Zerto Primary Use Case

JC
Director of IT at Arnott Inc

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

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

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

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BW
Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We use Zerto to enable our hot site configuration. We have two data centers. One of them is in one of our corporate buildings, which is our primary, and then we have a co-location center rack that we rent for our hot site backup or app. We use Zerto to replicate our servers and our VMs between those two sites. So, primarily, it is there in case of a disaster or malware attack, etc.

We also use it to restore files on the fly for users if they accidentally delete the wrong file or something like that. From a restoration standpoint, it is closer to the frontline of our security posture. We would first look to restore items. For removing the threat and everything like that, it obviously wouldn't be involved, but from a restoration standpoint, it would be frontline.

We have not yet used the cloud with Zerto. We just use on-prem physical servers. 

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Girish Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Architect at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.

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Buyer's Guide
Zerto
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Zerto. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Joseph Lamb - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Nevada Bank and Trust

We are using it to back up and replicate our critical infrastructure to allow us to replicate back when we are in a disaster recovery situation or a test.

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LA
Information Security Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery, backup, and ransomware protection. The 3-2-1 backup strategy requires us to have two backups of our production data on different media. One copy is on disk and tape backup, and the other is hosted off-site for disaster recovery. With journaling and the persistent backups we take nightly, it almost obviates 3-2-1 because it renders some unnecessary aspects. 

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Steve McFate - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst III at St. Luke's

We use Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for our servers in the multiple data centers we have. It allows us to replicate our servers from one data center to another and perform disaster recovery testing to ensure compliance with our organization's DR requirements.

Our organization wanted a solution for replication, whether for VMs or Azure sites, and the ability to migrate servers or VPGs in case of a disaster or for testing purposes. And we wanted something reliable.

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KP
Sr Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are failing over approximately 250 systems. In many ways, this could impact 3,800 insurance agents across 11 states. 

There are two sites: the source site and the production site. Those are failing over to another data center about 150 miles north of my location.

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Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It was a pilot. We did a bake-off between Zerto and RP for VM, which was an EMC product. It was to fail over 130 Oracle databases.

We wanted to handle disaster recovery for our data center. Zerto was mainly a failover product. We did not use any security layering.

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MR
Sr Storage Adminstrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We have critical servers at remote sites that failover or are replicated to our main data center in case of an emergency. If a remote site has a failure, we can spin up that virtual machine from our data center.

We operate a hub and spoke design with a centralized data center hosting our main instance, reaching out to roughly 78 remote locations. We handle the VPGs through the centralized management console at our data center.

We also use the Zerto to replicate from a primary host to a secondary host in case the primary goes down; we have a kind of cold box to which the solution replicates.

Our final use case is if we are updating a plant's entire server rack, and we use Zerto to replicate the old servers onto the new ones, which results in less downtime.  

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Paul Mickenbecker - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst, IS Infrastructure at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In my previous company, I used it for disaster recovery. We protected our critical workloads in another data center where we would replicate our primary workloads.

In my current company, we're in the middle of a data center consolidation project and we're using Zerto in two ways. First, we're migrating the workloads we had in one data center to another, about 250 servers. It took us about three months to complete the migration. We had to schedule all of our moves and work with the business to validate that the services were fine and accessible, once they were moved to the other data center. We've completed the migration and a data center has been shut down, and we're working on building disaster recovery for our primary workloads in Azure.

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Wendy B - PeerSpot reviewer
Wintel Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use Zerto for our disaster recovery procedure and testing to ensure our servers and virtual machines can failover from a production environment if there's a catastrophe. We have a disaster recovery test twice a year and use Zerto to recover the environment.

We have two environments for Zerto. One is for the US, and the other is for Europe. We updated one last week to version 9.0, and the other still uses version 8.5 but I will update that today or tomorrow.

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KM
Cloud Engineering Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use Zerto to replicate our gold systems. Gold systems refer to those that require recovery in a disaster recovery environment within 24 hours, with a maximum allowable data loss of one hour. Therefore, the Recovery Time Objective is 24 hours, and the Recovery Point Objective is one hour.

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Raymond Rosario - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Zerto is used as our go-to disaster recovery failover software for the replication of key systems from our main office to our main data center. We primarily use it to protect VMs.

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Angelo Winfield - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Lone Star Park

Zerto is deployed on a VM, and we use it to replicate the database for our POS system in our data center.

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AB
Head of IT at TWM Solicitors LLP

Our use case has evolved over the years. Initially, we strictly used Zerto for its original purpose: continuous replication of our virtual machines. We had a ransomware attack and needed to instantly restore virtual machines on or off-site without too much aggravation. That has been successful. The product expanded since then, and we're using many other features now.

We haven't replaced our other backup solutions yet, but we're considering it. I need to do some more testing of my databases and mail servers. It depends on how we utilize the cloud in the business. We're currently using an on-prem data center with a reserve disaster recovery site, but we're contemplating a transition to Azure. For example, if we are using Exchange Online, I'll need to find an appropriate backup solution. It may be something in the Azure stack, but I don't know yet.

We plan to use Zerto for cloud disaster recovery eventually. I'm in an upgrade cycle because I need to upgrade various backend elements to put me on 9.5, which I think is the latest release. That will give me immutable storage and benefits like single sign-on and multifactor authentication, which insurance companies increasingly request for all our applications. I plan to start shifting workloads into the cloud, and Zerto is one of the tools that will help me with that.

Zerto is deployed across my organization's entire computing infrastructure. We've got several different departments in the firm, so it handles many workloads. That sits on a Windows environment, and it replicates a data center where we just buy some shelving space. Including equity partners, consultants, and other visiting members of staff, we have around 250 users over seven sites.

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TK
Senior Systems Engineer at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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TF
Senior Data Center Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1-10 employees

We use Zerto for the disaster recovery capabilities that it provides us. It is for our Tier 1 applications. 

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Giovanni Golinelli. - PeerSpot reviewer
Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

We implement Zerto as a part of a Disaster Recovery process for our valuable customers, in various environments. Most of them consist of two sites owned by the same customer, connected with campus or wan link, but both using VMware virtualization platform.

Recently we realized a dedicated infrastructure in our Datacenter, then started to propose to our customers DRaaS using those resources as a recovery site and including dedicated 24x7 support. 

Few customers use the public cloud (Azure) as a recovery site: we could only implement and configure the solution or fully manage it because we are also a Microsoft Gold and Tier-1 partner.

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GK
Global Lead Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am the global lead for infrastructure for the VMware and Windows Server environments. We are mainly using Zerto for disaster recovery. We have a prime site in Missouri, and we have plants in Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, and Korea. We have 400 to 500 users in the environment. 

We have installed Zerto software on the DR site and the production site. We will be using Zerto for the production site for all the centrally used applications, such as SAP, file servers, and Exchange. Because this is a central site, a lot of other sites come to this site for various things. 

We also have Zerto on the DR site. In manufacturing, there are 60 or 70 tools, and each tool costs around $500,000. When the site goes down, you cannot transfer these tools very easily. It takes time. These are big tools, and it takes time for them to go somewhere else. You have to do a test again and go through the qualifications procedure, which takes time. As the IT department, we are interested in getting the applications that are used by all the sites centrally located, and if anything happens to the primary site, we want all the applications to be already there on the disaster recovery site. We just bring them up, and we are good to go.

Zerto will help to protect VMs in our environment. We have tried that in the test environment. That would be another reason for using Zerto.

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CS
Director IT at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for disaster recovery. We were looking for faster recovery time objectives. Our primary use case is protecting virtual machines in our environment.

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Mansoor Hanif - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP

We purchased Zerto for our business continuity and DR approach to make sure that workloads are available. We have 1,000 servers but are only protecting 250 of them because they are our core servers. The ones we don't currently protect are Tier three applications.

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TK
Senior Director of IT Security & Infrastructure at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees

We're solving the issues of disaster recovery with it. So, our main use case is disaster recovery. We use it to do real-time replication of our data so that if we needed to failover for whatever reason or we had a disaster at our primary data center, we would be able to spin up in our colo disaster recovery location with minimum downtime. Our delay is about five seconds. So, if something negative were to happen to our data center, our DR copy would be within five seconds of the original copy, which is pretty good. We are also using it for testing.

Our setup is on-prem. It enables you to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but we didn't go that route. We went the route of creating our own colo location. So, instead of leveraging Azure or AWS, we decided to maintain our own facility. Our primary data center is on-prem, and our disaster recovery location is a colo location that we control.

The current version that we're using is 9.5, which is the latest. When we installed it, it was probably version 8.

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DC
Manager of IT Technical Operations at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto to replicate all of our production solutions. We replicate to cloud storage.

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TF
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

We use it for disaster recovery. We do disaster recovery in the cloud as well. We also do routine testing of the disaster recovery functionalities.

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GY
Team Lead / Virtualization SME at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We mostly use Zerto to replicate applications and database servers between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. We have a number of business applications, Oracle servers, and three sites that we replicate to our DR site, and Zerto works well.

We deployed Zerto on private cloud and on-prem.

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DB
Senior Systems Engineer at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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DT
CIO at Per Mar Security and Research Corporation

We're backing up VMs with it. Our company has about 200 VMs and we're using Zerto on 30 of them in the main line of business applications. We're using it to replicate all that data over to our DR site so we can do our testing and reporting against that. 

Within those 30 servers we've broken out into three different SLAs on which ones get spun up first. We have it all scripted with monthly plans to fail over, spin it up, actually use it over there, spin it down, bring it back into production, etc.

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DR
Principal DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto to back up our VMs to our disaster recovery site.

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Jason Tucker - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at Majestic Realty Co.

We are using it for disaster recovery. We have recovery point objectives (RPOs) for our ERP systems, financial systems, and real estate systems.

We only use it for on-prem disaster recovery. We are not using it for the cloud.

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Brent Bishop - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager IS Technical Services at Kalsec

We use the product solely for disaster recovery.

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KP
Sr Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery replication side to side. 

We were running VMware Site Recovery Manager and it ran well. It was a great solution compared to what we had before. We didn't have disaster recovery issues. We were just doing our test. It ran superbly. Zerto improved the amount of time it took to failover and address any issues. We went from failing over in about three or four hours during the test to it taking one hour. It was very fast.

It's in a single department in a single company. Luckily, we don't really have to support much of our field force. We have approximately 4,000 agents who are in eleven states, but we don't have to go out into the states. We're on in one building and it's one business unit. We manage the failovers but it's just one group management.

Approximately four users use the solution.

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RB
Server Administrator at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We currently utilize Zerto as our disaster recovery solution. With Zerto, we replicate production virtual machines to our DR site. This approach enables us to recover and bring everything back online in a disaster swiftly. Our recovery point objective can be as low as five seconds, depending on the replication point.

Additionally, we employ Zerto for scaling purposes and for conducting upgrade testing. This entails spinning up VMs in an isolated environment, allowing us to perform various tests. For example, a few years ago, we tested the upgrade of our active directory domain controllers. By validating processes within this environment, we can ensure their smooth execution in production. These are the two primary use cases for Zerto in our organization.

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CZ
Virtualization Manager at Teknor Apex Company

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and DR testing.

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John Skarja - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Analyst at Niagara Health System

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and business continuity. We have also used it significantly for transferring workloads between different environments.

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JM
Disaster Recovery Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

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D. Ngunyen - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at State of California

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and backups.

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CU
Head of IT at Leadway Pensure PFA

We use Zerto for our application data recovery.

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Jagadeesh Ethiraj - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead, Global DataCenter Services at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and cloud migration.

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Shawn Woods - PeerSpot reviewer
US Infrastructure Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

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Oran Turner - PeerSpot reviewer
ISD Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We have previously used Zerto for data center migration projects. We have another data center migration coming up within the next year where we will be using Zerto as well.

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DR
Enterprise Data Management Supervisor at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company

We use it for disaster recovery and to migrate machines from one location to another.

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Griffin Walker - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

Implementing failover to a secondary data center is crucial for ensuring business continuity in the event of primary data center loss. This strategy involves automatically redirecting operations and services to the secondary data center when the primary one becomes unavailable. This not only minimizes downtime but also enhances overall system reliability. 

The failover process requires robust synchronization mechanisms to ensure data consistency between the primary and secondary data centers. Regular testing and monitoring are essential to validate the effectiveness of the failover mechanism and identify and address any potential issues proactively. 

In summary, failover to a secondary data center is a strategic measure to safeguard against disruptions, offering a resilient solution for maintaining seamless operations in dynamic and challenging environments.

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SB
Senior Security Engineer at North Shore LIJ Huntington Hospital

We use the solution for replicating VMs from our on-site VMWare sites to both Google Cloud and Azure clouds. This allows us to feel confident not only in our disaster recovery capabilities but also in testing applications from our on-site data center to isolated cloud instances where there won't be any IP address or domain name system conflicts.  

The continuous backup gives us a better point in time recovery. It also reduces the amount of bandwidth to move the Zerto VM data from site to site, and we like that.

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DA
Global IT Operations Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

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Jeremy Jones. - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant It Manager at TH Plastics, Inc.

We use Zerto for offsite disaster recovery. We have over 70 VM servers, several of which are our mission-critical servers that are replicated to our VMware hosts at an offsite location. 

We also replicate our Citrix environment and Disaster Recovery Zen App servers with Zerto to our offsite location as well. Most of our servers are Windows-based operating systems. However, this doesn't matter because we are replicating the VM servers. Further down the line, we may invoke extended retention for some of our more important servers.  

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Mike Erin - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of IT Infrastructure at Fay Financial

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery. We replicate up to Azure, and that's essentially disaster recovery as a service.

Overall, the effects of RPO have been great. They are never more than a minute or two, even throughout the production day.

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Gregory L. - PeerSpot reviewer
Converged Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto as a DR tool. Instead of having to have a duplicate DR server, we can add a system to BPG and point it to whatever our DR site will be and replicate it for customers.

We also use it for migration planning. If we need to move VMs from on-premise to Azure or back, or it was built in the wrong place, we can easily move it over. 

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GC
Manager of Architecture and Network Operations at EMPLOYEE HEALTH INSURANCE MANAGEMENT, INC

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery replication between two sites.

We started to use this solution to help with disaster recovery planning and fast recoverability.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have two different SANS by EMC, VMware as our DOS network operating system, and we have a mixture of Windows, Linux, Red Hat, and Cisco switches.

We haven't done DR in the cloud because we don't do anything in the cloud.

We haven't used Zerto for immutable data copies because everything is on-premises. We just use it in a VM environment for the VMDK replication.

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TB
Network Engineer at PRICE TRANSFER, INC

We're currently doing a two-tiered on-site and off-site replication, with one long-term retention being displaced into a cloud and one long-term retention being displaced to a third data center. We were looking to make our recovery solution more streamlined and efficient, that's why we implemented this product.

We're not as huge as everybody else. We just have large devices. We have four SQL servers running, each of which is about six terabytes, so our continuous replication is a lot larger than others. We also have multiple secured file storages in the two-terabyte range, so we replicate around 140 terabytes continuously, utilizing about 60 VM servers. Our primary and secondary production is VMware, and our third-tier backup area is a hypervisor. 

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CM
Cloud Hosting Operations Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We're replicating mainly some of our critical applications. One is our backup solution and then also some critical applications that we don't want to have to recover from tapes. That's been working very well for us. We actually just recently went through a DR rehearsal, where we ran a quick test and that ran for about a week and then completed that test. Then we were able to report that we were able to successfully recover our critical ERP system inside of the remote location successfully.

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JL
IT Director at Kingston Technology

Originally, I was looking for a solution that allowed us to replicate our critical workloads to a cloud target and then pay a monthly fee to have it stored there. Then, if some kind of disaster happened, we would have the ability to instantiate or spin up those workloads in a cloud environment and provide access to our applications. That was the ask of the platform.

We are a manufacturing company, so our environment wouldn't be drastically affected by a webpage outage. However, depending on the applications that are affected, being a $15 billion dollar company, there could be a significant impact.

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MU
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I used Zerto in my last company for disaster recovery. It was a hospital, and now, I work for a bank where we use it for both disaster recovery and migration. We are doing a major migration.

Currently, we are doing disaster recovery only on-prem, but down the road, we will also go to the cloud. We are planning to go to Azure, but we do not know what we will actually use at that time.

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Andrew Watts - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Ivrnet Inc.

We utilized Zerto to facilitate the migration of servers within a data center from one location to another and employed it for disaster recovery purposes.

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PL
Deputy Head of IT Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Zerto is primarily used for disaster recovery. In rare cases, it is also used for backup, but only for long-term storage.

We deployed our on-premises infrastructure in two data centers in Russia located in two cities, and multiple regions with combined infrastructure. We also had two data centers in Europe.

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Nathaniel Maddux - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Total Quality Logistics

In the past, we were predominantly using Citrix Hypervisor in the Hyper-V shop. Now that we've moved to VMware, we utilize Zerto to move those VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor over to VMware.

We're also looking at utilizing it for our DR site to be able to push up those VMs to the remote site in the case of a DR situation.

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SM
Sr Manager IT Infrastructure at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

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

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SK
Manager System Administrators at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

It's deployed on private cloud. I have two data centers, one in New Jersey, one in Ohio, which is my job site. I'm using a Zerto instance for my servers and another for my VDI machines. I can replicate everything.

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CS
Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

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.

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DS
Windows Administrator 3 at a insurance company with 11-50 employees

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.

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Barry Bontrager - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Manager at The First National Bank of Hutchinson

We utilize the solution for our primary backup and recovery source. We use VMware for all of our servers. 

With the ease of integrating with our complete virtual infrastructure, it is nice that we can replicate easily between our HQ and DR sites. 

The flexibility in utilizing the test environment to allow production servers to be test restored with no interruption to the actual production server in use is really nice for quick and efficient testing. 

I highly recommend it for companies using virtual infrastructure.

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Stafford Hall - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Data Center Architect at Cable Bahamas

We're a managed services provider that uses Zerto primarily for disaster recovery as a service. We offer Zerto as a DR option for our clients. Our customers in the Bahamas need a DR option outside of the hurricane belt, so we have workloads throughout the world to ensure our customers have somewhere to restore from. 

Currently, we run Zerto in a vCloud environment. All of the services are brought up in a vCloud environment. It saves us from having to constantly buy equipment. The vCloud environment enables us to spin up an environment as needed instead of having unnecessary hardware sitting there using resources.

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Paul Velasquez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Recruiter at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case currently is for replicating virtual machines on a production site and for backups. We also use it for onsite cloning, and we have a license that enables us to do that.

We don't use Zerto in the cloud at the moment. 

View full review »
Dan Janousek - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at National Indemnity Company

We are replicating all of our production VMs to a DR site. We also have another offsite vCenter that we are replicating to a DR site for protection and eventual testing.

View full review »
JW
Manager of Information Services at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

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

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

View full review »
TF
Software Engineering Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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

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Trilok Khanna - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Consultant at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

Our environment primarily integrates Zerto with VMware. This includes offering Zerto's self-service portal, which integrates seamlessly with Cloud Director. Additionally, we have Zerto integration at the vCenter level in situations where we don't use Zerto Cloud Manager and its self-service portal. This variety reflects the different use cases within our current processes. Since Zerto is our primary offering for disaster recovery solutions, we tailor the implementation based on customer needs.

We implemented Zerto to safeguard our private cloud infrastructure workloads. While disaster recovery is its primary function, we also leverage Zerto for data migration.

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TC
Accountant at TEE TEE

I use Zerto to store and protect my files. Whether I'm working on a project or just need to access old files, Zerto ensures everything is safe. This makes it very convenient, as I can easily access any information I need with just a single click.

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Aldo Centino - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Waternet

We use Zerto to verify the information being transferred from one data center to another.

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Abdellateef Hasan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory. 

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MM
Sr Director, Private Hosting at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

We primarily use it for DR, that is, for VM replication between two data centers, using it not only for replication but also for orchestration.

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AN
IT Infrastructure Server Manager at a logistics company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use it for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. The DR purposes are being looked into as well.

We've got about 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. These Hyper-V machines are used and converted to VMware, and these are the two environments that we work with now, both on-premises and in a hosted environment.

View full review »
RM
Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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

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

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Dov Goldman - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We primarily use Zerto for DR as a service but also for high availability purposes. It's mostly deployed at our on-prem colocation data center. We also do a little on the cloud, as well. 

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AC
IT Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use cases include replication and disaster recovery. 

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Jose Tomala - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Linux System Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

View full review »
JC
Analyst at COUNTY OF BUTTE

We have approximately 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. Those Hyper-V machines are being used and converted to VMware. We use Zerto for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. We are also considering using it for DR purposes. 

Our prod environment runs on-premises and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. Our development runs on machines and hardware. In the event of a DR event, we would shut down dev and bring up our secondary copy of production. We hope that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

View full review »
BP
Disaster Recovery Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery (DR) purposes. We needed a tool to provide a quick resolution during a failure or problem and help us achieve our goals related to our service level agreement (SLA). We needed a tool that would help us in providing the availability of lost services within a specific time frame. We wanted to make sure that in case there is a problem and we have to execute the DR procedure, it is quick, easy, and safe. So, the main purpose for going for Zerto is related to meeting the required parameters for RPO and RTO.

We don't use Zerto for backup purposes. It is used only for virtual machines. We also have physical servers, but we have different tools for backup. 

Currently, we are using it for on-premise data centers, but we also do proof of concept tests with public clouds or hybrid clouds.

View full review »
RS
Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees

We've got two data centers, and for any of our applications that are not in some kind of a load-balanced or high-availability cluster, we use Zerto to replicate them, to make them as highly available as possible, without building that into the solution. We replicate between 100 and 150 different VMs from our North Carolina data center to our Chicago data center.

View full review »
JS
Information Technology Director at Cameron county

Right now, we use it just for disaster recovery.

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SS
Solutions Manager at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

I am a solution provider and Zerto is one of the products that I implement for my clients.

Most of my customers use this product for disaster recovery purposes. Some of them use it in a local, on-premises environment, whereas other customers use it in the cloud.

We have assisted some of our clients with on-premises to cloud migration. These were customers that had an established local environment but wanted to explore the cloud. For these clients, it is a cloud-based DR implementation.

There are four or five customers that did not want a cloud deployment, so we have implemented the DR site on-premises for them.

If the client is given the choice, typically they prefer a cloud-based deployment. CDP technology is becoming the new norm, even for the backup industry. However, there are some instances where it is not an option. For example, in some situations, they cannot use cloud-based storage due to legal and compliance requirements.

Some of our customers that are making a digital transformation cannot afford to lose hours or even minutes of data. As such, I think that cloud-based disaster recovery is the future and the customers understand why it is much more important for them. Together with our reputation, I see this as a game-changing situation.

View full review »
DC
Senior Server Storage Engineer at MAPFRE Insurance

We do a semiannual disaster recovery test, usually one in January and another in September, where we fail our entire company over to our Arizona DR facility. We run the business out of the Arizona location for the day. In order to be able to do that, the Zerto application allows us to migrate 58 machines over to that location and allows us to run our business from that location for the course of the day.

View full review »
SP
Sr. Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

A lot of our focus area has been around capacity planning that includes virtual machine rightsizing and then construction for failover and resiliency-type models. The other area that is important to us is looking at data in motion, data at rest, and data in transit.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted to be able to go ahead and focus a lot on workload migration and disaster recovery.

View full review »
Gaurav Sharma. - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution was primarily used for disaster recovery for clients. If there was a major issue in the data center, it allowed the client to move to the second data center. It was also used for migration to virtual machines.

View full review »
DW
Computer Services Division Manager at a government with 51-200 employees

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

View full review »
SW
Sr Systems Engineer at a construction company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery as a service and site-to-site migrations. 

View full review »
BM
Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We utilize Zerto for our disaster recovery solution, which involves replicating our virtual machines to a remote hot site to ensure failover capabilities.

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JT
Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Our main use case for this solution is disaster recovery, migration and app testing.

View full review »
Ken-Adams - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

Its primary use case is for disaster recovery of 10 servers that we have in-house.

View full review »
PP
Tech Lead, Storage and Data Protection at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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

View full review »
CF
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case is for our Tier 1 application environment, we're an SQL environment. We have around 25 VMs that are replicated to a hot site or warm site. And we're a VMware shop and we use Pure Storage as our SAN, but that doesn't matter because Zerto's agnostic. 

We're a small shop. I am the only Zerto user and my official title is Senior Systems Engineer. I handle anything data center-related as far as information stack, the blades, networking, VMware Hypervisor, and Pure Storage. We also have a Citrix environment as well we have to support. I do all of the data center work.

View full review »
ED
Technology Infrastructure Manager at County of Grey

We needed Zerto in order to provide a disaster recovery solution for the entire organization. We use it to replicate some resources on-prem and for quick recovery. We also use Azure to replicate for disaster. If we ever have a catastrophic failure or attack at our main headquarters, we could failover and run our resources in Azure. 

We don't use Zerto for backup, we use Veeam. Once the new long-term retention features are added to Zerto, then we will investigate using it for that and possibly dropping Veeam.

View full review »
BV
Support Engineer at BIOS Middle East

We use Zerto for replication.

We implemented Zerto to help with the high bandwidth required for the live application replication.

View full review »
Kristopher Ducheney - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Engineer at PNFP

We use Zerto for server migrations between data centers during the role swap that we do. We use it from a recovery standpoint as well.

We currently do not have disaster recovery to the cloud. We go between our data centers. That is what Zerto helps us accomplish.

View full review »
JK
IT Analyst at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Our biggest use case is real-time replication to a secondary site in case of the need for a disaster failover. We also use it for file-level protection and restore, but the main purpose is to help add another layer of protection in the event of a disaster.

View full review »
TT
Lead Infrastructure Team at a government with 10,001+ employees

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

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

View full review »
TP
Virtualization Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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

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

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

View full review »
Lambert Tomeldan - PeerSpot reviewer
SVP of Technology / Head of Information Technology at Barkley Inc.

Our use cases are disaster recovery and long-term retention against ransomware.

View full review »
SS
Enterprise Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

View full review »
NR
Senior Manager, Technical Services at a logistics company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use Zerto for real-time replication of our systems, company-wide. The main reason is disaster recovery failover.

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ML
Enterprise Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
JP
Disaster Recovery & Cybersecurity Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

For one client, the use case was to facilitate data center migration, and for another client, it was for failover and failback of the data center for DR. We wanted to have controlled failover and failback of related applications for DR.

We have not used it for disaster recovery in the cloud. Everything has been on-prem so far.

View full review »
MM
Database Admin at Fintec

We primarily use the solution for data replication. We have it in Oracle. It helps with disaster recovery. We have a primary and secondary server and the data can move between the two thanks to Zerto.

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TH
Sr Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

The primary use case is disaster recovery. 

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Daniel Griffiths - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at Aunalytics

We have customers who come in for DR as a service, but we also do inter-cloud DR.

View full review »
MG
Lead Site Reliability Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Zerto is primarily used for site-to-site replication and recovery, low RTO and RPO, and migration from onsite to the cloud.

Currently, we have ZVMs installed on Windows Servers in our environment, vRAs and VRAHs installed on our vCenter environment, and ZCAs installed in our Azure environment.

I am not the primary user of Zerto. I am sort of the implementation or API specialist on it.

View full review »
CS
Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

We use Zerto as our primary disaster recovery tool for our most important servers.

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JC
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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

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

View full review »
ND
Solutions Architect / Building Supervisor at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

View full review »
John Skarja - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Analyst at Niagara Health System

We use this solution for disaster recovery and business continuance.

We are protecting: SQL, our file servers, and some other applications that are specific to the healthcare domain.

View full review »
DC
Systems Engineering Manager at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

View full review »
MB
Systems Architect - Cloud at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

View full review »
PW
System Engineer at American Medical Response

We use Zerto for data migrations. We use it to move our virtual machines from one location or data center to another and eventually, we then switch that over to DR from our facility in one state to another. It's for the migration of existing VMs.

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Ravi Theja Rachamadugu - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at Krish Services Group, Inc

We are using it for disaster recovery. 

View full review »
CH
Server Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We've been using Zerto for data center migration, but we will begin using it for disaster recovery. Because of some data center issues, we're still using version 9.5. One of our data centers is at 6.5 and the other one is at 7, so we can't move any or upgrade to 10.

View full review »
RL
Lead Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I use Zerto for disaster recovery. 

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JC
VMware Engineer Infrastructure Team at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Our main use case for this solution is the data center migration. We are in the process of moving from our legacy data center and all the VMs into our new data center.

In the future, we would like to look more into disaster recovery using Zerto but that's a much longer process and we are still looking into it.

View full review »
MikeEllis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at AHEAD

We use Zerto to help our customers migrate and consolidate data centers, especially crossing different geo spaces or long distances.

I haven't used it for downtime, but our customers have it configured for all of their disaster recovery needs.

View full review »
SI
Network Engineer at Eastern Industrial Supplies, Inc.

Zerto is part of our disaster recovery plan. We have it set up in our main office and in a remote location in another state. We replicate all of our ERP data over to the replication site utilizing Zerto. In case there's a failure or a ransomware attack, or anything that we need to restore back to a point in time, in real time, Zerto covers those scenarios.

View full review »
ZK
Sr. System Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Our primary use case is disaster recovery.

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

View full review »
MM
Manager, Infrastructure at Vizient Inc

We use Zerto for disaster recovery of our tier 1 applications from our primary data center to our secondary data center. We have also used Zerto to successfully perform server migrations from one site to another for data center moves and company acquisitions.

Our administrators love the product and it has been proven to be easier to use than VMware SRM which we were using before going with Zerto.

View full review »
SC
Systems Engineer at Shift movers

Zerto is our main application for curbing risks. We use it to protect our workflows on applications from threats that can come from the cloud and on-premises.

View full review »
RM
Cloud Services Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.

View full review »
DZ
Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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

View full review »
KU
Sr Project manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery purposes. We do not use Zerto for backups, only for the redundancy of the data center.

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DS
System Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

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

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JL
Network Administrator at City of Greenville

We work in a public safety environment and we use Zerto for disaster recovery.

View full review »
RM
Engineering Manager at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

We've been using it to consolidate data centers. We have 13 hospitals and two main data centers and a cloud presence. We're trying to collapse everything. We've been using Zerto to move the workloads over to our primaries.

View full review »
CB
AVP IT at a media company with 201-500 employees

We have a production environment that we are replicating to a warm data center, and Zerto keeps our virtual machine-protected groups in continuous sync. It has been working really well for us.

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SP
Regional Director IT at Apache Gold Casino Resort

We didn't have any kind of disaster recovery solution in our environment, whatsoever. We're using it for disaster recovery.

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GY
Team Lead / Virtualization SME at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Database replication is our primary use case. We don't use Zerto for backups. We use Zerto as DR at our sites.

It is deployed on-premises at several sites.

View full review »
DH
Chief Information Officer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

We are using it to protect all our on-premise virtual workloads, which includes mission-critical applications, line of business applications, and several unstructured data type repositories for disaster recovery.

It is our sole disaster recovery solution for what it does. It is protecting all the workloads at SmartBank. 

Both of our data centers are on-premise and in colocations. Our plan over the next year or two is that we will very likely be shifting to DR in the cloud.

View full review »
FB
Enterprise Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto for DR purposes, we replicate what's critical to continue business. We replicate it from our headquarters to another state, a DR site. If something happens to the headquarters where we are located we could run the continued business from the DR site with Zerto.

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AA
Virtualization Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are primarily using it for migration and data protection. We use it for protection of the VM and data protection. 

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SC
Systems Admin at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

View full review »
DC
Manager of IT Technical Operations at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto to replicate to a cloud center.

View full review »
AA
VMware Engineer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

The primary use case is to migrate VMs. It's easier to use than HCX and SRM.

View full review »
AY
IT Specialist at a government with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

View full review »
Oz Pozner - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Product - CloudHome at Bynet

We primarily use the solution for continuous data protection and cloud onboarding.

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DS
Windows Administrator 3 at a insurance company with 11-50 employees

Zerto is our primary means of failing over our critical production loads that have a relatively low RPO/RTO. This is our use case for this solution.

View full review »
GM
Resiliency Specialist at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use Zerto to replicate data between our on-premises data centers, as well as for replicating data to the cloud. It is used primarily for disaster recovery, and we're not using it very much for backups.

View full review »
JM
Senior Director - Information Technology at Revenew International

We have servers in Houston and we have servers at a DR site, we need to be able to make sure that they're replicated in some form or fashion. That's what we use Zerto for, to replicate between our primary site and our DR site.

View full review »
KS
Sr IT Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

View full review »
MM
Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

We offer Zerto to our application owners and system owners as a DR solution for them. It's part of our service offering from the VMware side because we do the infrastructure for them. We help orchestrate and set it up for them at the back end.

We also use Zerto to remove RDMs from the environment and help manage our storage. If we need to relocate the storage, we use Zerto, especially when going from multiple vCenters or multiple clusters. It's very convenient.

View full review »
GK
Converge Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We primarily use it for disaster recovery.

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BE
Systems architect at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our use case is disaster recovery or failover. It makes it a lot easier for us to actually test DR because of some of the coordination and orchestration that are a part of Zerto. However, our use case is strictly DR, making sure that we have the right RPOs, and Zerto does a good job of handling that.

View full review »
ZS
Converged Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I primarily use it for disaster recovery backup. Also, whenever we need to move things between our different environments, e.g., moving it to different vCenters and Azure, that is primarily done through Zerto

View full review »
MC
Senior Systems Administrator at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

We use it for a hot DR site for our primary production environment, allowing us to fail over all of our production servers in case of an emergency.

View full review »
BS
System Administrator at City of Rock Hill, SC

We're using it for site plate replication and fail-over or disaster recovery. We're primarily using it to replicate between the data centers that we own and operate.

View full review »
DB
Senior IT Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

We don't use it for backup.

View full review »
Bayu Jayasukma. - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Product Specialist at PT. DATACOMM DIANGRAHA

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery.

View full review »
NG
Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

View full review »
RL
IT Operations at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery. 

View full review »
KS
Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are using Zerto as a DR solution for our environment as well as for migrations. When we do data center migrations, we use it to move our servers over.

We are only on-prem at the moment. We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud.

View full review »
RD
Senior Systems Administrator at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

We have Zerto as an emergency backup if we were to lose electricity or compute.

I purchased Zerto because I wanted to get a return to operations and to minimize the downtime.

View full review »
Lee_Castillo - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Information Security Engineer at Lumen

We use the solution for two different data center sites. Inside the data centers we use VMware virtualization, NSX stretched VLANs and Dell servers. There are many servers, storage, virtualization, and a myriad of operating systems such as Red Hat and Windows Servers. 

We use Zerto to replicate our VMs from one site to the other, where we don't want to have to pay for two licenses of the same thing. We also do this to have high availability or to have the disaster recovery version of a piece of software. It is a benefit to be able to use Zerto to replicate that VM at the second site, and not have to power it on or anything. We know that it's always replicated on the other site. We currently use the solution for disaster recovery only but we are looking at longterm backup retention in the future.

View full review »
MT
Network Administrator at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

We protect about 15 virtual machines. We use Zerto to replicate them from our home office in Pennsylvania to our co-lo facility in Arizona. Our main data center is in our Pennsylvania office, but if that office were to go down, we would use this as a DR solution so we could run our company out of Arizona.

View full review »
LP
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Currently, we use Zerto to replicate our production visual systems at our disaster recovery site in Germany. This allows us to easily meet our RTO and RPO.

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DT
Sr systems engineer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for DR and general backup. We have snapshots or shadow copies with Microsoft and we do Zerto backups to our other locations so we can always get the data back.

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AF
Cloud system engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

We rely on Zerto for data recovery and cloud migration as our primary disaster recovery solution, especially since we lack a dedicated backup data center. Zerto's ability to block ransomware attacks and facilitate rapid server recovery provides us with significant peace of mind.

This comprehensive solution extends beyond processor recovery and data center capabilities. It also encompasses application testing and on-site data protection, ensuring comprehensive coverage in the event of any incident, including ransomware attacks.

We implemented Zerto to mitigate concerns about cyberattacks and data breaches. Zerto functions as a robust multi-layered defense, safeguarding our data. Even if an attack breaches the initial layers, Zerto allows for rapid recovery, ensuring minimal downtime and continuous synchronization with the production server.

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PL
Senior information system analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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MA
Sysadmin with 11-50 employees

We use Zerto for offsite replication.

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AM
Engineer

We are mainly using it for DR and, in a few use cases, we leverage it for migration as well. It really fits our use cases.

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RC
System Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We use Zerto for replication to a DR site of Windows and Unix machines. We like having a testable solution which does not interfere with the performance on our production machines. It has an included feature allowing assignment of a specific LAN or IP address to segregate the machine while testing. We are replicating 56 machines, totaling more than 30 TB, but compressing at 70 percent for space savings. We use the email alerts as a way to monitor replication status. This helps in off hours alerting for potential problems.

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reviewer1226331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto at our remote locations as a backup solution in environments where we don't have the infrastructure for redundancy. It allows us to use two HPE DL380 servers as stand-alone VMware hosts and replicate the VMs without needing shared storage.

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Tim Kovars - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at Quarles & Brady LLP

We primarily use this solution for disaster recovery. The initial sync was from Pure to Compellent, and DR with disparate storage was great. Once we identified our critical servers, vetted the Live and Test Failover, and got the necessary configuration at our DR site, we are now able to perform tests in a safe bubble.

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VV
Cloud System Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

We are using Zerto for disaster recovery. By implementing Zerto, we wanted fast recovery time.

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JP
Director of IT at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We have three locations. We replicate circularly around all those locations for all our VMs. This is for DR.

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AM
IT Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We use it to protect VMs. Disaster recovery is our use case. Our compliance requires that we need to simulate a DR exercise every six months if we are protecting a VM. One of the features of Zerto is simulating a disaster recovery exercise in case of failure. We fail back the VM to the DR site, and when the event is over, we fail it back to the production site.

We are using one of the newer releases, but we are still six months behind.

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RL
Systems Specialist at KESA

Disaster Recovery and quick file recovery.  We have used Zerto to recover from Ransomware three times.  Between the attacks we have recovered over 2 million files.  We have never paid a ransome.  Our users were only affected just under two hours with the attacks, majority of the time is actually figuring out in the office which pc actually had the crypto locker program running.

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BM
Network Services Manager at M. J. Electric, LLC

Virtual server replication, as well as a level of backup, to our disaster recovery site.

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JS
Adjunct Professor at Southern New Hampshire University

We were able to replace most of VMware SRM with this solution. It allows us to failover individual machines or application clusters with ease. The one thing that it does not do nicely is a full site failover. We have never needed that aspect though (only for testing).

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EI
VMware Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We use it mostly for VMs that are hosting client-facing applications and mostly client databases. We replicate 100 servers; we have 100 protected VMs.

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AS
Systems Engineer Virtualization at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

I've used it for a temporary migration. We had to shut down a data center and we moved some database servers over to a disaster recovery site. We then did the maintenance at the data center and brought them back.

We're using it only for on-prem and we use it to replicate from our onsite data center to a co-location, but there is a fiber connection between the two, so it isn't an internet-based replication.

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GG
Principle Systems Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

We primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

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AB
Manager - IT Infrastructure and Resiliency at Asian Paints

Our primary use case for Zerto was to enable replication at our DR site for virtual appliances and automation of the failover - failback process. This also gets utilized for recovery at our DR site at different timestamps using the journal history.

This solution is very light, with zero-touch deployment and very enhanced dashboards. 

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OS
Cloud Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I am a cloud provider and I use Zerto to provide disaster recovery solutions for my clients.

Recently, we had an issue where one of our customers using Oracle Server experienced corruption in a database. The customer doesn't know when the issue started, so we used Zerto. We started to do a real-live failover for the machine, and we were able to determine the timestamp for the start of the issue. Prior to this, Oracle engineers tried for four hours to fix the database but did not have any luck in doing so. Ultimately, we were able to save the customer's data by using Zerto.

A few of my customers are using file-level restore but the majority of them are using the replication features for disaster recovery.

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RW
IT Professional at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto for disaster recovery data replication from our headquarters to an offsite data center at another location.

It has replaced all of my legacy backup solutions.

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AB
Head of IT at TWM Solicitors LLP

Real-time replication for our Disaster Recovery site, which is currently hosted in another on-premise site but will shortly be moving to a Data Center in the Cloud.

I have also used this solution to do point-in-time restores of Exchange mailbox items and to check updates from Microsoft.

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ED
Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

Our primary use case for Zerto is disaster recovery.

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MC
Hosting Services Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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GV
Lead Network Security Engineer at a energy/utilities company

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

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BF
Systems Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for disaster recovery, by replicating to our DR data center.

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TL
SQL Database Administrator at Aurora Mental Health Center

It is controlling our mission-critical production system as a backup and a failover.

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RD
Technical Account Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery and migrations. We have two primary sites that we replicate to. If there are on-prem clients we replicate back and forth between those two and then we replicate our off-prems to them as well. We use on and off-prem as well as Azure. 

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reviewer1254672 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto as a robust failover and replication solution.

Currently we replicate about 50-55 VMs to our DR site. We have run multiple test failovers, and have even done a full-scale, full company REAL failover.  Zerto worked flawlessly. 

We use Zerto to make sure that our primary Server farm is replicated and protected in case of a failover.

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CA
System Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We use it primarily for DR.

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TL
Sr. System Engineer at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees

We primarily use Zerto for our critical applications and infrastructure to allow immediate failover at our DR site. We licensed our critical applications and database servers and standard backup the rest. In order to increase uptime, we replicate our entire Active Directory infrastructure as well.

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SG
Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We use it for backup and replication.

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BH
Systems Administrator at a legal firm with 10,001+ employees

We use Zerto as a migration platform from a customer's data center or from their on-premises environment to our data centers. We also use it for disaster recovery.

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DK
Cloud Systems Engineer III at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We utilize Zerto to backup our on-prem environment to our cloud provider. We've also used it for migrations from on-prem to our cloud provider.

Our deployment model is a hybrid. We're using on-prem and also replicating to Azure.

It is used in our production environment and also our lower environment, on-prem. It's like a DR, as we're backing it all up to our cloud provider. There are a handful of servers involved, replicating and backing up.

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EA
Project Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

In our case, we used Zerto Replicator mainly for DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan), but also for testing.

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it_user364671 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We use the ZERTO Implementation to pretend critical VM and Groups of VM (Application Consistency) from failing. The solution with ZERTO helpy us to TEST and Failover without pane. Installaion is based on local primary site and remote desaster site with a distance of a few 100km and a bandwith up to 30Mbit.

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reviewer1199877 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

We use Zerto to protect our staff information against ransomware and is outlined in our disaster recovery plan. We have a DR site that we failover to if anything happens at our primary data center. We have only our core services, that we could not live without, being protected.

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SR
Sr Director Security Operations at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

For all the most important applications, we are using Zerto as a hot site in case something were to go on with our on-prem data center-based applications. We can immediately resort to Zerto as a failover.

It's deployed for replication from our data center into the public cloud.

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BK
Security Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are using Zerto to facilitate cloud adoption in the organization. Our product teams are migrating their VMware workloads to the cloud, and Zerto is helping with that task.

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reviewer1246608 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use the solution for DR failover/testing on our DR site. We're a Windows/VMware environment and replicate 25 virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery site. The solution allows us to perform live failovers without shutting down our production systems.

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reviewer1245939 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

We use Zerto to keep a replica copy of the core servers we have running at our backup site. In the case of an outage, we are able to flip over to our backup location. Zerto keeps these servers up to date within seconds and in the case of an outage at our core data center, we can flip over services with little to no data loss.

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SF
Senior Operations Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use for this solution is DR Replication to a separate data centre. We use VMware at both sites. We're currently replicating around eighty VMs from our primary data centre in London to our secondary data centre in Beccles. Most of these are SQL servers with the VSS agent installed.

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KH
Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

My primary use case is doing demos and testing to make sure that Zerto is going to work for our customers. I test it mainly for disaster recovery and backup.

We've tested with VMware, Zadara, and AWS.

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GN
Solutions Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Cloud-based disaster recovery. However, do your homework on your provider. There are several options besides Azure and AWS that don't have their surprise charges. Be sure to check them out.

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BC
IT at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

We primarily use this solution for Replication and Disaster Recovery.

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it_user774891 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at a financial services firm

Zerto is used to provide real-time replication for the important virtual machines that my organisation uses to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site to ensure business continuity. 

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it_user1168068 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT system administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 51-200 employees

We use this solution for disaster recovery.

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it_user782481 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees

Replication of business critical VMware VMs over WAN to the remote disaster recovery datacenter.

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it_user782472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator, Core Infrastructure & Microsoft Systems at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

We primarily use Zerto Virtual Replication to protect groups of servers in our production data center, replicating them to a secondary site. We also protect essential test and dev servers.

I have also used it in a past role to carry out a datacenter migration project. 

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Buyer's Guide
Zerto
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Zerto. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.