Zerto Reviews

I use Zerto for ransomware resilience and data recovery.

Zerto has improved my organization by allowing us to replicate individual VMs or groups of VMs. It allows flexible protection and recovery of data. It is also easy to integrate with other solutions.

It has had a positive effect on our recovery time. It is very fast.

Zerto is easy to use. As long as you have the technical know-how, it is easy to use.

The near-synchronous replication is good. It ensures data availability and fast data recovery. I love that. We use Zerto to replicate the VMs from one site to another, ensuring data availability, protection, and disaster recovery.

Zerto has had a good effect on our RPOs. There is continuous protection and availability of data because it is all automated.

It is very fast. It has had an effect on our RTOs. It has reduced our downtime by 20%.

Zerto offers a comprehensive solution for data recovery and protection. It has saved us a lot. It has saved about 30% of the time.

Zerto has a user-friendly interface and intelligent dashboard. It is easy to manage. It has saved about 40% of the time.

We have had a positive impact on our IT resiliency strategy. Continued data protection and automated DR have been very helpful.

Zerto has simplified our compliance with industry regulations.

I love the seamless data integration between on-premises and cloud environments. Fast disaster recovery is also valuable.

I also love that it provides real-time and historical analytics.

It simplified my work. It has a user-friendly interface. It is easy for me to create my views in the dashboard. It makes work easy for me.

I am enjoying it so far, and I am happy with its capabilities, but it is expensive.

Their support can be faster.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

It is stable. I have been using Zerto for three years, and my company had been using it before I joined. It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

Its scalability is good. Zerto can meet the needs of any business.

We use it in multiple departments and at multiple sites. There are ten people who use Zerto. They are strictly admins.

My experience has been positive. They are always trying to help.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because we sometimes do not get a fast response.

Positive

I have used the Microsoft Azure solution, but I could not get the fastness, scalability, and ease of management that I wanted. I was looking for these capabilities, and that is why I went for Zerto.

Zerto is a better solution, but it is expensive. Zerto is a bit faster than other solutions. Other ones have automated disaster recovery, but Zerto is faster.

It is deployed on the cloud. Its deployment was straightforward. It took about three hours. Three people were involved in its deployment.

Like every other software, it does require some maintenance from time to time, but it is not much.

We have seen an ROI. Whatever we do, we are getting a fast result. It is always an advantage for the business. Zerto has had a positive effect. I do not have the metrics, but it has saved us a substantial amount.

It is expensive.

I would recommend Zerto to anyone who wants fast disaster recovery and protection. It has most of the features that people are looking for. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

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.

Our RPO with Zerto is under five minutes. The RPO time is dependent on the bandwidth. 

We have asynchronous replication with Zerto.

Zerto integrates well with Asynchronous Continuous Delivery tools. However, unlike SRM, Zerto offers protection during workflow rollbacks. This rollback functionality, along with its centralized reporting and UI management, makes Zerto an attractive solution.

Zerto offers a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, eliminating the need for physical data centers. In this instance, we leveraged Zerto to protect a private cloud workload running VMware and ensure its seamless recovery in Microsoft Azure. Disaster recovery in the cloud is crucial. As part of the private and hybrid cloud infrastructure team, I'm involved with a service in our catalog that runs workloads in a private cloud but configures disaster recovery primarily for the public cloud, Azure in our case. This is important for both the customer and the organization that provides the service.

Zerto offers significantly faster recovery times compared to SRM. SRM's recovery process involves multiple steps, requiring a detailed checklist to ensure the correct sequence is followed within protection groups and recovery plans. This complexity is a common issue with other data recovery products. Ideally, any product, not just from a design perspective but also from implementation and operation, should be user-friendly. It should be intuitive and easy to operate to achieve its intended purpose. This is a key reason we chose Zerto over other data recovery solutions.

Migrating data with Zerto is incredibly easy. It performs a continuous replication of our data in the background, even while our primary server is running. This live replication ensures all changes are captured before the server is shut down. In other words, it includes everything, resulting in a seamless migration process. Triggering the migration is also straightforward. We simply need to choose whether it's a move operation or a scale-over operation.

It helps reduce downtime during migrations. While there might be a brief interruption when workloads are shut down, there's no data loss. However, downtime for disaster recovery depends on the specific application's RPO. RPO isn't a fixed value; it varies based on how much data loss an application can tolerate.

It helps to reduce our overall DR testing. The solution is designed so that we can trigger the app or a move operation within three steps. Making it easier and quicker for the administrator or customer that is working on it.

Zerto's user-friendly interface simplifies operation and management, allowing us to minimize the number of people involved in overall backup and DR management.

The user interface is very user-friendly. Additionally, the journaling feature allows users to restore their progress to any point in time. This is a valuable feature, especially since similar products, like SRM and SCX, don't offer this functionality. In my opinion, this journaling capability makes Zerto unique.

Zerto integrates with vCloud Director to protect workloads deployed there. However, it would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation. For example, Site Recovery Manager recently introduced integration with VMware Aria Automation, allowing the protection of workloads deployed through Aria Automation. This functionality, including site recovery management, is currently not available in Zerto. Zerto's strength seems to lie specifically in its VMware capabilities, which could be an area for improvement.

Another point to consider is the potential for Zerto drivers to cause issues in ESXi environments. In some cases, users have reported problems and discovered that the Zerto drivers are not verified by VMware. While HPE is a technical alliance partner for Zerto, improved collaboration between VMware and Zerto regarding driver validation would be valuable. This information seems to be missing at the moment. We are currently in touch with our technical account manager to clarify this.

I have been using Zerto for over five years.

Most Zerto issues we experience are at the ESXi level, likely due to the Zerto drivers. However, these issues are not currently impacting our work.

Zerto is scalable.

The technical support is quick.

Positive

I also use SRM but I believe Zerto is better because it's easier to integrate with other systems. While SRM also offers integration for workload protection through VMware Aria Automation and a SIM connection application similar to replication, it may have some limitations. For instance, Zerto might require an agent to communicate with the source system, which could be a disadvantage. This suggests that there might be features offered by other vendors that Zerto could incorporate to improve its functionality.

The initial deployment is straightforward. Zerto has introduced an appliance, making deployment even easier by removing the need for patching and object installation.

One member of our deployment team is needed for the deployment.

As a Zerto partner, we do all the deployments for our customers and provide comprehensive training.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

I recommend that new users take advantage of any training videos and documentation offered by Zerto to familiarize themselves with all the features and how to use them.

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

Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate.

The fast recovery speed is Zerto's most valuable feature. It gives us peace of mind to know that the VMs are replicated and are there if we ever have a disaster. We recently upgraded our license to include the cloud because we are considering migrating from our hosted data center to cloud-based DR. Zerto's near-synchronous replication has been excellent. We haven't had any issues during our testing. It has worked flawlessly, and we're very pleased.

It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script.

We have used Zerto for five years.

We haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't done a lot of scaling. We initially purchased a number of licenses, and we've kinda stayed about that number for the whole time. We're currently protecting 175 VMs, which is a small fraction of our total environment.

I rate Zerto customer service eight out of 10. It's been good. I haven't had to open any tickets with support, but we worked with our sales engineer to configure things, and it went well.

Positive

We've used backup providers before to do replication, but we've never had a solution that offered immediate recovery. We evaluated VMware SRM and some other backup providers, but none were quite on Zerto's level. The recovery speed doesn't compare to Zerto. Zerto is easy to use aside from the scripting aspect of things, but the other solutions aren't aren't any better in that regard. 

The setup is straightforward. We deploy an appliance, and it's up very quickly. The initial installation is done in a day, but it takes time to configure things exactly the way you want them, get the VMs protected, write scripts, etc. 

It's hard to quantify the return, but we can do what we set out to. We're able to recover critical services in a DR site. We haven't had to use it, but we know it's there, and we've done testing that shows it works. Hopefully, we don't have to use it, but it's a good insurance policy. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

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.

Zerto is easy to use. Zerto is the leading disaster recovery solution.

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

Zerto has helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication. Previously, we used to hire other providers for these services, but now we have everything in one system, saving us around 30 percent. For example, we used to have to keep a copy of our data on Veeam Backup, but now we can store it all in Zerto. This saved us time and money, and it has also made our IT infrastructure more reliable.

With Zerto, we are meeting our RPO better. Previously, it took us 20 minutes and now it is five seconds. 

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

In our simulations, we observed a reduction in downtime when using Zerto.

Our recovery time with Zerto is excellent in data recovery situations, such as those caused by ransomware. We can save around five hours compared to other solutions.

Zerto reduced the number of people involved in our data recovery by 30 percent.

The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation.

File management can be improved. Zimbra is the only platform that allows for file replication.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

The technical support is average. We have had some cases where we were not as comfortable with the outcomes as we were with other solutions.

Neutral

We previously used a custom solution, but we switched to Zerto to unify our systems and improve visibility.

The initial setup was simple. We were able to deploy one FPE every two weeks. One person was involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto, which saved us 30 percent of our costs and improved our disaster recovery time.

The price is reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we were confident that Zerto was the best, as indicated by the Gartner chart.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is deployed to replicate our on-premises and virtual infrastructure data between our two offices in Germany and Italy.

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

I recommend that new users take advantage of Zerto's flexible license program to buy one or two licenses and try them out before fully committing.

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's very critical for us. For example, with SQL, we used to use Always On to protect databases at the database level, to give us high availability and DR. But now, in Azure, we don't do that. If we wanted to do that, we would have to have a SQL Server on the protected site and another up and running on the DR site and those machines would always have to be up and running. To save on costs, instead of using Always On, we're now protecting the VM as a whole, thanks to Zerto.

It's also the main tool that we use for our annual DR tests for all of our production applications. Once a year, for one week only, we do a failover of those critical production applications from the primary site to the DR site and we let them run there for that week. Zerto does the failover and the DR site becomes the active site while everything replicates to the former primary site. Once the week is over, we do a failback and Zerto is the main tool that we use for that, and we repeat the whole process. We're then good for the whole year. Zerto is protecting those VMs.

Another advantage is that Zerto has decreased downtime for us. It could have been a situation where we were down for weeks because of something that Azure did on their end. Even though Zerto has a partnership with Microsoft Azure, sometimes Azure makes changes that are disruptive. There was one change that affected our ability to replicate our critical workloads and it was a rough one. For that week, Zerto found a workaround because they were not getting any progress on resolving the situation from the Azure team. Zerto applied the workaround in their code and we were good, but that was a rough situation. Zerto goes out of its way to help its customers. We've had issues but Zerto has been very responsive.

The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick. Our SLAs are 24 hours, but Zerto could do what we needed, on-prem, in seconds, and in the cloud, in minutes. Zerto is way ahead of what our SLAs are.

Sometimes we do failover tests to make sure that we will potentially have a successful failover or migration. It's very flexible and does its job very well. And one of the things I love about the product is that whenever you do a failover, it gives you the ability to either commit or roll back. Some of Zerto's competitors don't have that ability, at least in Azure. That's critical for us because after we have DR tests on a weekend, we have users sign off on their applications that everything is fine. If something isn't right, we can always roll back to how everything was right before we started the DR test. And if everything is working great, then we commit.

Since we are primarily in the cloud now, Zerto definitely needs to update its platform. When we were decommissioning one of our on-prem data centers and going to Azure, there were issues. And with Azure, it's still limited in the way we can manage our resources there. Zerto hasn't quite kept up to date with how certain elements run within Azure.

In Azure, there is something called resource groups. You cannot create a resource without a resource group. You can apply tags to resource groups and that tagging information is very critical to our company because we now have 95 percent of our production environment workloads running in the cloud. We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group.

When it fails over, it uses the name of the group that you created within Zerto. The VM is failed over with no problem in a reasonable amount of time. But the problem then becomes that the resources are part of a resource group that has no tags. It does not follow our naming commission for resource groups and then we're stuck. It's not as easy just renaming the resource groups.

These components are very critical for us but they are missing in Zerto. They're aware of it because we've had feature-request meetings with our Zerto account team. They're working on it for the next release and have mentioned that they are going to be making improvements to the product. But for now, it's lacking.

Also, a downside with Zerto is that there is a lot of management overhead when running it in the cloud. On-prem, we used to have one Zerto management appliance, but in the cloud, we have about 20 to manage to protect our VMs. Zerto has mentioned to me that, for the next release, they're building it from the ground up and it will be much better in the cloud, with more cloud focus.

Because of the experience that I had with Zerto running on-prem, where we only had one appliance in each of our data centers, I deployed one in Azure as well. Little did I know that there were limitations and that more appliances had to be deployed because of all the replication of the traffic and the number of VMs that we were trying to replicate. But Zerto stepped in and helped when it came to that.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

They're very helpful. They always want to understand your situation and, even if they're not sure, they do their best to help and fix the problem. 

For on-prem, there were always references, but for the cloud there is a bit of a knowledge gap. I would always get workarounds, fixes, or KB articles for on-prem, but the cloud implementation is where the documentation is lacking. But the team does its best. It depends on who you get. Some know Azure, or cloud, and some still lack that knowledge. But if they don't know, they get the right person on the call.

Positive

We were a VMware shop on-prem and we were migrating to the cloud from on-prem VMware to Azure, so the tool that we were using to protect VMs through DR would no longer work. We used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for years when we used to be solely on-prem. 

We started looking for a product to help and, at the time, Zerto was the one that stood out among the competitors, and it was a solid product, so we started using it. Zerto is definitely a more effective product. It is a lot quicker when bringing our VMs up on the DR side, and even when we do a fallback. And Zerto is a lot easier to use than VMware.

The initial setup was not straightforward.

And maintenance is required for upgrades when there are newer releases, especially when it comes to Azure. There are newer releases that contain fixes and improvements and we do update the version of the Zerto appliance. They are running on Windows Servers, so we also have to patch the operating system. In Azure, there are a lot of SKUs with different pricing. Depending on the utilization of a VM, we sometimes make changes to the family types to save on costs at the VM level.

I did it with our Zerto account team, which included our sales engineer. Just the two of us were involved.

Zerto saves us a lot of time. One team member alone can handle the DR test using Zerto, whereas before, when we used SRM, at least two or three people were involved from the VM perspective and from storage. VMware was integrated with our NetApp environment and that meant at least two or three team members were involved. But with Zerto, just one person uses the product for a DR test.

We looked at Azure Site Recovery. We were close to going with it. It did have the ability to do resource group selection, but there were two showstoppers at the time that prevented us from going forward with it.

When we were looking at Azure Site Recovery, it seemed that it had a better cost per VM, but Zerto was not that far off. And we were more comfortable using Zerto to protect our VMs than the other products we were testing.

My advice is that if you're in the cloud, you really should test the failover of your VMs. If tagging is not a key component, you'll be fine. But if it is, that is a huge problem. And expect a lot more management overhead when it comes to managing Zerto in the cloud.

In terms of our RPOs, Zerto is consistent. From time to time, it may run past our SLAs, but that's because there are network or VM issues. And that happens very rarely. It almost always meets our RPOs.

The ease of moving data varies on the size. A good thing about Zerto is that it does give you a little chart indicating the step that it's at in the replication process.  But even if it's a small VM, it does take some time, including setting it all up and starting the synchronization. It's not instant.

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.

It gives us a seamless, performant data center migration. When we were migrating between physical data centers, we did what normally would have been a 72-hour job in about 18 hours. A large part of that was thanks to Zerto being able to rate limit and throttle how much data was being sent or transfers were happening. Being able to script around it and create governors was important. We didn't have that previously. That is one big use case that has saved an immense amount of time and effort. 

Previous data migrations were really tough and hard. It was high stress with late nights, no sleep, and a lot of coffee and Red Bull. We didn't have that this time. Everyone felt that we got through this in a slightly longer working day instead of 72 hours. So, we have seen a return on investment.

Another use case is being able to do disaster recovery testing at will, whenever we want to. That has been really special.

Primarily, the most valuable feature is the simplified deployment methodology, but also use the REST API and script ability for modularity. 

Zerto API Wrapper is really good. We don't use the Zerto module specifically. Instead, we use API Wrapper, which is a lot better in my opinion. The fact that we can extend the functionality of Zerto to high-level policies or processes via the API, whether it is through API Wrapper or otherwise, sort of brings out a lot of interesting usability use cases for us. We can do self-service replication of servers via ServiceNow, scripting, etc., offering extensibility. It is really easy to use. It helps to save a ton of time as far as replication goes.

There are open API calls. Things are available via the UI and API that may not be documented really well. You can open developer tools, inspect those elements, and see what those payloads are, but it is an extra step. For someone who is kind of new to the game, they may not know how to do that. 

Zerto is not an API-first company, but an API-now company. A lot of the functionality that is in Zerto UI is not in the Zerto API. That is likely because it is baked in code or compiled down DLLs. Every business has to make a decision to work on something, and I don't think Zerto has committed resources to working on that part. It is a problem to do cleanup for Azure Blob Storage, recovery site storage, or whenever you remove a VM from a VPG without deleting the VPG. That needs to be improved. 

Doing scheduled disaster recovery connection tests, e.g., being able to migrate things up and get things working on a recovery site without needing a user to do it, would be helpful.

Analytics has a 90-day window, where it keeps data. It would be nice to have on-prem storage instead of cloud storage for that so we can keep the data for longer. Unless you discover the problem within three months, you don't know that you need the data. Then, it is gone by the time you realize there is an issue. 

I would like to be able to offsite some data. We export our analytical data so we can keep it longer without having to script around it. It is possible right now, with the API, to script around it. However, I don't want to have to write a monthly process to export the last three months of data to a spreadsheet so I can just have it if I need it. 

A lot of the PowerShell documentation in some of Zerto tutorials or how-tos is a PowerShell-to-legacy sort of paradigm. It needs to be updated to at least 3, likely 5, or probably 7. It looks like it was written by someone who didn't know PowerShell, but had to learn it really fast. It does the job. If you copy and paste it, then it will work, which is something. That is way better than what a lot of people do. However, I feel like a bit more effort should be pushed towards PowerShell.

I would like them to build an alerting system. I am trying to find a way to connect it to my business continuity people, so the Zerto people don't need to be pseudo-business continuity people all the time. They can just be IT people. 

I would like more creature comforts for the scripting engineer. It would be nice if they could expand the development community around building different APIs or API structures for Zerto.

I have been using Zerto for two and a half to three years.

Stability of Zerto is significantly better now than it used to be. It was a little unstable, especially when you were doing massive amounts of migrations. I think there was a disconnect with Zerto's handling of jobs and the ticketing systems inside of vCenter. I am not saying that was a Zerto problem. It might have been a vCenter problem, where vCenter was unable to communicate how much availability it has to field those jobs, then its internal tickets were consumed in a way that Zerto couldn't deal with them well. There was probably some type of internal timeout that was reached when things failed. 

If you are not prepared to rapidly click retry a bunch of times, that will be a big problem for you. You can get around it by scripting. That is how we did it. You can get around it by updating Zerto to at least version 8, maybe even 7.53. 

The stability now seems solid. If there are some disruptions of service, I am not seeing it. We have taken off restrictions on our network throttling. So, we are not throttling that at all. We fullly let it go and it doesn't seem to be having a problem.

We have hundreds of terabytes up to petabytes of storage and replicated data. Triple-digits up to thousand-plus virtual machines are being replicated. There is RDM to VHD and VHDX-VMDK conversions. We have temporary disks or bypass disks involved for situations where VMs might be turned off or removed from environments without any lead time, thus pausing VPGs.

I don't think it has a problem with scalability. We haven't yet run into a problem scaling it. You could always deploy more ZVMs and ZCAs. The analytics engine has a calculator to figure out how many you should deploy. Follow that. It isn't perfect. If anything, it's a little conservative. Just don't test the waters unless you are prepared to sink a little bit. Be prepared to sink if you're going to try to min-max it. You can always tweak it. There are so many tweaks you can do on the ZVM and ZCA side. We have had to do probably a half dozen of those because our environment isn't the same as every other environment. 

You can push it to its limits. I don't think it is a problem with scalability. I think it is a nuance of your environment.

There were some hurt feelings with some of our engineers. They were told that it would just be plug and play. They didn't realize that it would actually take up a duplicate amount of storage. As a point of policy, that is how it works. I asked them, "How do you think it should work? If you don't think the storage should double, where are we putting the bits? Where is it going? How is replication happening?" It makes sense to me, but I think they were told something else. I don't know if that was a salesperson from Zerto's side or an advocate on the company's side, but they were misinformed. 

Zerto support is usually very good. I feel like we always get those Sev 1 cases where something is wrong with the core product. For example, every time that they have released a new minor or major build, there are release notes of what has been fixed. We have had five of those line items since version 7.

We have been using it since version 5. However, since version 7, we have had five big line items for those changes since we have a big environment and script a lot more, and maybe we script more than a lot of Zerto customers. We found a lot of weirdness in our environment, and that matriculated up. I got a call from the East Coast technical representative for the dev team. Every day, I had a call on the update of those tickets. You don't see that a lot. 

Some platforms work flawlessly. Some platforms are more simple. Zerto is a complicated platform doing a lot. After that initial burn-in period with our support team, we got grade-A service, which was really great. I would probably rate them as eight or nine out of 10. There is room for improvement, but if they never improved, I would be happy with the level of service and support that we have now.

I am pretty patient. From a programming standpoint, technology is hard and environments differ greatly, and I am willing to forgive a little bit. I don't speak for all my company. There are people in my company who don't accept that. They want it fixed tomorrow (or yesterday). Personally, I understand that it is hard and takes time to understand as the logs only tell you so much. 

Positive

I can't even remember what the previous product was. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment. I have been involved with subsequent deployments, which were straightforward. Originally, I babysat it, then I owned it in tandem with another engineer who was actually the owner of it. I helped with the scripting part since I had more scripting knowledge. 

Subsequent deployments take 15 minutes, which is not long. With ZVM installers, they ask you a question, then you put it in. If you don't have the answers, then you go get them. You have no business deploying Zerto if you don't have those answers to begin with. ZCM is just as easy.

Don't buy Zerto expecting to save money and get 100% performance. That is not how it works. That is not what you are buying. You are buying a solution that you have to invest in. Don't invest in buying the license, but none of the technology to support it. Ask the hard questions and expect answers that aren't, "Yeah, it will do that. No questions asked." 

I don't have a lot of experience with other solutions, but I have used a lot of technology. I know what approachable and unapproachable platforms look like. Zerto is an approachable platform. If you know the concepts of data replication and data recovery and know what those data protections look like, then you should be able to pick up Zerto with relative ease. 

Generally speaking, things in Zerto are where I would expect them to be. That is hard to do sometimes on other platforms. Sometimes, you get designers, UI developers, or user-experience people who don't really understand how engineers will approach a product. The Zerto platform seems tailored for people who are full code, low-code, or no-code, which is really special. I don't feel like you see that a lot. You start to get more of it now. However, having someone who is not specifically geared towards data replication, data recovery, or data protection accessing Zerto, they can use it if they have some of the nomenclature. They need to know a very small vocabulary in order to be able to navigate Zerto since things are where you think they will be.

Determine your questions in advance and ask them to the Zerto sales team. Get them to engage the engineering team as best they can. It does what it is supposed to do. It is not a magic silver bullet that just takes out everything. Everything is in layers. Zerto is only as good as your storage, back-end network, and replication infrastructure layer. It is only as good as the things allowing it to be good.

It has done a great job for what we needed it to do. I don't really have to worry about it doing the job. It is already doing it.

I would rate Zerto as eight or nine out of 10.

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.

Most of my customers are interested in DR and do not know much about the long-term retention capability. Our last three deployments already had a backup implemented from the integrator and didn't need an overnight one to avoid the loss of data. We discussed this with them and explained that this product offers much more than what they are using it for. We pointed out that it was a two-in-one solution but they continue to use it primarily for DR.

Our customers find that the interface is really easy to use. It gives you a great deal of flexibility for the administrators, as well as for the end-users to a certain extent. Overall, with respect to ease of use, this product scores the highest points in this area.

The functionality available in the console is not complicated and is easy to use, especially for DR failover. It just works.

It offers a high level of compression, which is very good. My customers and I are interested in this feature primarily because it saves bandwidth.

The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. This is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum.

I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version.

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

Based on the number of support calls that I get from my customers, where we have done the deployment, issues arise very rarely. From time to time, we get calls because the allocated space is running out. Otherwise, it is pretty much stable.

Even the situation where the allocated space runs low is rare and I haven't had this type of call in a long time. The reason for this is that I take precautions during deployment. For example, I check to see whether they have too many workflows. I know what it is that we need to do including how many VRAs we need to deploy and what the configuration should be. Over the past three to four years, I have only had to deal with four or five support tickets. Apart from that, I haven't experienced any problems.

I do not have a great deal of experience with scaling this product because all of my customers have only a few hundred VMs. I know that Zerto has the capability to go beyond 5,000 or 10,000, but that is something that I've never experienced. My understanding is that it is very capable at the data center management level.

In the initial phase, I leveraged technical support, but then I completed the deployment.

During the PoC, there were one or two times where I had to contact them to deal with issues. I am pretty happy with how they respond and how they follow up compared with the other vendors that I work with.

I don't have much of a complaint with respect to support.

I have been working with Zerto since version 6 and the most recent one that we deployed was version 8.5. Approximately six months ago, our customer that was using version 6 was upgraded to version 8, because version 8.5 was not yet released.

I also have experience with Veeam but Zerto uses a very different technology to perform the backup and change tracking. Veeam leverages the VSS technology for the volume set up, which will do the job but it is not ideal. Zerto has taken one step ahead by utilizing the Journal technology, which is the main difference that I can think of between these two products.

Prior to working with Zerto, many of my clients were using the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) feature, which comes built into the product, based on their licensing. I have also had a customer who was using Commvault and others that were using NetBackup. These are typically the enterprise-caliber products that I expect to find.

One of my customers is using Veeam and because of the difference in price, with Zerto being more expensive, they did not switch. My customer felt that Veeam was convenient and the price was more tolerable. This is the only instance where my customer did not transition to Zerto.

The customers who switched have done so because Zerto provides the lowest RPO and RTO. It is one of the main points that I emphasize about this product because it is very important to them. There is also a saving in bandwidth, which is something that my customers are concerned with because they typically don't have fancy high-speed connections. The compression is superb and really helps in this regard. These are the two primary selling points.

For us, this solution is not difficult to deploy. For a complicated environment then you have to do careful planning but otherwise, it is not hard to deploy.

Typically, if everything is well in place, the deployment will take between one and three hours. In cases where the customer's environment is very complex then I might need a little bit more time. I would estimate that it would take six-plus hours, after careful planning and ensuring that all of the resources are in place.

The installation takes less than 30 minutes; however, the customer environment increases the time because we have to do things like open ports on the firewall. We tell them about these preparations in advance but we always end up doing some of the work ourselves. In situations where the firewall has already been properly configured, I can normally complete the installation and configuration in one hour.

I have two customers that use the cloud-based deployment on Azure but the majority of them use it in a local, on-premises environment.

The main challenge that I face with this solution is the price. All of my customers are happy with how this product works and they like it, but unfortunately, in the market that I represent, Zerto is expensive when compared with the competition.

Another issue is that Zerto has expectations with respect to the minimum number of devices that they are protecting at a given price range. I understand that this is an enterprise product, but unfortunately, price-wise, it is really tough when it comes to the TCO for the customers in the one or two countries that I represent. Apart from that, everyone understands the value, but at the end of the day it comes down to the price being slightly higher.

Pricing is something that I have discussed with the regional head of sales in this area. I have explained that you can't have a price of 25 million per year in this region, and in turn, have requested a lower price with different models for corporations. Unfortunately, I have not received a positive response so far.

With the separate backup product expected to be available in the next release, in a way, they have already done what I was expecting to offer to our customers. They have also announced some features that are really interesting. Right now, I'm waiting to get the new products in my hands.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is that if the system administrator has basic knowledge about networking and storage, then setting it up and deploying it will be easy, and not an issue at all. They just have to be careful and take the appropriate time to plan properly, especially in a complex environment.

In summary, this is a stable, enterprise-grade product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

It improved the way we function because we know that in the event of a disaster, we can easily recover our state of being in a rather quick amount of time. If there's malware, for example, we can go back to a point in time, up to five seconds before the malware started, and start production from that point on, undoing all the damage that the malware did. The ability to do that is a very good feature. It has replication and DR, but at the same time, if something happens with malware and it compromised your backups and compromised your offsite remote copies, you have that third option of saying, "We'll go to Zerto and see if we can reverse back from that point." That's pretty comforting.

If we need to fail back on work we would absolutely use Zerto for that. We'd probably do that first before we tried the backups. It's easier to do that than to try to look for the backups. 

Zerto decreases the amount of time spent trying to get everything back online. That's the most important part. If something happened, I could just go back. It would take me around 15 minutes to locate something and launch it fairly quickly. If you're doing it from a backup, you're probably going to look for a good backup, launch it, then it's got to set up. So you're looking at an hour, maybe, if you're lucky. It's a big difference.

We once had a server and there was some software and one of the controllers in the software wouldn't boot up and we did not have a copy. It was a brand new server, so we didn't have a backup copy of it just yet. We used Zerto to go back. It was in Zerto, but it wasn't on backups yet. We were replicating it just in case and we used that to restore the server back. I called support who walked me through it fairly quickly. The whole thing took around 15 to 20 minutes. It was easy. If we had used a different solution, it would have taken us an hour or maybe two. We would have needed to find the backup and then mount it. We would then launch code or a bunch of series of Wizards. Zerto is always running so if we need to get something, we just highlight, and then we go to more, and whatever we want to do, it's right there. We don't have to turn it on. We don't have to get it going. It's always running. Backups are in a stopped state, so we would have to get it going first, then look for something, then mount it, and then do whatever we're going to do. There are four steps there, versus with Zerto where it's, "Oh, it's in this VPG," go to more, it gives you all the actions you could do, clone, delete, copy and you just do it.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery because it's only two people who manage the Zerto platform. It's mostly me. I do about 80% to 90% and then 10% is my supervisor. He's more into the meetings anyway. We require two people.

The replication is the most valuable feature. It's almost like a tape recorder. You can rewind if you need to, if something bad happens. You can rewind the tape and your production begins where your tape left off. Where you want it can be replayed for such a purpose.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. For replication purposes, it's definitely better than Veeam. Veeam doesn't do as good a job as Zerto does when it comes to replication. The other alternative would be to just have backups somewhere. But even with backups, you lose a lot of time because you have to set it all up. With Zerto, you failover, you just click a couple of buttons and you run from the other location.

It's very easy to use. Every morning I go into the dashboard and I can tell the health of the VPG groups. If there's a problem or anything, I'll see it in the active alerts. So the dashboard is pretty simple. There's a status that tells you if the RPOs are falling behind, or from what you set it to, there's a reminder that tells you when to do the failover test. I like that. If I'm going to add a server to a VPG, I just go to the VPG section of the menu, find our group, select it, and then edit it, go to VMs, and there it is. It gives it to me side by side. It tells me what is unprotected on the left, and then this is protected on the right. I can move from unprotected state to protected state or I can remove something that's in a protected state to an unprotected state. It always tells me at the dashboard from the bottom, how many licenses I have, and how many I'm using. I don't go over my license count where I might not be protected. It's pretty easy.

We've never had a situation where we had to go to Zerto for downtime. It's just protection, but we haven't had the situation where we've had to failover. Hopefully, we never do. It's like car insurance. You want car insurance, but you don't want to get into an accident.

The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere. It's prolific. So with Zerto, you have to find it within the Zerto application. Hopefully, as they grow, it'll be more out there on the net. Same thing with Microsoft. If you look for a problem with Microsoft, you're going to find millions of articles on it, maybe it's just because they've just been around for so long. I'm hoping that one day Zerto is just as prolific and can be found everywhere.

I have been using Zerto for two years. 

Zerto is very stable. There are very few errors. I just don't see any errors. The only one time we had an issue with it was with journals. We were filling up too much and we called support and they walked us through it. We found out that we were replicating a temporary drive and it's not good practice to back up temporary drives because they constantly change when it's not even necessary. So we removed the temporary drives and we never had that problem again.

I'm a system administrator.

If you were doing recovery from a backup, you'd probably want at least two people looking through backups quickly to speed up locating them. You might need somebody to set up a mount server to mount the backups on. You can get away with three people but you might need three depending on how urgently you want to get going. It depends.

For DR management, if I was with another solution I would require more people. If you have a Dell EMC, they have storage administrators that that's all they do. And so that's a dedicated position. I'm a system administrator, which means that I do the storage, I deal with the servers. It allows me to do a lot of things, not just one thing.

Scalability is excellent. We have one here, we have the one there. I know we could add another ZVM, another location, or another DR site if we wanted to. That's been in the talks for a long time. It's on pause now because of COVID-19. But if at some point we decide that we want to add a secondary DR site that is geographically opposed to where we are now, then we could replicate one, two, and three at the same time. It's got good potential to be increased.

We have about 20 to 50 servers in Maryland and we replicate all the critical, essential ones that would be required to continue to run business to North Carolina. Everything is virtual, which helps us out. We have one Zerto virtual manager here, we have a Zerto virtual manager in North Carolina, and we do failover every six months just to make sure that it works. As a matter of fact, we have a failover test coming up that we have a test of failover to make sure that it's continuing to work.

The support is very good. I've used them before. When we had the journal issues, it was easy to resolve the issue.  We've done upgrades on the versions and they've always been very responsive. If I do a P1, which is critical or they do a P4, which is just information, they respond fairly quickly. 

We've used Veeam for backup. Before Veeam, we used Unitrends, which is even worse. It didn't work. 

Zerto's good for DR replication. I don't think anybody does it better. Veeam is good for short-term backups. It doesn't do well with the replication part at all - even they say it. I've spoken to reps who agree and say that Zerto's better at it than they are.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You set up a ZVM here and there and tell it the direction you want it to replicate in to. You can create an EPG to the journal that goes attached.

Because we were setting it up in the middle of things, it took around one month. 

We did have a strategy of how to put those servers here, build servers there, and IP addresses we were going to assign to it. We did have some sense of where we were going to put things.

We used the reseller who helped us with the deployment. They were great. It was easy. No problems with it.

We bought it through CTI.

I think we do see ROI. We need a defensive posture to protect ourselves.

Pricing is okay. You don't use Zerto to put all of your servers in Zerto. The purpose of it is you take what is absolutely critical to continue running your business, whatever servers are in your business continuity plan. Those are the ones that you put in Zerto. Then you'll be fine in the licensing because if you just buy 200 licenses or 300 licenses and you're backing up a utility server or any server that's not essential, then your bosses are going to think you're spending too much money. But if you just zero in on what's critical and back that up with licensing, you'll be fine.

There are no additional costs that I'm aware of. We have the licensing fees that come up and then that's it, as far as I know.

We had a couple of proposals. We had the one from Veeam but we realized really quickly that it doesn't work for replication. The other alternative would have been to save the backups to the offsite location, have servers there, and load backups at the server location. That takes a lot of manual labor so we decided Zerto would the best option.

We don't know what we're going to do for long-term retention. We use it for DR purposes only. But we are still looking at the long-term retention and what to do with it.

I would say if you're looking for true DR protection with minimal recovery time, then Zerto is probably going to be the one. If the objective is minimum time to recover, then this is the product you need to buy. If you want to spend time trying to set up again in a disaster, then there are a lot of things out there and for ransomware too. We have about a five-minute window where once data is compromised beyond five minutes, it's useless. So we need to keep the window to about five minutes. Because of that, Zerto is really going to have to do that at this point in a cost-effective way to recover. 

I like Zerto. You learn different things as you use it more and more, so you become more competent with it as you use it. I know that if you do have an issue, as with most other vendors, the easiest solution is to provide the logs as soon as you can, and then they're better prepared to respond if you do it that way.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect.