMs; it might be a couple of hundred. That implementation is going from Berlin to Amsterdam. We've got one-way protection in two different geographies and all of those machines are under Zerto protection.

The number-one benefit is that for the first time we could show, at a customer-level of granularity, how a customer was protected, and what their RPO was in, real time. Each one of our 1,200 or so customers has a portion of those 10,000 VMs. For the first time we were able to tell a product leader or product manager what the RPO was on Thursday at 2:00 PM for that customer. We could say, "Hey, it was 67 seconds." Our company is very customer-centric and customer-focused. There's less interest in what the overall health is, and a lot of times there's specific interest in, "Hey, how is that customer doing?" either for performance or for RPO time.

Zerto also allowed us to easily pick groups of virtual machines, group them as a whole, and have that be segregated from the storage layer. That is the storage-agnostic benefit from their product. That agnostic feature with respect to the storage layer allowed us to group VMs by customer and not only report on RPO by customer, but also to more easily sell different RPO plans. We were able to prioritize and say, "Okay, these 10 customers have platinum and these 500 have silver."

Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection. The other products we were looking at required work from two different teams. The storage team had to get involved. With this product, the whole thing could be done by just our virtualization team, and that was a big sell for us.

The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware. It was the storage-agnostic features of the product.

The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale. If you're a small company with 50 VMs, this doesn't really become a problem for you. You don't have 1,000 blades and 1,000 of their VRAs running that you need to keep healthy. But once you get over a certain scale, it becomes a full-time job for someone to keep their products humming. We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going. 

They desperately need to work self-healing into the core product. If a VRA has a problem, the product needs to be able to take some sort of measure to self-heal from that; to reassign protection. Right now it doesn't do anything in that self-healing area.

My company implemented Zerto in 2016, so we've been live with their product for a little over four years.

The stability comes back to size and scale. It depends. If you are not replicating heavy workloads—meaning you don't have a SQL server that's doing thousands and thousands of IOPS, and you don't have multiple SQL Servers on the same very large hardware blade—Zerto is incredibly stable, based on my experience with the product. 

However, we are doing that. There's a one-to-one relationship between the Zerto VRA, which is essentially their chunk of code that does the replication, and a physical server. The physical server is running anywhere from one to as many virtual servers as someone can fit onto it. And that one VRA has to manage and push all the change blocks for all the workloads running on it. So if you've got five or six really heavy workloads running, that one VRA that has to handle all of that and push it to your destination can, and does, crash. VRAs in that situation crash or become unstable. We've worked a lot with Zerto over the last two years on tweaking the VRAs with advanced settings. We've directly been involved with identifying a couple of bugs with the VRAs. When the VRAs are pushed, they can only be pushed so far and then they crash.

It does perform. However, we have VRAs that crash all the time. When we go back and we look at why they crashed it's because we're pushing them too hard. We're doing things that they would say we shouldn't be doing. They would say, "Don't set six SQL Servers on the same blade. That's too much. Don't do that."

Zerto has worked with us very effectively on identifying advanced settings that we can make to the VRAs to make them perform better, and to be more stable in the "abusive" environment that we throw at their code base.

It could be more stable for really heavy use cases like that. But Zerto would come back and say, "Well, our best practices would have you put some sort of anti-affinity rule in place so that you don't end up with that many heavy I/O machines on a single blade." They would say that doing so is not best practice; don't do it. You could say that we abused their product, in that sense. 

But it works. If you align with best practices, it's pretty stable.

We have no concerns about the scalability, although I should qualify that statement. Zerto can scale horizontally extremely well. They've got one VRA per blade and that one VRA is their data plane. You can scale out your environment horizontally with as many blades or servers as you want, which is how people do virtualization and Zerto will scale with you. We've never hit a limit as far as its ability to scale as horizontally.

The caveat would be, as I mentioned elsewhere, the size of the pipe in your infrastructure to handle all of that replication. But that doesn't tie to the Zerto product itself. 

In terms of the issue of VRAs crashing, you want to scale horizontally rather than scale vertically, because if you scale vertically you're packing more and more virtual machines into the same number of physical servers. You're stacking them up high rather than across. If you stack them up high you have concerns about the scalability of the single VRA. The VRAs do get overloaded. Don't pack them too high. Scale out, not up.

Zerto has spread out as a company. They've mushroomed out into other areas. They've started to develop a presence in backup and they've started to develop a larger presence in reporting. Their core product, however, is known as ZVR—Zerto Virtual Replication. We've implemented that core product 100 percent. There's no other way we could be consuming it differently or more effectively.

The newer stuff they've come out with—certainly the backup—we don't touch that at all. The backup product is not ready for prime time. It might be good for a small customer that may have 50 machines they want to back up. But for our use case, with SOC compliance, and having to report on the success of backups for recovery, and although we looked very closely at their backup and where they were going with it, it's not ready for us.

They're starting to go into Docker containers. None of our product right now is containerized.

A third area is analytics and reporting. The analytics and reporting would be the one new area that they've put focus on that we could be using more and getting more value out of. They've got a SaaS solution now for reporting called Zerto Analytics. We do use it. You turn on their core product and you tell it to send your reports to their SaaS offering. We've done that and we can consume the analytics product, but we just haven't really operationalized it yet. That, for us, has been a tool looking for a problem.

It took us about two months to deploy the solution, but that was because we're a very conservative company. We purposely went extremely slowly. If we had wanted to go faster, it could have been done probably in a week or two, to get all 6,000 VMs under protection.

When we deployed it, there were two dedicated people at our company who were involved, paired up with three people from a Professional Services team from Zerto. As a tertiary, we had a full-time person from our VAR, the reseller that sold us the licensing for Zerto. With that help from Zerto and the value added reseller, it only took two of us to install it to about 600 blades and probably 5,000 virtual machines.

Our experience was excellent. Both teams were great. It was a very painless rollout.

I'm less involved with the pricing and licensing area now. The last time I was involved was a couple of years ago. In my opinion, their model is somewhat inflexible, especially for their backup product.

One of the reasons why we didn't pursue looking further at their backup product was, simply, licensing. Today we have to buy a Zerto license for every virtual machine that we want protected by their product. We have a lot of virtual machines that aren't production and that don't need to be protected by their product. They don't need sub-second RPOs. They do, however, need to be backed up. But Zerto's licensing model two years ago was, "Well, we don't care that you just need to back up those VMs, and you don't really need to replicate them. It's the same price."

We would have had to double our licensing costs for Zerto to adopt it as a backup solution. It was just not even within the realm of possibility financially. It made no financial sense for us to move off our current backup vendor. Their inability to diverge in any way from that was rigid.

Their licensing could be less rigid and more open to specific companies' use cases.

The other two vendors we evaluated back were Site Recovery Manager by VMware, and whatever Veeam's product was at the time. We also looked at CommVault lightly, but they were never considered seriously.

Zerto can do what it says it can do. It can absolutely provide sub-second recovery point objectives, but with a couple of caveats. The caveats tend to apply to large companies like mine, and by "large" I mean if you have over 2,000 to 3,000 virtual machines, versus a small to medium-sized company that maybe has 50 to 500. Once you cross that barrier, you're getting into a larger environment that you're trying to replicate with Zerto.

A couple things can break down. Zerto's product doesn't control the path between your source production data and the destination you're trying to send it to. There can be tons of bottlenecks on that path; you can be going around the world. If the bottleneck doesn't exist there, their product can absolutely do what it says it does. It's up to the customer. The people using Zerto have to understand that they own the bottlenecks in their environment. If there is a bottleneck between production and the targeted DR, the RPOs are going to slip. You're going to go from sub-seconds to minutes or hours. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto's product. It's the fault of the design of the customer's environment and what they brought it into.

That doesn't just exist for the pipe between the two sites. On the destination side, the side that's receiving this data, the storage layer underneath needs to be more performant than the production side. That's somewhat of a strange concept for a lot of customers and people coming into the Zerto solution. They see the marketing side of, "10 seconds to RPO" and say, "Yeah, I want that." But what it means is that you've really got to look at your hardware and you've got to have class-A hardware the whole way through that Zerto pipeline, for their product to do what it says it does. Zerto makes that very clear. They don't recommend hardware; they're not in the business of supporting other vendors. But they have a published list of best practices. The best practices clearly say everything that I just said. They also have best practices around managing your workload I/O on the source side, so that you don't overwhelm their product.

But not everyone follows best practices. Certainly, when we implemented it we said, "Yeah, we get that. We understand what you're telling us. We understand that's a best practice, but we're not going to do it anyway, because it's too expensive," or we didn't have it in budget for that year. So we knew it  and we went in without following them. A couple of years later, when we got to a tipping point, we realized, "Okay, we need to go back and align with some of those best practices," things we didn't think that we had the time to align with back in 2016. We've made that journey painfully with their product, but they were very upfront with us on what the requirements for their product would be.

Overall, I would rate Zerto as a solid eight out of 10 for the core disaster recovery offering.

We use it for DR as well as migration. We have four data centers and migrate workloads between them.

We don't use it for backup.

We had some ransomware that got on and infected the corporate shared drives. It was just one system and one user type of thing. It didn't spread because we had it locked down pretty well. So, I just bumped the server back entirely so we did not have to worry about it.

We have only had one instance, and it wasn't widespread, where we had ransomware. The RPO was approximately 20 minutes. We had an active snapshot from when the incident happened, because we couldn't really iron it down. Therefore, Zerto saved us time in this data recovery situation because I didn't have to rebuild the thing or do a SnapMirror. 

If we had used a different solution, it might have taken a week for our data recovery situation instead of 20 minutes with four or five technical folks (not including management), instead of just me. This is because we didn't have anything documented and just counted on Zerto to do it. I don't know what the company had set up previously since I'm new, but at the previous place that I've experienced malware, you would have to stand everything up from scratch and scrape through all your backups and differentials. 

We use in the data center if there is a live event that could cost the company millions of dollars, which I haven't experienced, e.g., if our data center were to explode or get hit with a meteor, then ceases to exist. We have the option to go in and flip a switch. That has never happened. However, our tests using SRM went from a day to minutes when we switched to Zerto.

The most valuable feature is DR. In my opinion, there is nothing better at what it does.

The solution provides fantastic continuous data protection. We do a lot of spin up test environments depending on what happened, then make changes and rip it down. Or, if we got hit with malware, then we use that to do a point-in-time recovery. We custom create software in-house, so we will spin up a test environment to test code deployments or do a copy to do the same thing, if we want it to be around longer than a test recovery. For example, somebody got hit with something, then they infected the server. We were able to restore it back to a point in time before the infection. 

It is super easy to use. A non-technical user can get it up in a day. I can get it up in 15 minutes. I've brought it to help desk guys and network operations center guys, and it's easily grasped.

While I am open to transitioning over to using Zerto for long-term retention, the problem is the alerting function in Zerto is very poor. That makes it a difficult use case to transition over.

The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it.

Four years.

The stability is fantastic. It has gotten a lot better as far as the maintenance. Initially, it required a lot of prodding and poking. As it sits today, it is really stable, though you sometimes need to mirror the changes in the application to what you have changed in your own infrastructure.

The management once it is already deployed is easy to moderate. Things can get a little goofy with the DRS and if you're shuffling things around. If your infrastructure is pretty static, you're not going to have any problems with Zerto. But, if you move things around or do any updates, you have to come in and make sure everything is good to go. It is not difficult, but sometimes you are required to go in and maintain it. Because we turn off the alerting in most places, you don't know its status without going in and manually looking.

I am the primary Zerto administrator. Therefore, I own the product for my company and use it every day.

Scalability is great. It will scale essentially one-to-one with your virtual infrastructure. However, if you have more hosts and VMs, then you have to go in and manage that many more hosts and VMs.

Four people know it and use it to do things. I'm the primary, then there is another guy who is the direct backup on my team. Then I have trained a couple other people who know how to utilize it in the event of an emergency, e.g., "This is how you would failover X environment." Because it won't automatically do failovers, somebody has to pull the trigger. Therefore, we have documentation in order to do that. It is very simple.

We don't use it for everything, not in both instances where I implemented it or been in charge of running it over. However, it definitely has freed people up to do other things in that space. It only takes me to entirely administer Zerto, instead of a backup and recovery operations team with two or three people.

We are at about 60 percent of use. I would like to see more. We don't do persistent long-term backups or use any of the cloud functionality, though I think we will as we're in the midst of looking at AWS to potentially migrate workloads there. I also very interested in using it as cold storage.

Initially, years ago, the technical support was very poor. We were promised one thing that was physically impossible with the software. I spent a lot of time fighting everybody in support. Since then, the support has been really good. In my experience, they are all mostly stateside. They understand the product inside and out to help you with your needs or come up with some type of creative solution.

At my previous company, we were using SRM and our DR tests would take one to two days. For our primary customer, we switched to Zerto, then it took 15 to 20 minutes instead of days. It was a huge difference. That was from Boise to North Carolina, then back. It was approximately 30 terabytes of data with 19 virtual machines. It was a pretty large orchestration.

SRM was replaced by Zerto due to simplicity. SRM is very complicated. It is also not easy to use and set up. Zerto is better for implementation and ease of use. So, it was a no-brainer.

The initial setup was straightforward, though it could be more straightforward. Now, you just install the software on a Windows system. It would be nice if they had an appliance that autodeployed in VMware. That would make it simple. But if you can install Office or any kind of application on Windows, you can do this. It is super easy to set up with minimal front-end learning required. 

The deployment takes about an hour for an experienced person. If it is your first time, then it will take a couple hours.

You need to know your use case for an instance where you need something to be backed up. Once that need is identified, you need to know where it is and where you want it to go. Once you already have those questions answered, the implementation is simple. Through the installation progress, you just plug in those values of where is it, what is it, and where do you want it to go, then you're done.

At the company I'm with now and at my previous company, I was the architect and implementer. Zerto generally requires one person for the setup.

The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field.

It has helped decrease the number of people involved in data center moves. For the infrastructure pieces, which is my primary responsibility, I am the sole person. Whereas, we use to have an OS guy and a network person before to manually configure the pieces. We also had application teams, but they are still relevant. Previously, it took four people because we were touching each environment and machine. Since we wanted it done fast, we would stack a bunch of people on it. Now, it's just me and it's done faster.

When migrating data centers, we have saved a lot of time on my team. Something that takes an hour or two used to take a week or two.

There is big ROI for ease of use, management, and labor overhead versus other solutions.

Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it.

We currently use Veeam and Commvault.

In general, moving VMs through VMware using site-to-site is not as easy than with Zerto because the data has to go on flight, and Zerto just sends it over. I like that aspect of it. During our data center moves, we move from one location to another (San Jose) with a two-hour total downtime from start to finish: From powering the systems down, getting them over, getting a live feed changed, and back up and running to the world. This would be way slower with a different product.

For long-term retention, we do Veeam to spinning disk. While the LTR is something I am interested in, I think Veeam has the upper hand with alerting and job management. Both Veeam and Zerto are easy to use, but Zerto is easier to use.

I am not a big Commvault fan.

It could replace Veeam and Commvault, but not at its current price point.

Most people assume catastrophic failures have a long-term data impact. However, with Zerto, it doesn't have to be that way. If you spend the money to protect everything, you are going to get that low data recovery time. Whereas, if you are cheap and don't buy Zerto, it's going to be hours to days of data loss. With Zerto, it is in the minutes. Thus, how valuable is your data? That is where the cost justification comes in.

If you are thinking about implementing this type of solution:

• How important is your data? 
• Would your company go bankrupt if you were unable to do what your company does for a week? 
• Do you have contract requirements which say you need to have a DR plan up and running? 
• Do you want to spend a week doing it or 20 minutes doing it? 

It's that value of time, money, and data. I can implement Zerto and use it in an emergency situation anywhere. If you're talking to somebody like me who understands data protection and disaster recovery, the question is how much is your data worth to you and how fast do you need it back?

Currently, we are doing our own storage as the target for protection, but there is interest in enabling DR in the cloud, e.g., to do Glacier or something cheap in Azure.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We use it mainly to move the server alarm between vCenter and the physical center.

I like that Zerto is easy to move and that there is no effect on the user. That is, the user doesn't even know it. We're in the healthcare industry and work for a hospital. We can set up a server in no time whatsoever. It's easy for us to schedule the time because it takes only about one minute.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is a lot easier to use in comparison to similar solutions.

We have had no downtime with Zerto.

The speed of our upgrade is a lot easier because, for example, when I put the move fail and there's a pullout from the destination, I can cover with something from the source and pick it up from the source in person. I can copy the tag from the server very fast.

Customer service and technical support need improvement.

I've been using it for about five years.

Customer service and technical support need improvement, and I would rate technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We switched to Zerto because it is easier to use, and the users did not complain.

The initial setup was straightforward. You open the firewall, install it, connect to vCenter, and then do all the steps to install the software.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto a seven because of the bad experience I had with technical support.

Our primary use case for Zerto is disaster recovery.

It's very simple to use and configure.

The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable.

This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We haven't experienced any issues.

We have a small environment so it may not be applicable to comment on scalability. What I can say is we took two of the largest virtual machines in our environment, created a VPG for them, set up the seeding and replication and Zerto easily supported this. If there was going to be any concern, we would've seen it with these two VMs. So far it looks good.

The customer support for this solution is okay. I have only opened up one support case. We were looking for someone to assist us right away. It was a Severity 2 case, with Severity 1 being the highest. They sent me an email but couldn't help me the same day. I was hoping that I could speak with them the same day to get some support.

I would rate them a six out of ten. 

Neutral

We previously tried Veeam's replication tool and it didn't work out too well. That's why we decided to go to Zerto. Zerto is much easier to set up and offers a faster speed of recovery.

The initial setup was straightforward. How the VPGs are configured and adding the VMs is simple and pretty intuitive. It took under an hour to set up. 

The setup was completed by myself and a colleague.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

I would advise others to take extra time before jumping into the setup, to consider the grouping of the VPGs and what makes the most sense for their business. It was important for our business to take that extra time to make sure that we got that right. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for replication from our primary data center to the secondary data center.

The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is provisioned. If the application team would like to use a replication process, DR process, or RPO, Zerto can facilitate this within 15 to 20 minutes.

This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It can be scalable depending on the licenses which can be quite expensive. 

We previously used SRM. SRM is as not as good at Zerto. That's the reason we bought the licensed product as opposed to the free product. I'm hoping that Zerto will be used in the future in our company for data replication purposes like SQL data.

The initial setup was very easy. I followed the documentation to set it up myself. The person completing the setup needs to understand the storage layer and the network layer for the backup. Without this understanding, It may be extremely confusing.

When you apply Zerto to your environment, you need to understand your networking settings, storage settings, and your capacity planning. Setting up Zerto took us 15 minutes. 

We recently bought more licenses and are exploiting the benefits of Zerto so I would say we are seeing a return on investment. 

Zerto helped to reduce downtime drastically by 80%. I would advise others to complete a full evaluation process to ensure they get the most out of it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We started off using this solution for disaster recovery and DR testing but then it morphed into more of a file recovery tool. We can usually get closer to a point in time recovery using Zerto versus the nightly backups that we do.

Zerto gives us peace of mind knowing that if we were attacked by ransomware, we would be able to recover data from the time before the ransomware to get us back to being fully functional. Zerto helped to reduce our company's disaster recovery testing model to where we can do it all within a day. We normally pick a time around lunchtime on a set day for the different groups to test with and it is completed by the time lunch is over. 

It definitely does make life easier when you're in a situation where you have to have all hands on deck as it doesn't require you to have as many people to bring everything back up.

The file recovery functionality is definitely the most valuable as well as the amount of time it takes to recover a VM. The different snapshots it makes are great, especially when we try to schedule DR testing with our business unit. The less time that we have to spin up the environment, the better the whole testing process will go.

One common use case I'll get is when someone says, "I deleted," or, "I've changed a file." I can ask them, "What time did you do it?" If they tell me a specific time, for example, 1:15 PM, I can pull that file at 1:14 PM and recover the data.

The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup. We tried it once and didn't try again. I'm not sure if they've improved that since then but we actually went in a different direction for backups.

I have been using this solution for six years.

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had to scale much as we're a small business. If we were to grow, it would be a couple of servers at a time so I can't really speak to the scalability of it. We have 400 servers total and only use Zerto with what we consider mission critical.

The customer support is excellent. When you call with an issue, they answer almost immediately. The guys are really knowledgeable.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

We started off with Site Recovery Manager. We did not like the process and once we tried Zerto, we saw how easy it was. That's been the solution until recently as we've added a second data center in which we use now Pure Storage with VMware. They do active clustering and we can use a simple vMotion to move from one site to another versus the way we used to do it before completing a migration with Zerto. 

We still keep using Zerto because we know Zerto works. Zerto is a lot faster especially compared to what we used to do with Site Recovery Manager.

The initial setup is straightforward. I just followed the documentation online and it was set up in a day.

I completed the setup myself. There may have been a help check afterwards once we got the first test recovery group setup. 

Based on the fact that we can rely on Zerto for recovery if anything were to happen and the confidence that our management has in this product, it's definitely worth the money. 

We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year. This is another reason why it's easier for us to keep this product as well as have another solution, because we've already paid the money upfront.

When evaluating Zerto, I would advise others to try to think of any potential scenario to test with and use it to prove whether it does or doesn't work.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.