HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We are using Zerto as a DR solution. We also utilize Zerto when we have to migrate any servers from one location to another.

Previously, we were using VMware Site Recovery Manager, and we were not happy with the services we received. There were lots of issues. Since implementing Zerto, we have been happy. We are not seeing any issues with the services. Zerto's support is also excellent. If we encounter any issues, we open a ticket, and they are available all the time.

When we implemented Zerto, we were not sure how things would work. We have a DR test or maintenance window every quarter. During the first window, when we did the DR implementation through Zerto, we found it to be very helpful. Previously, we used to manually take screenshots for DR evidence, whereas now, we can generate a report from Zerto. After the DR, it tells everything in detail such as when a VM was moved, what the procedure was, and how much time it took to consolidate from the primary site to the DR site.

When we had an issue with a legacy application over the weekend and users reported it on Monday, we had to revert the VM to a snapshot from eight hours prior. We could do that easily. This is an excellent feature. Zerto allows us to select a custom recovery time. For instance, if no one checked the server yesterday because it was a holiday and we needed to restore the VM to the day before yesterday, we could do that quickly. Zerto helps address downtime situations effectively.

Zerto has reduced the DR testing time. Previously, it took three to four hours, including app testing, but now it gets completed in one hour. 

Zerto is excellent. It is the primary and only solution we are using in our organization.

The constant replication between the primary and the DR site is valuable. Zerto's near-synchronous replication is excellent.

Zerto is very easy to use. A new team member can pick up the pace in one or two days. Someone who has never worked with Zerto can understand it in one week. It has a user-friendly graphical user interface. Everything is well described.

I have one recommendation, but I am not sure if it has been addressed in the current or upcoming version. The challenge we faced occurred during a DR for a database server running on SQL Always On. We experienced a database crash and logged a case with Zerto about a year ago. They said that they do not support Always On. As a result, we had to plan accordingly. We deployed another server to that location with Always On and moved all the database servers out of the Zerto application. We are uncertain if Zerto now supports Always On because we have not explored that option. We have a couple of environments on the cloud but have not tested if that feature is available or not.

I have been using Zerto for the last four to five years.

We have experienced no issues at all.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten for scalability.

Zerto's support is excellent. At the time of implementation, the support was slightly delayed because there was only one way to log cases, which was through the portal. They provided us with a few articles to refer to, which helped us address the solution.

We had VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which was very difficult to manage. Sometimes, we faced replication issues. When performing a failover, the network was not stable. There were many issues, including dependencies on the storage area, requiring the storage team to be available during DR tests. The network team also had to be available, involving multiple teams. With Zerto, we do not need the involvement of the storage area or network teams.

It was easy. Initially, we took help from Zerto support because we were not sure about the configuration and best practices. We received help from Zerto.

The challenge was not from Zerto's perspective; deploying VMs where we were going to install Zerto took some time. We had dependencies on aspects such as VMs not being ready. The deployment of only Zerto took less than eight hours.

We reached out to Zerto for any support.

One person can handle the implementation, but if that person is not available, it creates challenges. Whenever we undertake projects, it is between team members. One person deploys, but everyone is involved so that everyone is aware of what is being done.

Currently, it is good, but the license we are using is based on VM count. We are only protecting mission-critical servers, so we are using a very low number, about 300. However, we have 3,000 or more servers. If we consider using Zerto for data protection, it would cost us more than what we have for data protection now.

For new users, Zerto used to offer free training and certification. I am not sure if it is still available, but it was available. Anyone planning to deploy Zerto can get support from Zerto and should go through the basic training, which is free on the Zerto website. They can get certification and reach out to Zerto support if needed. Having a basic understanding of how Zerto works is important.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten because we do not have the functionality to protect our database servers that are on Always On.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery between our private data centers.

Near-synchronous replication is the primary reason we chose Zerto, as nobody else is able to meet the same replication times. We have some special contracts, so Zerto is the only one that can meet those contractual requirements.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our RTOs. We have probably reduced our RTOs by 70% to 80%. Previously, we relied on manually replicated backups that we had to restore from, resulting in significant RTO compared to Zerto.

We use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in our environment. When it comes to recovery, if other solutions take five minutes, with Zerto, we can usually get them up in under a minute. Our RTOs are much quicker on Zerto. It is probably 20 seconds on Zerto versus an hour with others.

We have had multiple live disaster recovery events where Zerto saved us a lot of downtime. We have not had any ransomware situations, but it has saved us time in generalized data recovery.

Zerto has helped reduce DR testing. For the customers for whom we use Zerto for disaster recovery, we usually do DR testing once a month, and it takes us probably two minutes to run those DR tests. With other solutions that we use for our wider customer base, it takes us about two days to go through all of our DR testing.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. The tier-one customers that we use Zerto for have very strict requirements for their disaster recovery capabilities, and Zerto is able to meet those contractual obligations pretty easily.

We were able to realize its benefits immediately after the deployment.

The low SLA times are valuable. It is very easy to use with a straightforward user setup.

The biggest area for improvement is the technical support side. Although it has improved somewhat, after the HPE acquisition, it became apparent that level-one technical support was moved to groups unfamiliar with the Zerto product. As experienced users of Zerto, when we need to open a ticket, dealing with level-one technical support can be tough. We often need to escalate immediately due to our internal skill set surpassing level-one support capabilities. That is the biggest complaint we have with Zerto.

We have used it for roughly five years, possibly six years.

The solution is very stable, especially in the newest version. There were some challenging times shortly after the HPE acquisition, likely due to engineering changes. However, the newest version is incredibly stable, and we have no complaints.

We have not had to worry too much about scalability because we have a fairly limited implementation.

Once past level-one support, the experience improves because we then interact with people familiar with the product. I am assuming that the level-one support is generalized HPE technical support, and they are relying on Zerto Runbooks to be able to help us. They do not have a lot of familiarity with the product.

For the quality of support, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Before Zerto, we primarily used Veeam, but we needed faster RTOs for tier-one customers, who had contractual obligations for RPO and RTO. At that time, Zerto was the only solution that provided the necessary speed. The rest of the industry had not caught up. Currently, we use Cohesity for everything else, but for customers with stringent standards, we rely on Zerto.

Zerto is definitely easier to use from a GUI standpoint and is very straightforward for automation. It is a one-click solution for us to do our disaster recovery events.

Its initial deployment is very easy. We recently did a deployment of version 10 for our VMware 8 deployment. We completed it in a single day, taking approximately three or four hours.

It requires maintenance but it is very infrequent. We need to make manual changes to our Zerto environment maybe once a quarter.

Just one person handled the implementation.

I am not very involved with the pricing, but from my understanding, it is fairly expensive for us. This is why we limit its use to our tier-one customers. We have other disaster recovery solutions for our other customers due to the cost.

It is pretty straightforward. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The purpose was for cloud migration, as it's for cloud DR as a service. It's for DR purposes on the cloud and also on-prem to different sites. The main challenge is that I'm not working with one customer but I'm working with multiple customers. My role is I'm an architect that provides DR solutions and cloud solutions to the customers in Israel, but not only in Israel. Most of the use cases are for DR as a service. The challenge is to provide a disaster recovery solution for big organizations, and they are not limited to their on-prem sites.

The most liked feature in HPE Zerto Software is that it uses CDP, Continuous Data Protection. It's a protocol that provides a very low RPO, which is Recovery Point Objective. This means how much data you lose when a disaster occurs. This is the main feature of the product. It's called CDP, and until two years ago, it was the only product able to provide that. Today, there are competitors, but they are not as mature as HPE.

The near-synchronous replication is the CDP I just mentioned. The near-zero replication is possible due to the CDP usage, and this is a game changer. DR in the cloud is much cheaper, and the ROI is absolutely in favor of cloud DR because we do not need to purchase any hardware. As a customer, I do not need to purchase hardware, rent a physical data center, or bring all my equipment to locate in the DR site.

It's not only in the cloud; it's DR as a service, which means that the recovery operations are performed by a dedicated team specializing in this area. Organizations don't need to have the expertise to manage and know HPE Zerto Software platform because a dedicated team of the cloud provider is actually operating all the necessary steps to recover the systems. Comparing to a regular backup solution, it reduces downtime by 95%. The recovery time objective reduction comes from the fact that it's CDP. Additionally, HPE Zerto Software comes out of the box with an orchestration tool, which means you can automate the recovery process and don't need to perform tasks manually for the recovery operations. The recovery process with HPE Zerto Software is better compared to other DR solutions. However, it's equivalent for some products or methods.

There are few areas for improvement that are mostly technical. It has limited support mostly for VMware environments; they are trying to reduce support for Hyper-V and now bring it back, but it's not working as easy with VMWARE. There is a problem where you need to perform a full sweep to back up and sync a VM from the beginning, which occurs in some scenrios. There are times you need to restart synchronization from the start, which is a heavy operation without clear reasoning, consuming a lot of resources.

I have been architecting soluitions with this product for four years.

I rate the stability of HPE Zerto Software at nine.

Scalability is rated at 10, but it is limited mostly to VMware.

The deployment, whether cloud or on-prem, is easy. The deployment process takes about one to four hours, specifically the deployment of the HPE Zerto Software footprint.

in DRaaS, maintenance is easy because it's cloud-based; everything happens behind the scenes for the customers and end users.

DR in the cloud is much cheaper, and the ROI is absolutely in favor of cloud DR because we do not need to purchase any hardware. As a customer, I do not need to purchase hardware, rent a physical data center, or bring all my equipment to locate in the DR site. Having it in the cloud is very beneficial for customers and organizations. It's not only in the cloud; it's DR as a service, which means that the recovery operations are performed by a dedicated team specializing in this area. Organizations don't need to have the expertise to manage and know HPE Zerto Software platform because a dedicated team of the cloud provider is actually operating all the necessary steps to recover the systems.

I would say the pricing is expensive, rated at 10.

For now, HPE Zerto Software is the best with CDP, although other vendors are catching up. In two years, it's not guaranteed they will be the leaders.

HPE Zerto Software is not the only recovery tool needed for ransomware recovery. It provides the ability to deploy systems for review and cleanup, it's beneficial to use it to reduce the time for bringing back the system for ransomware investigation. It reduces time by about 50% in a ransomware case. I absolutely recommend HPE Zerto Software, but my first advice is to ensure proper sizing and validate that applications are supported by a tool that supports CDP. There's a possibility that a VM, which is hosting an application, may not always be considered by HPE Zerto Software when copying VM data, so checking application support with CDP systems is crucial. 

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are disaster recovery and replication.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I enjoy the most are the ease of setting up the protection groups and the ease of doing testing, such as failover tests. 

The near-synchronous replication is crucial as we don't want any data loss, which is critical.

The quick setup of disaster recovery environments helps streamline our DR testing.

HPE Zerto Software has reduced both my RTOs and RPOs. Its recovery speed is much faster than other disaster recovery solutions and much easier to use. I can recover one of our tier zero SQL servers and have it up and running in under ten minutes. If I were using one of our backup products, that would take hours.

It has helped to reduce the time it takes for our organization's DR testing, reducing it by days. The big benefit is that I can set up that environment and people can test, but if something happened and we needed to redeploy that environment, it's very quick and easy. It has reduced the overall time for the DR testing, including the testing process to make sure the applications are working.

HPE Zerto Software, as far as the replication, had near-synchronous replication, which made our RPOs better. It was easier to use, easier to recover from, so it was far superior for that purpose. Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, we were using our backup system to test DR.

I don't have any recommendations regarding how HPE Zerto Software can be improved or what additional features should be included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for a year and a half, about 18 months.

I have experienced issues with downtime, crashes, and performance with HPE Zerto Software. When we first deployed it, we were replicating to AVS, and we've done DR tests where we've left that test environment running for a significant period and had issues with the amount of storage space it was using. Sometimes the VMs become unstable when they're running too long.

HPE Zerto Software scales well with the growing needs of my organization because we haven't had any issues there.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as good. Any case I've opened, they've been very responsive. I would give them a ten out of ten. They're very responsive and knowledgeable. They've helped me with all my issues.

Positive

I found the deployment to be easy.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software was great. It was not overly expensive, and deployment was easy. 

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, I considered Rubrik, which has orchestrated recovery plans, and we've tried using those. HPE Zerto Software was much easier to use.

The solution has not helped to reduce downtime in any situations. 

The advice I would give to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is to do it. If you need a good recovery product, HPE Zerto Software is fantastic. 

I rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are business continuity and disaster recovery.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most include its core function, where I can replicate near instantaneously, which guarantees that I have X RTO, Y RPO, and that actually works. 

The core functionality is what's beautiful about it.

HPE Zerto Software Analytics enables me to see my entire global real estate from one SaaS portal—that's powerful. We are still less than a year into using HPE Zerto Software, currently in the deployment phase, with the plan to have a unified global deployment. It will be a cookie-cutter template for every single site, where based on the application's criticality, that type of provisioning is determined. HPE Zerto Software would automatically inherit the workload, protect it, and create a DR for it. 

HPE Zerto Software also works based off of tags, in an automatic fashion, saving a lot of time for my engineers where they don't have to babysit a tool, as it automatically takes care of itself.

HPE Zerto Software's recovery speed to other disaster recovery solutions shows that it's superior. The native technology is stream-based replication, instantaneous replication, whereas the other technologies I've used in the past are purely snapshot-based, which impact the production. HPE Zerto Software is transparent, as the production is not impacted, and it's a live write to a destination.

My impression of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication is that it's a great technology, and that's what we're really counting on for the DR teams.

We're still in the process of reducing our organization's DR testing. We anticipate that, since, it doesn't impact production, we should be able to test more frequently on the DR side.

An improvement I would like to see in HPE Zerto Software is the ability to start protecting bare-metal configurations, as today it only handles virtualized workloads. I would love to see some progress in bare-metal protection. Several bare-metal use cases also need similar RTO, RPO, and business criticality thinking, which would be fantastic if HPE Zerto Software ventures into the bare-metal space.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for less than a year.

We haven't had any challenges so far, so it's pretty robust. There have been no downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization, as the licensing model is pretty good, and I'm happy with what I have, leveraging economies of scale through my team, making it positioned for us to match our scaling and buy more licenses as we grow.

I evaluate the customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as satisfactory. We have a virtual TAM with a lot of experience in the space, and we have frequent meetings with the technology team, plus the customer support is also very responsive.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using another solution to address similar needs, specifically RecoverPoint for VMs and VMware Live Recovery, which I plan to replace. I'm also familiar with Rubrik.

The factors that led me to consider a change were the core architecture, where one solution utilized snapshot-based replication while another used stream-based replication, and HPE Zerto Software's approach is more effective than snapshot-based replication.

The way its architecture is formatted, deployment is fairly easy for us to get started. We can get set up and be production-ready very fast.

My experience with pricing, setup, costs, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software was pretty good and in line with what I expected.

Before HPE Zerto Software, I considered other solutions such as RecoverPoint for VMs, VMware Cloud on AWS with the VMLR tool, and a few other industry-standard options, mostly snapshot-based, and a few replication-based, but HPE Zerto Software was the better of all of them. What stood out with HPE Zerto Software is that when making a purchase, it's a combination of great technology and the price matching my expectations, so HPE Zerto Software fit the bill in both cases, which is why I went ahead and purchased it.

Regarding expanded usage of HPE Zerto Software, it's too soon to tell if we will, as we've been using it for less than a year. 

I rate HPE Zerto Software overall as eight out of ten. 

I won't advise other organizations since everyone has to evaluate their own footprints to understand what's the right fit for them. 

Our main use case for HPE Zerto Software is for DR purposes—that's disaster recovery—for our separate DR site.

What I appreciate about HPE Zerto Software is that it seems fairly easy to use, and there are a couple of minor challenges that we figured out. We also found ways around those. 

The way HPE Zerto Software specifically benefited us is that when we've had to do some testing to show we can actually bring things up in our disaster recovery site, we're able to do it with relative ease, allowing us to check off boxes on testing for either auditors or some of the other cyber insurance or whomever else that we need to validate that through. It made it a lot easier and gave everybody else a sense of comfort.

HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication is great, just based on the small timeline that's there; that's what I found to be most beneficial. Near-synchronous replication is very important to our organization as it gives us that safety and security blanket of knowing that the data is being mirrored or replicated up to another environment, so in case we were to have some kind of disaster locally, we would at least have another copy sitting somewhere else within a very short period of time.

HPE Zerto Software has helped reduce downtime in some situations; we haven't had to use it officially to bring anything back up, but we have tested numerous times throughout the year for different applications to see how long it takes for us to bring things up, and while we haven't had to actually use that in place just yet, we know it's there if certain things happen.

HPE Zerto Software has saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes; we've been able to utilize it just for doing some work with it. But we've also found that certain situations will not work for us since we haven't finalized the air gap vault in place, and we know that using some simulated ransomware attacks would cause problems, so we wouldn't be able to recover. That's why we're looking and trying to see what we can do to mitigate that issue.

In testing, I wouldn't be able to come up with a number right now as we take our time to ensure we don't miss anything. Usually, we can normally do that within a day. HPE Zerto Software has definitely impacted our RTOs and RPOs positively; they have come down considerably.

In comparing it to other disaster recovery solutions that we've used in the past, I would say that since we own and use HPE Zerto Software, it clearly beat out any of the competitors we had looked at previously. We're not yet using a cyber vault solution or immutable data copies. I can't say how HPE Zerto Software can be improved just yet; I want to see us get the vault in place first to test that out, so we're hoping to look at it here sometime soon. Our DR testing will probably save about 50% of the time.

The only thing I could suggest for HPE Zerto Software would be better support for detached drives in a clustered environment, as it's currently not supported very well unless everything's running on a virtualized VMDK file. If it's detached an iSCSI drive, it doesn't work, so that would be about the only thing I would suggest.

We have been using HPE Zerto Software for six to seven years.

HPE Zerto Software has been stable and reliable every time we've had to go through it thus far.

HPE Zerto Software has scaled with us thus far.

The support we've received from HP Zerto has typically been very good, and they normally answer any questions we have; we're looking at a couple of gaps we found, and we'll be testing that out to see how that's going to meet our situation.

Positive

Prior to using HPE Zerto Software, we weren't actually using anyone for a similar type of situation; we were relying on backups.

For the most part, it's very easy to set up, and the time it takes for it to keep things in sync is very small, which has also been a huge benefit. We've seen that work out very well when we've had to test part of our DR situations.

I've seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software. I've been able to see that return based on the time it saves us for recovery and testing for DR testing.

I can't say what those competitors are since we've had HPE Zerto Software for about six to seven years now, and I don't remember which ones they were at the time.

Initially, HPE Zerto Software has helped us deal with many challenges. We have had a couple of bouts where it did cause a problem, however, part of this is due to the fact that we haven't implemented the new air gap solution yet, so we run into some difficulties there. We are reevaluating that through our rep and also talking to them now just trying to get more information on that.

Our deployment model for HPE Zerto Software is all on-prem; we keep everything on-prem with our primary data center to a disaster recovery location located out of state.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give the product overall a big nine, probably over nine; it's not perfect. There's always going to be some pieces that are missing.

We use Zerto primarily as a cloud provider to set up either ground-to-cloud or cloud-to-other cloud sites for disaster recovery. 

We also use it as a migration tool to get people's virtual VMs from ground to cloud. 

Another use case is to protect our virtual machines in our environment. We have our own internal IT, and we protect them with Zerto, but the vast majority, probably 98% or 99% or even more, of what we do is with customers since we're a cloud service provider. As a service provider, we're not classified as an MSP. We do resell Zerto to our clients.

What I appreciate about Zerto is the speed to recover. We have two ways that we migrate them into the cloud: one is with Zerto and one is with Acronis. Acronis is a bare-metal restorer that takes much longer to do the restore, depending on the size of the VM. 

I appreciate that Zerto already has the disk synchronized to the cloud, and it just updates deltas every five seconds or so. Should there be an instance, such as a migration, or if the customer has been ransomed, or if they want to roll back for any reason, they can do it because we have their data in the cloud. 

When I was an IT manager, our RPO and RTO were measured in hours or days; now it's measured in minutes, which is huge for disaster recovery. 

The interface and ease of use of Zerto make it easy. We're getting into version 10 now. The version 10 update 4 took really long to deploy, and we had to back off and do update 2 because that seems to deploy much quicker. 

Other than that, it's pretty easy to deploy and manage; we can set it up through Zerto Cloud and update it remotely. 

I see the benefits of Zerto immediately after deploying it. As a former IT manager, when I saw what it did, it was a revelation, and I thought this is excellent for disaster recovery. Zerto's near synchronous replication is fantastic. It helps our RPO and RTO and is beneficial all around. In terms of RTO and RPO, Zerto improves them to seconds. It indicates right in the health of the VPG how many seconds the RPO or RTO is. 

Our DR testing with Zerto is much quicker. We encourage our customers to do testing so they get familiar with recovery processes. We maintain a playbook and a method of procedure, and every test adds something new to the MOP, improving how quickly we can resolve any disaster. 

Zerto has a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We do it for customers, making all the difference in the world. It's not just about me as an IT manager using Zerto; as a service provider, we host people's data in the cloud for disaster recovery, making instantaneous recovery possible that wouldn't be as quick otherwise.

In terms of improvement, Zerto does reasonably with support and responds quickly to help us. I don't know if there's anything they could do better, but we'd prefer Zerto to work with our open cloud product for disaster recovery and migrations. So far, they haven't made their product compatible with KVM, and we would appreciate seeing that.

I have been using Zerto in my career for four years.

I haven't seen much instability with Zerto; it seems pretty stable overall.

Zerto scales efficiently; we have hundreds of hosts, with production and disaster recovery environments. We set it up to replicate, such as from Grand Rapids to Indianapolis or Detroit, so it scales pretty efficiently.

Zerto's support is reasonably good. If they know I'm on the call with a customer, they usually join a Zoom session quickly to help resolve issues. Sometimes it's resolved quickly, while other times it may take two or three sessions, but they're generally pretty good.

I use alternatives to Zerto, as I'm a Veeam engineer certified in Veeam. We use Acronis and Cohesity, but in my opinion, there's nothing that works for disaster recovery quite like Zerto. The main differences between Zerto and Veeam are ease of use and convenience. 

Veeam allows a restore of a server in a test environment while detecting any malware before connecting to the network, which I haven't seen in Zerto. Zerto just replicates what's there without evaluating for malware. Zerto is quick and easy to use while Veeam is more complicated but has more capabilities for backup. I haven't greatly used Veeam's continuous replication feature, but from my experience, Zerto is easier to set up and use, and it's less expensive as.

When I first deployed Zerto about four years ago, it took about 15 to 20 minutes to set up after the client had a Windows server ready. We'd give them the installer and set it up, then pair it with their hosts. After installing the VRAs and setting up the VPGs, once the first VPG is set up, we can do the rest without client involvement. Overall, the total time ranged from half an hour to 45 minutes, depending on how many they wanted to set up initially.

I'm a Professional Services Engineer, which means that I implement projects. When our salesman sells disaster recovery with Zerto to a client, I'm the one who sets it up, creates the VPGs, and ensures all the syncs work properly; the long-term maintenance is handled by another team.

Zerto has a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We do it for customers, making all the difference in the world.

Zerto is easier to set up and use, and it's less expensive.

We use alternatives such as Acronis and Cohesity.

The recovery process depends on the customer. Zerto is one of those things that we set up and monitor, but if the customer isn't monitoring their VMs, it can complicate things. 

We had one customer who made a decision to protect only a few of their VMs and then got hacked, which wasn't Zerto's fault or ours; it was their decision.

However, for customers that have everything protected, we've had quite a few successful recoveries. There have been situations involving ransomware or data recovery situations when we used Zerto. I haven't personally been involved in one, but our company has had multiple incidents where we were able to recover without paying the ransom.

Zerto does require maintenance on our end. We register the client in the cloud, and if they move away from us, we unregister them and remove their tenant. We also have updates to do, including the Zerto virtual manager and the virtual replication appliances on the hosts. With hundreds of hosts and multiple data centers, we have a lot of work to do, which is why we have someone dedicated to updating Zerto. 

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 9.

Right now, I am using it for disaster recovery and file recovery, with all the different components of it. It is just site-to-site replication from one site to another. I have done server moves, and I will also do server moves in a couple of weeks.

I use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. That is 100% of my use case. It helps us to commit to the recovery point as per our standards. Our RPO is under five minutes for everything I have got in there unless there is a sync happening at that point in time. It has greatly reduced RPOs and made them stable and knowable. 

Our RTOs are even better. We are also a Cohesity customer. Our tier one, two, and some tier three are in Zerto. For everything else, the plan is to bring it out or restore it from the backup in case of a DR or an event where there is an issue with the server. We know that bringing something online in Zerto is dramatically faster. It is a night and day difference. Restoring everything from the backup would take days or a week, whereas with Zerto, as soon as I make the change, everything will automatically come online at my other location. For example, I have a file server that is 50T. Restoring that from the backup took three or four days, whereas in Zerto, we can flip it over, and it would be up and running in seconds. 

Zerto helps us reduce downtime. If something happens and we need to bring a server up that is in Zerto, it will only take the amount of time required to commit and make sure that everything is functioning as expected, changing or updating IPs and names, and making sure that is good to go. It takes five to ten minutes. 

For auditing and other things, we can do a controlled VR test where we bring up all the necessary components in an isolated bubble with networking for just that bubble and bring it online. We can test SQL Servers, Exchange Servers, Active Directory, connectivity, authentication, and applications. We can bring it all online in that bubble while production is still going on without impacting anybody. In the event that we flip the switch and have to go, everything is going to work. In addition to meeting auditing needs, we have been able to refine the process so that in the case of an unfortunate event, we know we will be able to do it. We will be able to do it quicker than coming in cold and having never tested it or done it. 

Zerto has had a big impact on IT resiliency strategy. We know that as long as our boxes are protected by Zerto, we are covered. We will be able to spin a box up at our remote DR site and bring it online. It will be functional, and all the data will be there. It is not just about fulfilling an audit request; I sleep better at night knowing that we are protected, the data is there, and there are not going to be any issues. Zerto has near-synchronous replication. It works very well. I have been fortunate enough not to have to use it in a production environment, but I have used it to restore files. 

From the server moves, I know that I can cut over in a couple of seconds and all the data is there and ready to go. There is no lag. There is no waiting. I just have to update the IP and register that in DNS if the IP changes, and it is good to go. It is fantastic.

What I like most about Zerto is that it makes my job much easier. I have peace of mind knowing that it works. The replication time and the minor amount of time it takes to sync a new server outside of any of my huge 40-terabyte boxes is ridiculously quick. When I add a server, it is there in 15 minutes. I know it is protected. It is fantastic. There is peace of mind knowing that the workloads I put in there are protected. It is very easy to use. In day-to-day usage, it is very simple and easy to set things up or monitor it. I check it every morning and keep track throughout the day of what is going on and if there are any issues.

I am an advocate and a fan of the product, and I have had great success. The only negative I would give is that with the latest version of the appliance, setting up authentication was a bit of a challenge, but that is just a matter of using Keycloak and how things have changed. Other than that, I have had no complaints.

I have used the solution for seven years.

I have had no complaints. It has been running very well.

I have contacted customer service many times for various issues. Overall, they have been good, and I would rank them in the higher percentile of the support I have dealt with. Sometimes, I have had to get through a couple of techs or work solidly with somebody, or I have not fully explained the issue correctly. Once we get on the same page, the issue has been quick and easy to resolve. Nothing has hung up for too long. 

I would rate them a ten out of ten. I have never had an issue that was not resolved, and I have never been in a situation where they did not respond. They are very responsive. They do get back very quickly. That is another very nice thing. It is not like Microsoft where things go into a queue and disappear for weeks at a time or a week at a time. They are also knowledgeable.

Positive

The initial setup was very easy. The documentation was good. I am a stickler, so rather than giving Zerto full rights, I went through the vCenter and allowed just the rights that were specified by the documentation. Those have always been correct, and I have not had an issue. 

The actual implementation of the software went smoothly, bringing everything in. I remember upgrading it. We had a major revision from Windows to the Linux appliance, which was not a full redo, but it was a pretty major changeover. Things are done differently there, and documentation for everything, except authentication, worked very well, and we have had no issues. 

It does not require much maintenance from our end. We mainly need to take care of upgrading and verifying any issues. The software itself runs fine. Every once in a while, I may have too many servers on the same host causing an issue and overloading the VRA. I just separate things.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. The software has been awesome. It has made my life easier and my sleeping at night better.

My original use case was to protect against ransomware and any critical failure in our infrastructure, and that has been carried through to the present day.

It is incredibly easy to use, which attracted me to the product. I have been doing IT for over 30 years, so it did not take me very long at all to learn it. That is a good thing because when you have a solution like this going in, you want to make sure that you are fully confident with it within a short period of time. The learning curve for this solution was very short.

Zerto’s near-synchronous replication is good. Previously, when I tried to do it at a SAN level, which was part of the SAN vendor's portfolio of solutions, I could never get it to work. It was not very user-friendly. It was complex and difficult to configure. In comparison to that, Zerto shines.

Over the years, they have brought in immutable backups. They have brought in cloud migration, though I have not used that due to the nature of the Azure tools I use, but I have used immutable backups. In the past, we replicated from our on-prem site to our data center, and then more recently, we replicated from our on-prem site to Azure. The next stage is to replicate from Azure to another part of Azure or another region.

Zerto has had a very high impact on our RPOs. The recovery is very fast. It is instantaneous. We have already got everything replicated on our remote site, so we can just fire it up. All we have to do is follow through the scripts to change it over.

Previously, our RTO was very much in the order of two days. After we implemented Zerto, it is in the order of an hour.

We put in Zerto in response to ransomware because I had to do quite a lot of manual jumping around. Hopefully, we shut the gate on that problem. We have a solution to utilize.

We are a small to medium organization. We did not do downtime testing before we had Zerto, but now we do. It gives me the ability to test. We never had that option of testing. Usually, you cannot test the system in real-time because you have to turn off the live, whereas Zerto allows you to do it with different VLANs, etc. We can spin it up and effectively test it out. If I was doing a manual test, it would have probably taken me two or three days. I can do that in maybe 15 minutes. There is a 20 to 30 times improvement.

Zerto has had an effect on our IT resiliency strategy. It has supplemented where we did not have a tool before.

The ability to test that my backup regime is actually doing and working as I want it to do is valuable. It provides visibility and comfort. I can see in real-time that things are replicating, and my SLAs for my RPO and RTO are available instantly. That gives a lot of comfort. It is the sort of thing that gives you peace of mind.

Some of the cloud instructions around VNets and peering of networks could be clearer with some best-case examples. It is more complicated once you move into the cloud than running it on-premises. Actually doing these things is quite easy in the cloud and with Azure, but understanding how it fits in my environment can be quite a head-scratcher at times.

I started using it in early 2016 and have continued until the present day.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability. I never had a problem with it.

It has been fine. It has grown with the business as we changed things around. It has been very flexible. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

Their support is pretty good.

Positive

I used EMC SAN. Zerto is 400 times better. The previous one just did not work. I bought the SAN with the intention of having recoverability with it, and I could never get it to work. There was relatively zero support. It does not encourage us to persevere with it. We just ended up using it as a SAN and moved over to another solution.

We currently have a hybrid setup because we cannot migrate in seconds. It takes quite a long time to pick a network and move it into the cloud. It is not as easy as you would hope when you start moving into the cloud. There is a bit of complexity. If you have a network with multi-subscription, multi-network, VNETs, and peers, it takes a little bit longer to try and figure out how to make it work.

Initially, when I first put it on-premises, it took me about a day to get it working. In the cloud, it took a few days to head-scratch through it.

It is currently running between on-premises and Azure cloud. We do not split by department. We are not big enough to do that. We run a centralized compute function for the entire business, so it is relatively straightforward and flat as a design. Everyone uses the same environment.

It is used by only IT people. There are six of us in IT, but only three people use it with me being the primary person.

It requires a relatively small amount of maintenance. They have moved over to Linux-based machines, so we no longer have to upgrade them. We can apply a very simple process to update the actual version of Zerto. It needs a little bit of maintenance, maybe for an hour or so a month. I do the maintenance. I just keep an eye on it.

It is difficult to quantify that. I have seen no return on investment because I do not calculate around that sort of thing. If we had any disaster, we would have used it for real and would have seen a massive return on investment. It gives me peace of mind. If I am happy, then the management is happy.

Zerto has not helped reduce downtime in any situation because we have not had any downtime. Most people like me hope we never have to use it. It is like insurance.

It is not the cheapest product; it is not the most expensive product, but it works. It is a mid-range product, and it is justified in terms of being pretty quick and easy.

I would definitely recommend it, especially for people who have no current method of implementing a disaster recovery solution. It is a quick and easy fix, and I would highly recommend it.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten because we need a few more scenario examples when moving into Azure.

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software include providing near-zero recovery. We're replicating several of our VMs for instant recovery purposes.

Zerto features benefit my organization. I've never had to use HPE Zerto Software in a real disaster scenario, however, we test it every year and it performs its job effectively. 

It's easy to use, setup, and configure. It's also very easy to do a recovery.

The features of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate most include its integration with our VMware environment, which makes replicating VMs really easy. My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication capability are that it's one of the main features why we purchased it, as it allows us to restore from anywhere from basically five seconds ago to three days ago.

HPE Zerto Software has impacted our RTOs and RPOs positively by providing near-real-time replication and instant recovery, which has definitely reduced our RPOs and RTOs.

The solution has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing as it allows our DR tests to proceed very quickly. We conduct several tests each year, with the process being very seamless. The saved time has been allocated to value-add tasks because it's one less thing we have to focus on when we can easily perform a DR test.

Although we have not had situations involving ransomware or other causes, HPE Zerto Software has saved us time in general-purpose recoveries.

Fortunately, we've not had to use HPE Zerto Software to reduce downtime in any cases, but we know that it works effectively.

My only suggestion for how HPE Zerto Software could be improved would be to integrate with other virtualization platforms, as many organizations are moving off of VMware, so having options there would be beneficial.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for probably close to eight to ten years, since before it was an HP product.

I would describe the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as consistently stable over the years. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization as we just have a small footprint where we use it in our most production-oriented VMs, and it has scaled fine for our needs. 

I have expanded the usage of HPE Zerto Software; it's a relatively small footprint, but it has grown a little bit over time, and it's been easy to include more VMs in our recovery.

I cannot specifically evaluate customer service and technical support because I'm not usually the one to call support, but I've never heard complaints from others at my company who use it. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as probably a nine or ten, although I cannot really answer that since I haven't been the one to contact support.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using traditional backup systems, which obviously don't have as low of RTOs and RPOs.

It's easy to set up, configure, and performing a recovery is very straightforward with simple steps. 

I have seen return on investment with HPE Zerto Software as it is affordable and definitely prevents us from needing to purchase other similar software.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of HPE Zerto Software has been that the product has been affordable for us, so I have no complaints from a pricing standpoint.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, I considered other solutions, however, it's been so long ago that I don't remember. However, we have been consistently happy with it so we haven't shopped around.

In my evaluation process, what stood out positively was the ease of use, as the setup was simple, and performing the actual DR recoveries was extremely easy. My experience with deploying HPE Zerto Software has been smooth, particularly the setup with our VMware environment.

We didn't really change from anything in particular, so the factors that led us to consider HPE Zerto Software were more of an add-on to a traditional backup system. My advice to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is to ensure it aligns with your needs, and to try to get a demo of it and go through a proof of concept. 

I rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.