HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We are using Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for on-premises to Azure, and also from Azure to Azure between different regions.

At this time, we are only using it for DR. However, we will also be using it for data center migration.

I would rate Zerto's ability to provide continuous data protection a ten out of ten. The tool is very easy to use. It's also a very simple and very quick setup. The outcome from our setup showed that we had very low RPO and RTO. The interface is intuitive and as such, anyone can log in and figure out how to use the management utility.

Being able to achieve such a low RPO and RTO has significantly reduced our lengthy recovery times. For example, a recovery that previously took four hours is now completed in 40 minutes. Furthermore, it allowed us to complete the data center migration very quickly, with very little downtime.

Using Zerto has allowed us to reduce the number of people involved from a failover standpoint. There are only a few of us who can perform the failover and it is done with the click of a button. From an overall verification standpoint, the application owners are still required to verify.

We have saved money by performing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center for a couple of reasons. First, we saved money by not having to upgrade our hardware and pay for additional facility costs. Second, in Azure, we saved between 10% and 20% compared to Azure site recovery.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capability.

The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration. Importantly, we were able to do this without affecting the DR setup.

When you're configuring the VPGs, they can improve the process by looking at the hardware configuration of the existing VMs and then recommending what they should be, rather than us having to go back and forth. For example, on the VM configuration portion of creating the VPGs, it should already figure out what sort of CPU, memory, and capacity you need, rather than us trying to write that down and then going in afterward to change it.

The logging could be a lot better from a troubleshooting standpoint. If the log was more detailed and more user-friendly, we wouldn't have to make the calls to the support to try and figure out where the problem lies.

They could improve on how many machines the management server can handle for replication.

We have been using Zerto for approximately two years.

Stability-wise, it's pretty good and we've been happy so far. We've had a couple of issues here and there, but nothing that wasn't easily resolved.

The scalability is pretty good. If you need to scale then you can always add more appliances on the Azure side, which is very easy to set up. For the on-premises side, you only need one management server.

We are not a very large environment; we have approximately 400 servers, and then we are protecting about 125 VMs. In terms of users, we have close to 3,000 full-time employees and then about 25,000 contractors. Being a recruiting company, we have a large base of contractors.

The site reliability engineers are the ones that use Zerto more often, and there are three or four of them.

The technical support is pretty good. The level-one has a lot of knowledge and because we've been using the product for a while now, if we get to the point of calling support, usually we have everything ready to go. We explain the situation to level-one support and we can always escalate easily to the next engineer.

Prior to using Zerto, for our on-premises environment, we did a typical database replication from our production site to a secondary site in another city across the country on the West Coast. We also replicated the storage and application code, and it was a very lengthy process. One of the environments took as long as four hours.

We switched primarily for the time savings, although there was also the cost factor. In order to meet the growing demand of our business in IT, we would have had to upgrade all of our hardware, as well as pay extra for facility costs. As such, it did help out on both sides of things.

Also, just the process itself was a lot simpler. It would have required coming up with five or six different teams to do the individual parts, whereas this automates everything for you from a server level.

We use a different product as our backup solutions. Zerto is strictly for DR and data center migration.

To set up the initial environment, it took about an hour. This included setting up the appliance, making sure it's added to the domain, and things like that. But then, creating all of the VPGs will probably be another couple of hours.

The strategy was that we already had everything ready to go, which included our server list and all of the VPG names. If you have that, you could probably have everything completed in half a day, or a day, from a setup standpoint. Of course, this is depending on how large of an environment it is, but for us, we set up five or six environments and it took us approximately half a day.

We had assistance from the sales engineer. 

When we did the PoC, they showed us everything. Once we purchased the product, we used Zerto analytics to determine how many appliances we would need on the Azure side. Then, using that, we were able to break up the VPGs between the different sites.

We have an enterprise agreement that combines all of the features, and we have approximately 250 licenses. There are two different licensing models. The one we purchased allows us to support Azure, as well as the on-premises jobs. This was a key thing for us and, I think, that is the enterprise license. They have a license for just their backup utility, and there's the migration option as well, but we went with the enterprise because we wanted to be able to do everything going forward.

Zerto needs to improve significantly on the cost factor. I know friends of mine in other businesses would not look at this when it's a smaller shop. At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop.

We're very lucky here that finances weren't an issue, but it definitely plays a factor. If you look at other companies who are considering this product, it would be very expensive for somebody who has more than 500 servers to protect.

The bottom line is that they definitely have to do better in terms of cost and I understand the capabilities, but it's still quite pricey for what it does. It would make a huge difference if they reduced it because as it is now, it deters a lot of people. If you've got somebody who's already using VMware or another product, the cost would have to be dropped significantly to get them on board.

We did evaluate other vendors, but this was the only tool that was able to fully automate the conversion from on-premises VMware to Azure. This was important because our goal, or our DR objective, was to set up DR in Azure. Every other tool required having some sort of intervention from us to convert them to Azure format.

I don't recall all of the tools that we looked at, but I think we looked at VMware SRM and also a product from EMC, from a replication standpoint. Ultimately, from a strategy standpoint, this was the only thing that was really capable of doing what we wanted.

My advice for anybody who is interested in Zerto is definitely to do a PoC. Run it against your environment to do a thorough comparison. This is the best scenario; instead of just picking the product, let it go through the different options. For example, whether you are doing on-premises to on-premises, or on-premises to the cloud, this product can do it, but you'll only see the results that you want to see if you grind it against your own environment.

Overall, we are very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We primarily use Zerto for backing up our databases.

We are heavily invested in database technology. We use SQL databases such as PostgreSQL and MS SQL, and we are also functional with NoSQL databases. Our use cases are majorly relying on databases for financial vendors and most of the time, we have to perform day-to-day operations with respect to finance and accounting.

We have been using the data retention functionality for a long time and whenever there is a failure and the system goes down, we recover the data from that particular snapshot in time.

We also require security, as it is one of the major concerns. Ultimately, we align these two things together.

We are deployed in AWS, although we are also deploying in GCP and plan to do so with Azure as well.

Zerto provides us with continuous data protection that is reliable. It is convenient to use because the API allows for seamless integration when performing our day-to-day operations.

Currently, we do not have any long-term data retention activities, and it is not one of our core operations. However, in the past, we did have several such use cases.

Using this solution saves us time because we have been capturing the volumes and snapshots, are we able to perform operations on the Delta. This is an important benefit to us because we are able to deploy everything into production, then continue to get the backups and snapshots from there. 

Another time-effective benefit is that once we are fully backed up, we are able to perform Lambda functions on our use cases. This saves us a lot of time.

In some instances, Zerto has saved us time and on the number of people involved during failback. The number of people that are involved depends upon how critical the failure is. Any time there is a failure, we have to work from the most recent backups. For example, if the incident happens at 9:00 PM and there is a snapshot that was taken at 8:00 PM, there is one hour of work to make up for. This is much easier and quicker than having to look back at the logs for the entire day.

On a day-to-day basis, using Zerto saves us approximately 20% to 30% in terms of time. Overall, considering both our test and production environments, using Zerto benefits us with an approximate time savings of 60%.

We are using Zerto for DR in the cloud, and it has saved us money over using a physical data center. In a cloud-based deployment, the cost is quite a bit less compared to a physical environment. Also, because the cloud is a pay-as-you-go model, and you don't need the service all of the time, the paid resources are not wasted. I estimate that we save thousands of dollars per year in operations costs.

With our backups fully in place, in the cloud, Zerto has helped us reduce downtime. 

The most valuable features for me are the fast performance and seamless integration. The performance is one of the main features and the integration has helped me a lot.

When we have a system that is being fully replicated, we also get snapshots. Then, we perform our activities on the snapshots only, which reside on the cloud-based volumes. This means that our production environment is not affected.

We have low latency in production because most of the things we do are on the cloud.  When we have the backup, we just start to perform the data operations and with the help of Zerto, we can do this quite efficiently.

Zerto is quite easy to use. With the click of a button, I have been able to use it to do what I need. Furthermore, any end-user that I have worked with has easily been able to make use of its functionality.

Some of the integrations with our internal tools, in particular, company-specific ones, do not work. In cases like this, we have to ask for additional support. This is an area that has room for improvement.

If the API integration worked more efficiently then that would be an improvement.

We have been using Zerto for between two and three years.

Zerto is a stable and reliable product. We have not experienced any anomalies in the tool. For all our use cases and workloads, we rely on it and have found that everything can be done easily.

We have not had problems when we want to redeploy a number of things, so scalability has not been an issue.

We have between 30 and 40 users, including engineers, architects, and management. We are a growing and expanding company, and our workload increased from day to day. I expect that our usage of Zerto and other solutions will increase.

We often reach out to contact technical support and it is good. We have a lot of use cases that we need support for because we don't always have a sufficient solution.

The initial setup was straightforward, although we did have some problems. For example, there were instances where we could not integrate with our internal tools and we were not able to solve the problem. We looked at the FAQ and reached out to customer support to ask what the ideal solution would be.

Overall, it took between six and nine months to deploy.

We deployed Zerto using our in-house team.

We have seen ROI in terms of time savings, as well as other points.

We subscribe to their annual license package and we have tier one support with them. There are no costs in addition to this.

We have evaluated other tools including Veeam and Veritas. There were several factors, including cost, that led us to proceed with Zerto.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to have things properly architected in advance. Otherwise, the implementation will be a hassle. Once the design is complete, if they need to change it then it will be time-consuming.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Right now, everything is on-prem including LTR. We are looking at adding the Azure features but we're not quite there yet.

We purchased Zerto to replace our Legacy backup system that still had disks, Archiver Appliance, and everything like that. We had wanted to do something that was diskless but still gave us multiple copies. So we were utilizing both the instantaneous backup and recovery, as well as the LTR, Long Term Retention, function. We do our short-term backup with normal journaling and then our longer-term retention with the LTR appliance, which is going to dedicated hardware in one of our data centers.

We use Zerto for both backup and disaster recovery. It was fairly important that Zerto offers both of these features because Unitrends did provide the traditional backup piece. They also had another product called ReliableDR, which they later rolled into a different product. Unitrends actually bought the company. That piece provided the same functionality as what Zerto is doing now, but with Unitrends that was separate licensing and a different management interface. It wasn't nice to have to bounce between the two systems. The ability to do it all from a single pane of glass that is web-based is nice.

It's definitely not going to save us money. It'll be a peace of mind thing, that we have another copy of our data somewhere. Our DR site is approximately 22 miles away. The likelihood of a tornado or something devastating two communities where our facilities are based is pretty slim. It's peace of mind and it does not require additional storage space on-prem. We know that the charges for data at rest are not free in Azure. We get good pricing discounts being in education but it definitely won't save money.

Zerto was fairly comparable to what Unitrends was offering with multiple products. We didn't gain a ton of extra features. If anything, in the very near future, it will give us the ability for Cloud backup and retention to have some of that sitting out in the Cloud as an offsite backup. We have a primary site, a backup site, and a recovery site. We have multiple copies already, but we want to have one that's not on any of our physical facilities so we will be setting that up shortly. We just need to get our subscriptions and everything coordinated and up to par. That would be the main improvement that it's going to provide us. But we're not quite there yet.

Zerto has reduced downtime. Speaking specifically to the file restores, it's definitely restored things much quicker. Instead of waiting for half-hour to get a file restore done, it's a matter of five minutes or less to do it where they can keep rolling much quicker versus with Unitrends. Other than that, I can't say there are any huge differences.

The difference in downtime would cost my organization very little. We're a small technical college, so we're not loopy on making or losing thousands or millions of dollars if something takes five minutes versus an hour and a half. Higher ed is a different breed of its own. 

In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image. Our main data stores are close to two terabytes. It would take 15 to 20 minutes just to mount the image. Whereas with Zerto, I don't think it's taken longer than a minute or a minute and a half to mount any image that we've needed to go back to a restore point on.

With Unitrends, some could have taken a half-hour. I'm the only network administrator here, so it usually was a multitasking event where we would wait for it to load. I would take care of a few other things and then come back to it.

Switching to Zerto decreased the time it took but did not decrease the number of people involved. It still requires myself and our network engineer to do any failover, back and forth, because of our networking configuration and everything. I know that Zerto allows us to RE-IP machines as we failover. However, because of the way our public DNS works and some of our firewall rules, we have purposely chosen not to do that in an automated fashion. That would still be a manual operation. It would still involve a couple of people from IT.

Zerto does a pretty decent job at providing continuous data protection. The most important thing that I didn't clearly understand upfront, was the concept of journaling and how that differs from traditional backup. For example, if you set journal retention for seven days or whatever, in your traditional backup, it kept that for seven days, regardless of what was happening. You had it versus the journaling, where coupled with some of the size limits and stuff of the journal size, if you don't configure it correctly, you could actually have less data backed up than what you think you do. I also found out that if you have an event such as ransomware, that all of a sudden throws a lot of IOPS at it, and a lot of change rate, that can age out a journal very quickly and then leave you with the inability to restore if that's not set up properly.

We have requirements to keep student data and information for seven years. We need long-term retention for those purposes. We don't typically need to go back further than 30 days for file restores and everything. There has been the occasion where six months later, we need to restore a file because we had somebody leaving the organization or something like that and that folder or whatever wasn't copied over at the time they left.

Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware because we did not have it correctly configured. When we had an event like that, we weren't able to successfully restore from a backup. That has been corrected now. Now that it is configured correctly, I anticipate that it will save us weeks of time. It took almost two weeks to get to a somewhat normal state after our event. We're still recovering somewhat from rebuilding some servers and stuff like that. To get our primary data and programs back up and running to a mostly normal function, took around two weeks.

We also expect that it will reduce the number of staff involved in that type of data recovery situation. We ended up having to hire one of our trusted partners to come in and help us rebuild and remediate. There was at least a dozen staff including our own IT staff, which was another 10 people on top of that. Provided that we do now have this set correctly, it would really drop it down to maybe two or three people.

In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if the implementation team had a better best practices guide and made sure things like the journaling are very clearly understood. 

Speaking directly to our incident, we did have professional services guide us with the installation, setup, and configuration. At that time, there was no suggestion to have these appliances not joined to the domain or in a separate VLAN from our normal servers and everything. They are in a completely isolated network. The big thing was being domain-joined. They didn't necessarily give that guidance. In our particular situation, with our incident, had those not been domain-joined, we would have been in a much better place than what we ended up being.

I have been using Zerto for about two years

It is quite stable. I haven't had system issues with it. The VRAs run, they do their thing. The VPGs run, so as long as we're not experiencing network interruptions between our two campuses, the tasks run as they should. In the event we do have an interruption, they seem to recover fairly quickly catching up on the journaling and stuff like that. It's fairly stable.

Scalability is pretty good. We have 50 seats, so we will just be starting to bump up against that very shortly. My impression is that all we need to do is purchase more licenses as needed, and we're good to expand as long as our infrastructure internal can absorb it.

I just recently learned from Zerto Con that they are coming out or have just come out with a Zerto for SaaS applications, which gives the ability to back up Office 365 tenants or Salesforce tenants. I am very interested in learning about that. We have been researching and budgeting for standalone products for Office 365 and Salesforce backups. From my understanding, those products would be backed up from the cloud to the cloud so that it wouldn't have impacts on our internal, long-term appliance, or any of our storage internal infrastructure. That's very appealing. 

It will depend on costs. If it's something that I can't absorb with the funding I have already secured for Office 365, then it would have to be added to our next year's budget because we run from July 1st to June 30th. Our capital timeline budgeting has surpassed us already.

For the most part, the technical support is pretty decent. I've only had to open one or two tickets and the response time has been pretty good. Our questions were answered.

We previously used Unitrends. We switched solutions because we were at the end of our lifecycle with the appliances we had. At that time, Unitrends was not quite as mature with the diskless and cloud-type technologies as Zerto was. We were pursuing diskless where we had to rotate out hard drives for archiving. We wanted to get rid of that. That brought us to Zerto and it was recommended by one of our vendors to take a look at it.

Unitrends had replaced Commvault. 

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, deploying the VRAs to the VMware infrastructure and stuff like that was point, click, and let it run it. It was fairly quick. The VRAs took a couple of minutes each, so that wasn't bad at all. Setting up the VPGs is quite simple. There is a little bit of confusion where you can set your default for the journaling and stuff like that and then modify individual VMs after the fact. If you want different journal sizes for different VMs in the same VPG, there are a couple of different spots you can tweak. The setup and requirements of the LTR were a little bit confusing.

We purchased six or eight hours of implementation time but that was over multiple calls. We stood up some of the infrastructures, got some VPGs together, and then they left it to me to set up some other VPGs. Then we did a touch base to see what questions I had and things like that. We had six or eight hours purchased but it was spread over multiple engagements.

For the most part, only I worked on the deployment. Our network engineer was involved briefly just to verify connectivity via the VLANs and firewalls. Once we had established a connection, he was pretty much out of it.

I'm the only one who uses it strictly for our district backups. We're a small college. Our IT programs, HR, or business services, don't have their own separate entities. It's all covered under the primary IT department.

I don't know that we've saved a ton by replacing our legacy solution with Zerto. I think there's a little less overhead with it. Setting up the VPGs, the protection groups, and everything is a little bit easier and the file restores go much quicker. Fortunately, we haven't had to perform full system restores, but I did not need to do that with Unitrends either. It's usually a folder or a file here and there. We're not really intense on restoring. It has saved a little on management, but not a ton. 

Pricing wasn't horrible. I can't say that it was super competitive. We definitely could have gone with a cheaper price solution but the ease of use and management was really what won me over. Being the only network administrator, I don't have a ton of time to read through 500-page user manuals to get these things set up on a daily basis. I needed something that was very easy to implement and use on a daily basis. In the event I'm out of the office, it would be nice to have simple documentation so that if somebody needs a file restore while I'm gone, it can be handed off to somebody who is not a network admin as their primary job.

I have not run into any additional costs. Obviously, if you're going to utilize Azure for long-term retention it is an additional cost, but that's coming from Microsoft, not Zerto. To my knowledge, there is no additional licensing needed for that, that's all included in the product.

Commvault was another solution we looked at even though it was against my better judgment. We looked at Veeam and Rubrik as well.

In terms of ease of use, Veeam was pretty similar but at the time we still had some physical servers that we no longer have now. We are all virtual now. Veeam couldn't accommodate that, as I understood. I liked the features of Zerto and the ability to get the RTO and RPO reports and see where we're at. The ease of file restores was really nice.

My advice would be to make sure that you clearly understand what you require. You must have retention and recoverability. Make sure that your journal configurations correspond to accommodate that in an event like ransomware or something like that, that a high change rate can happen. Also, utilize long-term retention for instances like that. 

I appreciate the continuing education that they provide. There is Zerto Con and they have different customer support webinars. They do the new product release webinars and stuff like that, where they're very open on what features they're adding, what they've released, and what improvements they're doing. Whereas it seems like most companies, say, "Okay, we have an update available. Here are the release notes." And, it's up to you to go through that.

I like that Zerto takes the time to sometimes do live demos. We're migrating from 8.0 to 8.5. We're going to do it in a live environment and show approximately how long it takes and all the steps to go through it. Make sure you check this box if you're upgrading from this. I find that very helpful. I'm a visual learner, versus learning from reading. Seeing some of those step-by-step upgrades, releases, and feature demonstrations is very helpful.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

We are protecting 91 terabytes worth of data that consist of 200 virtual machines over the span of 96 tracking groups. We currently have 300 licenses and Zerto provides protection for our critical production systems with a 24-hour journal. We do utilize another platform to backup our entire enterprise as well as handling retention for a longer period of time.

We limit Zerto access to our platform engineers so either our Linux administrators or our Windows administrators use the solution. When a virtual machine is tagged as the article, in other words something that should be replicated to a target data center, they have the authority to create a VM and make sure it is protected via Zerto.

We have an annual DR test requirement. Initially, we used Zerto for testing a subset of our production systems and generated reports that would validate that the tests were successful. We leveraged Zerto to test failover for over 200 VMs by running it in the test scenario. We ran it for a couple of days and tested connectivity to verify that all the virtual machines were up and running and that disk integrity was fine.

Over the years, we have moved from an offline test scenario to an actual real-life failover for subsets of applications. For a couple of years now, we have failed over applications into another data center and have run production from there on a small subset. Our vision going forward is to avoid these offline once a year tests and to periodically move applications from one data center to another in a real-time testing scenario.

We currently have a production data center and then we have a co-location, which we are leasing. So we actually have two locations where we can failover. We do have a small cloud presence in Azure, and we have started a small cloud presence in AWS as well, but we are not running any IaaS virtual machines in those clouds. There's really been no cost-savings at all in the cloud so we've brought those work machines back on-premises.

Prior to Zerto, we used a third-party offsite facility and a team of 25 individuals, where we would restore over 300 VMs in our network, to prove annually that we can recover our data. Since adopting Zerto, we've pretty much reduced all of that VR testing to about four team members. We've significantly reduced our costs by staying on-premises and time from only four individuals instead of a whole team of 25.

The first benefit, right out of the gate, was to duplicate a subset of our production environment and test it in an offline network scenario. That initial test was fantastic as was all of the reporting to prove that we have done those tests. Another big attraction is the near zero RPO. A lot of other products have minutes, half-hour, or an hour RPO. We have proof indicating that Zerto is near zero, or a matter of minutes, as far as the RTO is concerned. So again, that's another attractive offering where you can actually fail something over and bring it back up in a target location in a matter of minutes. Meaning very little data loss as far as recovery time. It's fantastic.

The main reason why we love Zerto is because we have a VMware environment. What we're doing now with VMware is we leverage NSX-T which gives us the ability to have a shared address space across two physical data centers. By using Zerto with an NSX-T, we can failover applications without re-IPing or anything like that. So it's a matter of literally shutting down the forced side and powering up the other side in minutes. It works fantastic and that is definitely our future DR strategy as well as our future failover testing.

I haven't seen any significant features or improvements in the past few major version releases. The only challenge I have with Zerto today, and over the past few years, is that it seems like a lot of development and effort is going toward the cloud. Since we're utilizing the solution with an on-premises hypervisor, it seems like development for our needs is kind of stuck.

The other thing I wish they would do is to develop their PowerShell module to be more robust. So instead of having to rely on the API to actually include a PowerShell command, it would let you create VPGs, delete VPGs, modify VPGs, etc. This would ease the automation effort of deployment and decommissioning and I'd really appreciate that.

I implemented the solution back in the fall of 2016.

Zerto is very stable and requires little maintenance. We probably update Zerto twice a year. There's been no real outage issues that we've encountered. There have been a few times where we've had issues with VMware which in turn provided a hiccup towards Zerto. Though Zerto was a symptom and not the root cause.

Zerto provides continuous data protection and we've had very little disruption. We've gone through mobile versions starting with version six something and we have gone through the various upgrade cycles without any major issues.

Zerto seems very scalable. I can't really comment further on that because we've only had two license upgrades from 200 to 300 virtual machines. I haven't really tested this on a very large scale like for over a thousand VMs or anything close to that. From what we've utilized it has scaled, but I'm really not a good example because we manage a smaller subset of virtual machines.

As far as our key-protected systems, we're at the 280 marker so we don't see ourselves growing any more. License increments are 25 or 100 and if we did grow, obviously, we would increase our license count. Although we've had 300 licenses for a few years now so we've kind of found our sweet spot.

There's been a couple of support calls along the way, but support has been very helpful and very responsive in correcting our issues.

Back in 2016, we conducted a 30-day POC with Zerto and that was enough time to fully implement the solution and even utilize it. We were really impressed that we could actually use Zerto from start to test within a 30-day timeframe.

We found the setup and deployment process to be very simple and not complex at all. We installed Zerto on-premises with just regular employees. It was a team of two engineers and a database administrator and that was it. After a little bit of research on the prerequisites we literally ran the installation setup. It was a breeze and there were really no custom tweaks or anything that had to be done post-setup.

The solution is very user intuitive, from the initial setup of the application and installation all the way to actually getting data in there by creating virtual protection groups and populating VMs.

As far as our IT budget is concerned, Zerto is a little bit expensive. But as far as the value that it provides, it is completely justified by all of the savings. Reducing the labor of DR failover exercises or its reporting functionality for our audit teams has saved a lot of soft dollars. Also, failing over our workloads to another data center and proving that it does work is priceless. On the other hand, the price consideration is why we're only protecting a subset of our virtual machines, those that are deemed DR critical, versus protecting everything.

We did evaluate a few different products before selecting Zerto. We looked into Commvault and Veeam. We also looked into VMware's Site Recovery Manager. Having a near zero RPO and a very short RTO was the main difference between Zerto and the products we evaluated.

The biggest advice would be to compare Zerto to another product side-by-side and actually do a demo of both products. And then at that point, post-demo, the decision will be very easy.

On a scale of one to 10, where 10 is best, I would rate Zerto a nine plus. Unfortunately, no product walks on water, so they're never going to get a 10. There's room for improvement everywhere for sure, but I'm extremely happy with the product.

We are using it for disaster recovery for our day-one applications that need to be up first, upon failover.

We previously had our Microsoft SQL Servers set up as clustered pairs, with the primary in one data center and the secondary in the other, and they were staying in sync via SQL Server Log shipping. That was not a very efficient way to get SQL servers failed over. There were also some things that weren't replicated through log shipping, such as the SQL Server Agent jobs that are defined on the server, or the custom permissions that are set up for the different roles. Zerto was able to replicate the entire server, including the jobs and the permissions, and eliminate the need for us to have that secondary server. We were able to break all of our SQL clusters and just have standalone SQL Servers. It helped to increase our efficiency with failover and reduced our overall compute and storage footprint around SQL by about 40 percent.

When failing back or moving workloads, the solution saves time and reduces the number of people involved. The time from the initiation of a failback to the completion is about five minutes for us. We've also made some tweaks in the DNS to help that to update and replicate quickly so that we're not waiting for that, even if the resource is available. As for the number of people involved, for SQL especially, it used to require getting the SQL team involved and they would do everything manually. Now, anybody can just click through the recovery wizard and perform the failover.

Our savings from Zerto are around licensing and how we structure our current environment. We were able to save money with our on-prem deployment, but we don't use it for cloud.

And in terms of downtime, every time we test a failover it's non impactful to operations, because we're able to do testing in an isolated environment. Before, if we wanted to test our failover processes it was going to create a production outage. That is no longer the case. Before, when we were doing regular DR tests, I would estimate the cost of the downtime to have been about one weekend per quarter. That's the time we would have to take to do that. Only if we were to do a live failover as a test, which would probably not be done more than once a year, would we really have to worry about impacting any operations.

The most valuable features would be the

• granular configuration of your SLAs
• built-in WAN compression as part of the replication 
• easy wizard-based failover.

The granularity enables us to failover specific workloads instead of an all-or-nothing type of scenario, where you have to move your entire IP block and your data center, or you have to move large chunks of VMs. Those situations also make it prohibitive to test effectively.

The replication piece with the built-in WAN compression is important because the network circuit that we send our replication traffic across isn't actually behind our normal WAN accelerators. We were able to use Zerto's built-in WAN acceleration to help those workloads compress.

The failover is important because that way I can delegate initiating a failover to other people without their having to be an expert in this particular product. It's easy enough to cross-train people.

Continuous data protection is Zerto's bread and butter. They do all of their protection through your journaling and that continuous protection gives you countless restore-point opportunities. That's extremely important for me because if one restore point doesn't work, because it is a crash-consistent restore point, you have so many others to choose from so that you really don't have to worry about having an app-consistent backup to recover from.

Zerto is also extremely easy to use, extremely easy to deploy, and extremely easy to update and maintain. The everyday utilization with the interface is very easy to navigate, and the way in which you perform testing and failover is very controlled and easy to understand.

The replication appliances tend to have issues when they recover from being powered off when a host is in maintenance mode. Sometimes you have to do a manual task where you go in and detach hard disks that are no longer in use, to get the replication appliances to power back on. There are some improvements to be made around the way those recover.

My other main inconvenience is fixed in version 8.5. That issue was moving virtual protection groups to other hosts, whenever a host goes into maintenance mode. That's actually automated in the newer version and I am looking forward to not having to do that any longer.

I've been using Zerto for coming up on four years.

My impression of its stability is very positive. It doesn't seem to have any issues recovering after you shut down any of the particular components of the application. It seems everything comes back up and comes back online well. 

Sometimes the replication appliances will stop functioning, for one reason or another, and most of the time a power cycle will resolve that. But anytime that I do have a sync issue, support will generally be back in touch with me within the first half hour after opening a ticket. They're very responsive.

The scalability is able to take on any size environment. We don't have a huge environment here. We only use it across 20 hosts, 10 at each site. They're very large hosts. If you have more than a certain number of virtual disks protected on a single replication appliance, the replication appliance will automatically make a clone of itself on that host to accommodate the additional virtual disks. It seems to be built to scale in any way that you need it to.

While our hosts are very large hosts, we don't have any current plans to extend that deployment because we have capacity to grow within our current infrastructure footprint, without having to add on resources.

I rate their technical support very highly. They're very responsive. Usually within the first 30 minutes of opening the case, someone has tried to reach out to me. I will just get a screen share, or a reply to my call with an answer, or a KB article. I have a very positive impression of their support.

We were using Site Recovery Manager for several years, and I always struggled with keeping that functioning and reliable. Every time something changed within the vCenter environment, Site Recovery Manager would tend to break. I wanted to switch to a DR product that I could rely on.

In addition to Site Recovery Manager, we were also using NetApp SnapMirror. We are still using that for our flat file data which is non VM-based. We have Rubrik as our backup solution because, while we replicate our backups, there's not any automation behind bringing those online in the other sites. So it's a manual process to do disaster recovery.

We were having to utilize those solutions to do the failovers for our day-one application in SQL and they were inefficient and ineffective for that. Zerto was able to come in and target those workloads that we needed better recovery time for, or where we needed a more aggressive replication schedule. Zerto is supplementing those other solutions.

Zerto is easier to use than the other solutions. There's definitely more automation and there are more seamless failover activities.

When I deployed the solution, it took certainly less than a day to get it up and running. The upgrade process has been fairly seamless and painless, in the past, as we have gone from one version to the next. That includes some of the features they've enhanced, where it automatically updates the replication appliances as well as the management pieces.

We have two data centers and they're both Active-Active for one another. Our deployment strategy for Zerto was to stand up a site server at each one, pair them together, and then start identifying the first workloads to add into Zerto protection. We started with our SQL environment. 

I was the only one involved in the deployment. If I had questions I would ask my account team. My sales engineer and the account rep are both very knowledgeable. But I actually didn't need to open a support ticket as part of the deployment. It was very easy and straightforward.

About five of us utilize Zerto. I am the infrastructure engineer, focusing on the compute side of the house. We've got a storage engineer. My manager is an applications delivery manager who uses it. We've got another senior network engineer who focuses more on the runbook side of things, and he uses it. And my backup, who is our Citrix guy, is starting to use it.

Zerto doesn't really require any particular care and feeding. Whenever a new version comes out that has features sets, I'll decide when I'm going to update it and do that myself. It doesn't really even require a support call. It's pretty straightforward. For each management appliance, updates have taken 10 to 15 minutes, in the past. And it's just a couple of minutes for each replication appliance.

Our ROI is quite significant. The SQL cost savings alone would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That's due to the fact that we don't need to have our SQL clustering set up as an always-on cluster, which would need to be a higher tier of Microsoft licensing. We're able to use SQL standard for everything, and that wouldn't be possible without a third-party like Zerto to do the replication and failover.

Get the Enterprise Cloud license because it's the most flexible, and the pricing should come in around $1,000 per VM.

Support is an additional cost. We are currently doing three years of support. There's an additional 15 or 20 percent of overhead during each year of additional support for each license.

Definitely take the free trial and put it through its paces, because you really can't break anything with it, given the way that you can do the testing. It gives you a good opportunity to play with the tools without having to worry about causing any problems in the environment.

We have plans to evaluate the solution for long-term retention. I'm going to start testing some of their features once we upgrade to version 8.5, and then we'll evaluate if it makes sense to do that or not. We do have other backup products that we're evaluating alongside of that though.

The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. We already run a very lean engineering team.

I got what I expected. I'd actually been trying to bring the product in since 2014 but I kept not getting budget funding for it. I feel satisfied with what I ended up with and I'm glad that we were able to move forward with the project.

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.