Zerto Reviews

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.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

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. 

The tool gave us a better way to respond to any problems on the production side and improved how we can recover. The recovery capability is the best part of Zerto.

The solution reduced our recovery time objective (RTO) and improved performance on the IO by around 10%. When we implement failovers and synchronization to VMs with databases, we see a marked increase in performance.         

The solution helped reduce our downtime. Before we implemented Zerto, my organization did a recovery that took four hours. Since implementing, the last time we did a recovery, it took one hour, so the solution makes recovery significantly faster. The cost of three hours of downtime to my company would be very high.   

The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great.

Zerto is easy to use, and it saved us five times in three years; on those occasions, we had problems with our VMs, and we used the product to roll back to a functional state or for failover, which resolved our issues. 

Regarding near-synchronous replication, Zerto is the best application we have right now. We could get another solution to do the same job, but from a design point of view, Zerto is an excellent tool for replication and synchronization, and we don't have a problem with it.

The IT could be better; we have sectioned areas and databases for iOS, Windows, and Linux. Because the solution is centralized, each computer has the VMs from every section running.

The solution is very expensive. 

I've been using Zerto for three years. 

Zerto is highly stable, and I rate it ten out of ten for stability. 

We didn't have to scale the solution, so I can't speak to the scalability. 

I give the technical support full marks; it's simple to open a case and get a quick response from the support staff. We rarely experience issues requiring us to contact support as it is.

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution of this kind. 

The initial setup was straightforward; it wasn't complex at all. It was very simple to install and set up the replication, more so than other solutions. 

The replication functionality is very user-friendly, so that was the easiest part. At the same time, the security aspect of the solution, integrating with our firewalls etc., was the most challenging element of the deployment.

We carried out the implementation via an in-house team. 

The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper.

We are currently evaluating Veeam, and how that would fit into our system, as many of our clients use it, so we wonder if it may be a better option for us.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

My advice to potential customers is to carefully determine the requirements for such a solution and how Zerto fulfills those. Some solutions do the same job for cheaper, so considering the price has to factor into the cost-benefit analysis.

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.

It makes me feel more comfortable that we have something to fall back on in case of a disaster. We are a large insurance company, so we have a lot of different applications and SQL Servers. We never had a disaster recovery site before, so this will protect us in the event of a disaster.

A good, valuable feature is using the preseeded LUNs, when deleting a virtual machine. Then, I put the VPG back to keep track of where I was at, so I don't have to replicate everything. Instead, I just preseeded LUNs since it needs less replication time.

It is fairly intuitive and easy to use.

You can go back fairly quickly. You push the button and there you are.

I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

It has been stable. We have had glitches between our site and DR site. When the MPLS comes back up, Zerto just kicks right back off, doing what it needs to do.

As we have been growing more VMs in production, I have still been adding to Zerto. So, I haven't had any problems with the amount of VMs and everything that Zerto can handle.

I haven't really had any problems with support. Most of the time, when calling support, I find the answer before they call me back. Or, they will send me an email, and say, "Here, try this."

I would rate the technical support as nine or 10 (out of 10).

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution.

It provides us with a safety net.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, which was very difficult to set up. Even as a test, it was hard to set up. With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy. Then, I insisted that the company buy Zerto for me.

RecoverPoint was difficult to set up and use. It wasn't as menu-driven as Zerto. 

We really haven't done any recovery or rollbacks. We are getting there. Later this year, we will be doing those types of failover tests, rollback tests, etc.

We haven't done DR testing. That will probably be done in the next three months.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

The integration with VMware is really good.

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

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

I have been using Zerto for approximately seven years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our in-house team was responsible for implementation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, it's a fantastic product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using Zerto for five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We provide disaster recovery with Zerto in two scenarios. One is for our customers using on-premises deployments, and the other is for using the multi-tenant cloud. They're buying the cloud as a service, and we're also protecting that with it.

Zerto is primarily well-recognized as a leader in disaster recovery. It makes it easy for us to talk to our clients about the solution we provide them. Since it is Zerto-powered, we don't have to answer many questions about how it works, its reliability, or its capabilities. Thus, having name recognition, a positive company reputation, and technology benefits us.

The platform's ease of deployment and the ability to isolate failovers are key features for our customers who want to perform testing without interrupting their production environments. Those are the two primary use cases.

Our operational teams have discussed the ability to integrate multiple Zerto cloud platforms more seamlessly. For example, we have acquired 22 companies over the last seven years. Some already had it deployed, and integrating those existing deployments into our primary deployment is more challenging than it could be. We have provided our feedback to them.

Thryv has been using Zerto for about twelve years now.

As a product manager, I haven't received any feedback indicating issues with platform stability, which our engineering team would certainly inform me about.

We've had no issues with the product scalability so far, whether it's individual customers or even as an aggregated group.

The size of the environment varies. We have some small customers with only a handful of virtual machines and others with two, three, or four virtual machines.

In our previous company, we used VMware Site Recovery Manager and Veeam. However, over the last 12 to 14 years, we have primarily used Zerto.

We have our private cloud, and that's where we primarily use Zerto. We also manage some Microsoft Azure environments where we have sparingly used the service, mainly because the same functionality is not present as it is when using it in a private cloud.

Disaster recovery as a service is a significant component of our overall cloud services. So, the ROI lies in Thryv's profitability, as we offer a managed service that adds value to our customers and generates a profitable revenue stream.

The product's pricing is the one area where it is less competitive. However, we understand why it costs slightly more comparing the features and capabilities. Customers prioritizing price might choose a solution offering different RPOs and RTOs for a lower cost. We have provided feedback on whether there could be a lighter option or alternative that's more cost-effective for the customers while balancing cost and performance. It would help Zerto and us win more business.

The product is superior compared to the other vendors. 

We offer disaster recovery as a service powered by Zerto. We have multiple disaster recovery targets in the US and the UK and are expanding into Canada and Hong Kong.

I am happy that they've reconsidered the decision to stop supporting Hyper-V, especially with all the changes happening in the Broadcom world and customers looking at it as a solution. Zerto's continuous support is key.

The near-synchronous feature is a differentiator. Other platforms compete with Zerto, with Veeam being the primary one, trying to get the same capabilities. It is a key factor for clients who need low RPOs and the ability to protect their data with minimal potential data loss. It cannot eliminate the potential for data loss entirely and has a minimal impact. If the customers have a production-impacting event, their data is as close as possible to a mirror of what they had at the time of the production loss. So, it is a significant factor.

To some extent, we have implemented DR with Microsoft. It is less feature-rich and has a different implementation. We offer the service but don't offer much in the public cloud. Replicating out of the public cloud adds a whole other set of challenges. We can replicate it to a VMware-based cloud. However, no VMware tools are available if we want to replicate it outside of Microsoft Azure. It makes for a different recovery and is a bit more labor-intensive.

It has greatly impacted the RPOs. As long as our customers have enough bandwidth to transmit the changes across the network to our cloud, the RPOs generally take a minute. However, if the customer has bandwidth constraints, it can take up to five minutes.

With Zerto, recovery is much cleaner and faster. It's orchestrated better, and the testing capability within the cloud is a valuable differentiator. Unfortunately, we don't have many customers experiencing disasters, so our experience is generally around the testing component and making simulated or even full recoveries for customers seeking that. It has always performed well.

I would give it a nine for everything around capabilities and the product itself. The only drawback is the pricing. If we could get a better pricing model, especially in larger deals where we need to be more competitive for price-conscious customers, that would be beneficial.

Overall, though, I'm happy with Zerto as a partner. My reaction would have been different if the Hyper-V decision hadn't changed, as that would have caused complications for some customers. 

We've used Zerto for file recovery and entire VM recovery.

Having a fast recovery time for both of our use cases is invaluable to the business. 

The ability to form our backups automatically during the day has saved us, more than a few times. 

My impression of Zerto’s near-synchronous replication is very positive. It gets the job done. 

Near-synchronous replication is very important for our organization who use a lot of different versions of files across environments and database changes. It's what we do every day and having the functionality of near-instant recovery on entire virtual machines and files is a blessing. 

We use Zerto to protect our VMs in our environment. We do daily backups with a different backup management software and having the ability to recover data in under ten seconds has been helpful.

Speed of recovery has been very effective in getting our information back as fast as we're able to get it. The daily backup solution that we use alternatively only allows a single backup versus having continuous backup replication with Zerto, it's a no-brainer.

I would like to have more granular notifications for jobs and workloads within the applying case application.

We have been using Zerto for around sixteen months. 

It's pretty stable. The company itself has been around long enough to know they're not going anywhere. The number of clients that use them on a day-to-day basis speaks for itself. 

For our environment, scalability does a great job with how it is. It can handle scaling. 

Zerto technical support is some of the best around. I know when I reach out to them over the phone or via email, they are there quickly and offer great support. 

I would rate them a ten out of ten. Every time I have to call them, they get something ready, very fast, and our issues are resolved quickly.

Positive

We still use Veeam.

We chose Zerto because when we started our path with GreenLake, we began looking into other backup utilities and Zerto was highly recommended. After we saw a product demo, we were sold. The demo sold itself very well.

Once the VPG is configured, the automation for backups happens on its own. There's nothing else to do. You can monitor but until you need to recover the files, there's nothing else to do. Zerto is very simple. We enjoy using the product. 

The main difference between Veeam and Zerto is that with Zerto, we can get our near-instant recovery window to pull entire virtual machines back from the brink of failure. We might be able to implement more recovery windows for Veeam but from a data storage perspective, Zerto does a great job with deduplication.

We had a third party enable our Zerto configurations. They did a great job. The same VPGs are still running today. 

We used an integrator for the setup. We had a good setup. They walked us through any issues we had after the setup. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is a network issue that my team is still trying to figure out. Once we take care of it, it'll be a perfect ten. 

Zerto should be our primary backup solution but until we can get the network issue resolved, it is relegated as a secondary source. It still does its job. We've used it multiple times for specific cases, and it's always passed with flying colors.

We're using Zerto to move services between our on-premises data centers and Azure environment.

Zerto has really helped us streamline migrations to new hardware or other data centers.

We use the solution to move servers and VMs between data centers. Thankfully, we don't have to use it a lot for DR. 

I love Zerto's near-synchronous replication. It's better than other applications that we tried. This near-synchronous replication is super important to our organization because we don't want to lose any data.

We're now trying to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud with Zerto. We haven't had any real use cases, but we're piloting it. It's pretty important to our organization to have DR in the cloud because we're in a very rural area where we don't have a lot of redundancy. So, it's important to have the scalability of Azure where we don't have it.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment, which is our primary use case. Our RPOs are pretty short. We can roll over a data center in 30 to 60 minutes if we have to. It's pretty quick, and we could turn everything around.

We looked at VMware's SRM but decided not to go with it.

We chose to use Zerto because the RTOs and RPOs were a lot faster with it.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is really easy to use, and its interface is really nice. It's really easy to set up the replication groups in Zerto.

We're struggling a little bit now with the appliance migration with version ten.

Zerto could make some small improvements with some of the newer features. You can back up VMs but can't back up individual objects, like email objects, which could be improved.

I have been using Zerto for about seven years.

The solution's stability is very good. We haven't had any stability issues with Zerto.

Zerto can go bigger than our environment, so I think it has good enough scalability.

The solution's technical support is pretty good. Since we haven't had a lot of issues with the tool, we don't really use the support much. The cases we've opened have been resolved quickly by the support team. The support team seems knowledgeable and quick.

I rate the solution's technical support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

We have Zerto deployed in our on-premises data centers and for Azure VMware and Azure native so that we can switch between them. The solution's deployment is really easy. You just deploy the main tool and then tie it into your virtual environments.

Zerto's pricing was not that bad. I think it's gone up since we went live and added the cloud options now that we are an enterprise. The solution is expensive, but it's worth the price.

We use both public and private clouds to deploy the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.