Network Engineer at PRICE TRANSFER, INC
Real User
Allows rapid RTO and great customer support, in the simplest DR solution I have ever deployed
Pros and Cons
  • "The whole package is valuable. The most useful feature for the company is the rapid RTO, which offers a faster return to operations and brings us back online quicker. The last time we had an issue, we recovered within about 36 minutes, which was probably the most valuable thing for us because, previously, it took four to seven days."
  • "There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

The most significant improvement is the reduced stress of running our operation. Before deploying the solution, we had two people on-call 24/7, one on-shift and one off-shift. Now our workload has been reduced, and we only have to give support over the phone, which rarely happens.

For this deployment, I realized the benefits very quickly. I already knew how the solution would provide a reliable safety net and offer a better risk-reward profile for our cybersecurity insurance. I knew this three deployments ago. The main selling points I presented for this deployment are the continuous replication, plus the reduction in man-hours and cybersecurity risk.

What is most valuable?

The whole package is valuable. The most useful feature for the company is the rapid RTO, which offers a faster return to operations and brings us back online quicker. The last time we had an issue, we recovered within about 36 minutes, which was probably the most valuable thing for us because, previously, it took four to seven days.

I've worked with Zerto since the beginning; I think it was when we were still on version one. Having that continuous replication, as we call it, where we have just a small delta point is paramount to being able to create that multiple mine backup solution or recovery solution. It's absolutely the product's selling point. 

Zerto is the simplest disaster recovery and data recovery solution I've ever deployed, and I've been doing this for 30-plus years. 

We have used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. That's the entire solution for us; it's all virtual. They can even calculate a number now, and I have 30-day testing documentation that gives them real-time data that shows a 15 to 40-minute recovery. It's astronomical because they now have a number they can guarantee to the stakeholders. 

There isn't much comparison with other disaster recovery solutions, though it depends on the configuration. A more dramatic or complex multi-tiered recovery would expand the time, but we went from four to seven days down to under an hour. For that reason, it's almost incomparable to other solutions. Depending on the deployment, even the VMware Site Recovery Manager takes four, eight, or even 12 hours. We can bring things back online in under an hour. I don't know any other solutions that can do cross-breed virtual environments or multi-hypervisors with VMware, with different types of cloud. We can go with Microsoft Cloud, VM Cloud, or Google Cloud. It's not even a comparison. If you have a good product seller and a buy-in from your network engineer and your software engineer, it's an easy sell. 

We currently have over 600 days of saved downtime. It's almost two years now without a single moment of downtime, because we utilized the failover to do maintenance cycles.  

Our last collapse was when we were hit by ransomware just about two years ago. It took out 80% of our systems, and we were back online in 36 minutes. 

I use the orchestrator for DR testing. I run a simulated test every 30 days, and we do two live tests a year. Before my arrival, they had never done a test, but that's what we do as a standard now. It only takes two members of staff, me and one other, for the entire test. It's very low-volume in terms of staff requirements.

The solution dramatically reduced the number of staff involved in recoveries. Before my deployment of Zerto in this organization, they had one disaster recovery and had to hire 19 people to do it. When we had the ransomware attack, two of us recovered the entire solution within an hour without having to hire anyone. The previous recovery costs were around $20,000 for the staffing alone, not counting the loss of revenue. I implemented the recovery during my regular work shift.

What needs improvement?

There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to the large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better.

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For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution for two and a half years, and I've assisted in the deployment at three other companies. I personally have close to ten years of experience with it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've been using Zerto for close to 10 or 11 years, and the stability is probably in the 95% to 98% range. That's pretty good, and I give it an A.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is the smallest solution I've ever deployed. It scales very well across multiple platforms and at a long-range. It's very scalable; I've implemented substantial deployments and deployments over huge areas. I'm impressed with the solution's scalability, especially the integration with vCloud environments.

How are customer service and support?

I dealt with them recently, and they're pretty solid. The process is mainly automated, they connect remotely, and I don't have to explain much as they can look at the logs. With that capability, it does work very nicely.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I replaced the VMware Site Recovery Manager and a Symantec backup solution when I came in. I also replaced the third-tier snapshot replication, which they had never successfully tested or recovered from.

We switched because I begged them to. I've used Zerto extensively, and the amount of fluidity and flexibility it offers is necessary. It gives me peace of mind and allows me to sleep well at night knowing it will be alright, which is uncommon in this business. I said as much to the company and was able to convince them within about six months.

I used Veeam and some other bare-metal backup solutions before. Since virtual servers have been in place, Veeam and SRM are pretty much the two standards, with Symantec being the tape backup solution or virtual hard drive backup solution. Since Zerto came around and I saw what the product could do, it's all I ever push for when I get called in for a company that needs a DR plan.

How was the initial setup?

I designed it all and already knew what I wanted to accomplish and what the product could do. Once we knew what direction we were going in and where the critical applications aligned, it was just a point of picking things up and putting them into placeholders already in the required image I designed for our purposes. It was pretty easy. It might take a little longer without prior experience and an idea of what I want to accomplish. It would still be pretty easy as Zerto provides excellent documentation. This is one of the most straightforward designs out there. End-to-end, with testing and approvals at each step, I think it took two and a half weeks.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented the solution on my own.

What was our ROI?

I can't give an exact figure, but I would say that protection from Ransomware tech alone paid for the initial startup process and most of the maintenance needed. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I wouldn't say I like the licensing pricing structure. Every year, it increases exponentially, which bothers me a little. It's worth it in terms of the value, but I worry the price will increase even more often after the Zerto merger. I still think it's worth it and that the solution is cheaper than the others. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Symantec, and NetApp, and we brought in Veeam.

The main differences between Zerto and the other solutions are the continuous replication capabilities and the ability to have two continuous replications simultaneously. These were major selling points for the company. With snap replication from NetApp or even Veeam, there isn't that consistency between multiple divisions. I showed the company we don't have to have VMware at the low MBR; we can have a hypervisor at a much-reduced cost, as the price was the last hope for the other solutions. 

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I don't give anybody a ten, as nobody is perfect. The best score I give is an eight, and they get that.

We don't necessarily use Zerto for immutable data copies as it's never been a requirement. I know it's there and what we can do with it if we need to.

We only use the physical solution because of the nature of our business, but we do long-term retention in the cloud. It is nice to have that long-term cloud retention, as it gives us another tier of data available for worst-case scenarios. 

I wanted to replace our legacy solutions, but we still have old-school solutions for legacy data recovery. We use Symantec for backup exec. on our bare metal, but I don't think it's critical because it's more for our legacy data recovery. After all, we're not like most companies. We have to keep our data for 24 years. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Tech Lead, Storage and Data Protection at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Enables us to achieve our RPOs and to conduct successful DR tests
Pros and Cons
  • "The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem."
  • "Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

It helps us

  • achieve our RPOs
  • conduct successful DR tests
  • provide functionality for some of our key, critical customers.

Fortunately, we haven't gone through an unplanned DR situation, but if we were to go into one Zerto would be the top technology that we would use to recover. We would expect it to function as designed to get everything back to working as normal. Otherwise, obviously, it would be a big problem for our company. Zerto is a critical, core piece of infrastructure for the IT infrastructure team. I estimate it would save us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a DR situation.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time involved. It's hard to quantify how much time it would save us because we haven't compared it to other DR products. But if we were to use our in-house data protection backup solution or our storage solution, Zerto would save weeks of man-hours when it comes to setup, compared to those other solutions. And it could save minutes in terms of the recovery point objectives.

What is most valuable?

The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem.

Zerto is also pretty simple and straightforward when it comes to ease of use. There were no big surprises.

What needs improvement?

I would like the ability to monitor the performance of some specific components. Right now we're having an issue with local and remote replications with some of the VPGs. Being able to look at individual VPG performance would be helpful. 

Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, "Hey, you're not conforming to best practices." It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on.

Another area for improvement is alerts. We're getting so much noise right now in the 8.5 version. The problem is that we don't know which are the ones we need to act on. We don't know which ones are severe versus those that are informational or notice or debug. They have told us that when we upgrade to version 9 we'll be able to tune some of the alerts. That type of alert tuning, where we can get just the emergency and error alerts, would be helpful, while not necessarily tuning out the informational or notice or debug alerts. If alerts could be channeled to a syslog server where we could filter and see which alerts are the priority that would be an improvement.

We have a network operation center and for us to operationalize this tool with them, we have to be able to deliver each alert along with an action plan for it. That way they can take the appropriate action if Zerto has some type of error. It would help if the alerts didn't just fall on our storage and data protection team. If we could transfer some knowledge and have other level-one teams look at some of the more basic Zerto alerts and try to resolve them, that would help.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've known about Zerto for several years but I've been actively using it for the last two months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is pretty good. I haven't seen the software itself break, or the services stop for unknown reasons. 

We did have an issue with a VPG the other day, where it went belly-up, and we had to rethink and do a bunch of baselines. So some type of health monitor that shows both the servers and the VPGs would be helpful.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I haven't worked with the scaling functionality because we only have it in our two major data centers. But I think it would be pretty straightforward and simple to set up scaling.

Currently we're protecting about one petabyte with Zerto. We have some room to grow still with Zerto.

How are customer service and support?

Much like with any technical support—and this is true whether you're talking about IBM, Microsoft, Dell EMC, or any of the big tech players—their level-two guys are definitely good, if you can get one of them. But the level-one guys seem not to be as good. Zerto was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and it shows with their level-one guys. They're not as vested in the product. All the level-one people who were vested in the product probably left. So a lot of the level-one guys aren't very technical. 

We oftentimes have to work with our technical account manager to get cases moved up to level two. Once they're there, they seem to get some movement, which is good. And, obviously, their level-two support team in Israel is very good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

I was not part of the initial installation, but I've heard that some of the initial pieces are straightforward. Where it gets complex is that I don't know if it was set up according to their best practices.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing follows normal industry standards.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

In a previous company, I was involved in the evaluation process that ended with choosing to go with Zerto.

Zerto sits on top of a lot of other technologies. It's like a "Layer 3" for lack of a better term. Some of the other solutions that are "Layer 2" can be more attractive, solutions like Commvault, Rubrik, and Cohesity. They're able to do more native operations at the OS level, like replication. They have more hooks into the operating system to enable you to do that.

However, Zerto's user interface is good. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it gives you the RPOs and RTOs right then and there. It requires some administration from the VPG perspective, but it's able to bridge a lot of gaps.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to work with your Zerto technical account manager for the setup and best practices.

Zerto is good when it comes to continuous data protection. We're currently in the middle of some technical support cases with them, cases that I'm watching, regarding some of our larger databases. But so far, there have been no issues with the smaller databases. It's doing its job.

We haven't yet enabled Zerto to do DR in the cloud, but that's something we are pursuing currently. We have had a demo of it but we haven't done a PoC.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Does what it says it will do when it comes to providing continuous data protection
Pros and Cons
  • "Being hardware agnostic is nice in that we don't really need a 15 second recovery time. It's easy to use. It's always doing updates behind the scenes. These are the positive things. The setup is pretty easy. Building out the VPGs is pretty easy. And it works like it's supposed to."
  • "There are still some pieces in testing that aren't automated. There are still some built-in scripts or workflows I wish Zerto would do out-of-the-box, versus having to PowerShell or have a vendor create it, or create it myself."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto is a set it and forget it kind of thing. At least it's more of an insurance policy for us. We don't have a good DR plan, but the peace of mind knowing that the data is replicated off-site, like a repository or offsite environment, there is value to that. We just haven't been able to fully embrace the actual testing of the failover and failback process. The testing has worked, but we haven't done a full production failover yet. We've been planning for around a year to do one but it keeps getting pushed back.

What is most valuable?

Being hardware agnostic is nice in that we don't really need a 15 second recovery time. It's easy to use. It's always doing updates behind the scenes. These are the positive things. The setup is pretty easy. Building out the VPGs is pretty easy. And it works like it's supposed to.

Zerto does what it says it will do when it comes to providing continuous data protection. It gives me all my recovery points up to 15 seconds or less. So if need be, we could recover to that point in time that it says it can do.

Zerto is easy to use for the most part. It's pretty simplistic. The UI is pretty simplistic. There are some things that I'm waiting for newer releases to address some functionality that I'm curious to see has been fixed or not in the new version.

What needs improvement?

There are still some pieces in testing that aren't automated. There are still some built-in scripts or workflows I wish Zerto would do out-of-the-box, versus having to PowerShell or have a vendor create it, or create it myself. We haven't done a full failback yet of production so I couldn't really say. The failover process is a lot of manual steps, but Zerto is a mechanism that gets the data there. In that aspect, it does what it's supposed to do. But I wish they would expand on their out-of-the-box functionality for the VM. When you fail it over, there are DNS and SQL changes and there are reboots. There are some things I wish that Zerto would facilitate with a checkbox that would do some of these things for me versus having to PowerShell it and put the scripts in a certain place and have support run it. I want it more automated if possible.

The issue I have with ransomware is if I don't know I have ransomware in all my recovery points, and if it goes three months, I wish Zerto somehow either bought a company or could tell me that we're infected with ransomware. If I don't know how ransomware and everything gets encrypted, there's nothing to restore back to if all my recovery points have been corrupted. So I wish Zerto somehow had a mechanism to alert me of suspicious activity.

We have a Trend product that does that for us. We can get alerts of things that Trend finds, but it's always nice to have layers for your security. We have alternatives, but it would be nice if Zerto had a mechanism to alert me as well.

Alerting has also been a pain but it was supposed to be fixed in the newer version and that's. I would like to have more granular alerts.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for about four years now. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

When it comes to stability, it does what it says it's going to do. 

I do some babysitting because the alerts are relentless. My biggest pain point is the endless amount of alerts that are just noise. I have to log in and see what actually is an issue because the alerts are just endless. There's not much maintenance I have to do besides logging in and babysitting from time to time.

We keep wanting to test it. It's our main DR strategy, but we just haven't had a window to vet full failover and failback. As far as increasing, I think we're pretty stagnant at the point with what we're backing up with it.

How are customer service and technical support?

I would rate Zerto support a seven out of ten. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. You could deploy the VRAs pretty simplistically as long as you set an IP via the UI, so that was pretty easy. We were up and running in a day.

Our implementation strategy was rushed. We were doing a data center move and we just wanted an extra copy of the data. So this was a stop-gap solution that we stuck with.

What about the implementation team?

We used a reseller for the deployment. They met our expectations. They provide the product, but outside the product, we have to get a stronger resource. If it goes above and beyond like if it's broken, they call Zerto support. If I want some PowerShell scripts and some cool stuff to be done, they need to find a resource. They provide the basic service, which is great. Above and beyond that, they're average or below average.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay monthly for the CPU, memory, disk space, the Zerto replication, and then there's a Microsoft charge as well on top of that for the operating system. We pay month to month and we go year to year.

There are additional VM resource costs.

My advice would be to think about the large VMs that you're backing up. Think about the wasted disk space and wasted resources on your production environment, and if you replicate that to a hot or warm site, you have to pay for those resources. The Zerto price is what it is, so you need to work with the business and ensure your Tier 1 or most critical VMs are what you're backing up or want to back up, not just everything. Then scale that to something manageable for replication and find out if you can have minimum resources while replicating and then scale up in a true DR scenario and only pay for the resources as you need them.

What other advice do I have?

It's not really Zerto's fault, but you don't have full visibility on the protected site so you have to rely on your vendor for visibility if an issue arises.

I would advise asking a lot of questions. If you're an SQL environment, make sure you failover all the key components in the correct way. If you want it fully automated, make sure you buy some extra hours to get professional support.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Technology Infrastructure Manager at County of Grey
Real User
If we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before
Pros and Cons
  • "There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
  • "Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before.

We use Veeam Backup for data and not for replication so this is purely just for disaster recovery and replication. We don't use it for data backup, we're still using Veeam for that.

Zerto definitely decreases the time and people it takes when we need to failback or move workloads. The benefit of using it with the Cloud is that we don't have to maintain extra hard work or an extra infrastructure for disaster recovery. With Zerto and Azure, it can all be done essentially by one person. If we're restoring data and systems from the cloud, it can all be controlled from the Zerto interface, whether it's on-premise or in the Cloud. To move the data back, depending on the size of the disaster, if we were to have to rebuild our hardware on-premise, that would obviously require more people. But if it's just a matter of restoring data from the Cloud, it would only need one person. Whereas before, you could probably still do it with one person, but the amount of time that would take would be a lot longer. We would have had to rebuild servers to restore the data. With Zerto, we can restore entire servers from our Cloud repository and have them up and running, it would just be dependent on the speed of the internet. Zerto could easily save us days of time.

It saves us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. If we had a ransomware attack, we could have our systems available for investigation and run our environment entirely in Azure, separate from our on-prem network. With Zerto as well, we could also recover our systems to the point in time before the ransomware attack happened, ensuring that it doesn't happen again. With our resources in the Cloud, we can scan it for infections and pull it out if it's been lying dormant. The big benefit against ransomware is that we can easily just go back in time to the point before the attack.

The ability to do DR in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center has enabled us to save money. It has saved us quite a bit of money by utilizing Cloud resources, instead of buying a whole new recovery site on-premise. We did an analysis of the buy and one of the reasons why we went with Zerto on Azure is because of the amount of money that we would save over a five-year period. Based on our analysis, it saved us roughly $25,000 a year.

What is most valuable?

The one-click failover feature is very valuable because of the ease of use as well as the little to no data loss with the constant replication in journaling technologies that it has.

The one-click failover feature is really valuable to us because we need a solution that's easy to use. There's the potential that myself or other staff may not be available at the point of the disaster and it would be possible to have somebody who may not know the technology be able to initiate a failover on our behalf by simply just asking them to click a button.

The important features of having little to no loss of data are extra valuable because if we do have a failover event or an event where we need to initiate a failover for disaster, having no data loss is really important because if we were to have a disaster where we needed to initiate the failover for recovery, and if there was data loss, that's lost time from staff. It's also really hard to tell what data is lost and what has to be made up. We have certain resources here that can't afford any sort of downtime or loss of data.

Its journaling technologies are always sending replicated data up so that we can view what the recovery point objectives would be in real-time. We can see it could be a matter of six seconds to a couple of minutes, and that gives us peace of mind that things are moving constantly so that when we do have a failure, we can go back to pretty much any point in time that we want and have our systems available again.

Zerto is very easy to use, the interface makes it really easy. The wizards that are available, the how-to guides, and the support from Zerto has made it really easy to use. With little to no training, we were able to get it up and running in the test environment in under a day. The interface makes it really easy to use from using it from day to day, setting up new jobs for replications, or even restoring data.

What needs improvement?

Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Zerto for around nine months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zerto is very stable, we have not had any issues with it so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a very small number of machines up to a very large number of machines without any issue. We started small and they included more and more to it and I haven't had any issues. We have not had any problems scaling across sites to other sites within the organization and integrating it all together. It's as advertised that it can be in any environment of any size. It scales very well.

Only one or two people are required for the maintenance of this solution. As the manager of technology and infrastructure, I and the system administrators do the maintenance. I mostly work with it. One of my other staff works with it from time to time, but for the most part, it just does its thing and we don't really need to do a whole lot with it.

Zerto is used extensively in my company in the sense that it is our primary disaster recovery solution. It is used for servers throughout the County for all departments. Every system that we have in place relies on Zerto for DR. As servers increase, we will add those servers to Zerto, for disaster recovery purposes. It's completely integrated into our system.

Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management only because we have a small team to begin with. Our infrastructure team that I'm in charge of is only six staff. So DR and backup is one job amongst many, for all the staff here. The amount of time dedicated hasn't changed a whole lot for us.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their support is fantastic. Anytime we've had an issue, which has been not too many, they've been very good to resolve any issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We also use Veeam and it is really easy to use too. They're both easy programs to use. If anyone can use Veeam, they can use Zerto. I wouldn't say Zerto's any easier or Veeam's any harder. They do different things; Veeam does back up really well. If you need a backup solution, Veeam is far cheaper. Whereas Zerto is fantastic at disaster recovery and replication, but when it comes to backup, that's not really what it's made for. Moving forward that may change. But Zerto is definitely a much costlier program compared to Veeam but it does a lot more.

How was the initial setup?

Zerto itself was straightforward to set up. There was good documentation available and we utilized some of their engineering services to help set up as well. For the size of the products and the complexity that it can do, the actual setup and operations over this are quite easy. It took a couple of days, which included getting everything in Azure set up properly.

The implementation strategy that we did was to create the on-premise environment for a dedicated network, virtual machines, and the installation. Then Azure would become our disaster recovery site in the event that we needed it if we had a disaster on-premise, we could failover all of our services and servers that we needed to in Azure. Then our client computers would connect to them while in the Cloud while be prepared for recovery on-premise.

What about the implementation team?

We utilized a third-party consultant to assist with setting up our Azure environments and Zerto technicians helped us set up Zerto on Azure. Our experience was really good. There were some challenges and there was lots of learning to do, but overall, the experience was good. The staff from Zerto were exceptionally good. They really know the product well, helped quite a bit, and provided instructions and training on how to use it outside of that.

What was our ROI?

I think that return on investment will come in the event that we do have a disaster that we need to recover from. We have seen some ROI from Zerto by moving virtual machines between data centers, where that has saved us a lot of time. The technology not only is useful for disaster recovery, but also for server maintenance and moving resources between posts and impairments. Before, it could take hours to copy virtual machines, even days. We use Zerto to move resources around with little to no downtime in a lot quicker time. So we were able to save staff time and resources by using Zerto.

It wouldn't have cost us too much with the government. It's hard to equate a lot of downtime to dollars and cents for us because it's more so around staff time and convenience. We have long-term care homes that we need that are up all the time. And any of those maintenance windows we usually schedule after hours. So it's more of an inconvenience for IT staff to work overnight instead of during regular business hours.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto is not cheap; however, it is worth the cost. The licensing model is easy. You buy based on the amount of virtual machines you want to protect and go from there. Even though it is not a cheap program, you do get what you pay for, but overall it became cheaper than maintaining a separate data center.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Cohesity, Rubrik, and Commvault. Veeam does replication as well, but it doesn't do it nearly as well. We looked at a few other solutions from Dell. We went with Zerto because it had all the disaster recovery functions that we needed, the ability to recover within minutes with minimal to no data loss, and is integrated well with Azure.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend doing the free proof of concept exercise with Zerto pre-sales engineers and work with them to discuss your environment and then review their recommendations on implementation. From time to time do the free training. I highly recommend doing that. Get your hands on this software and try it out first before doing the production implementation.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be hard.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. I don't rate many things ten, but Zerto offered me exactly what they're upfront with, what it will do, and it's doing exactly what they said it would do.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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IT Engineer at Southern Veterinary Partners
Real User
The overall effect on our RPOs has been fantastic
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capabilities. The fact that we can have a clinic across the country backup in as little as 45 minutes is incredible."
  • "As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is for backup and disaster recovery. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery capabilities. The fact that we can have a clinic across the country backup in as little as 45 minutes is incredible. 

Zerto has enabled us to do disaster recovery in the cloud. This ability is very important because we have over 419 hospitals across the country and being able to quickly get a hospital up in Colorado while I'm in Alabama is impressive. The speed is impressive and it's easy to get it back up.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been fantastic. Coming from our C-suite level and getting reports of how long hospitals are up versus if we do have disaster recovery, the amount of time to recover using Zerto is fantastic. We can have them back up in as little as 45 minutes. I don't have to hear all the bad sides of it, they're very happy when the hospital's back up and making money. 

The other company we used before was Commvault, and we had had multiple issues with them with fragmented backups. Some backups weren't taking properly, and we did have a DR situation with them, and they were not able to recover all the data. That was our big push to find something else, and that's where we found Zerto. 

Zerto's ease of use compared to other solutions is a ten out of ten. 

What needs improvement?

As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for around one year but my company has been using it for about two. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is a ten out of ten, we haven't had the issues with them like we did with Commvault. I have no complaints.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is seamless. We're able to add another server and within the hour build on top of that. 

If we're ever out of licenses, I could just send an email out and say that we need to add some more, and it's done. 

Our environment is large. We have 419 hospitals across the country. 

How are customer service and support?

Their support is a ten out of ten. I have not had any issues with them. It's been fantastic every time I've had to deal with them. They've resolved all of my issues. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The deployment was easy and seamless. We put in a ticket. They get our new servers added and within an hour we have new deployed servers on the solution.

What was our ROI?

We see ROI in the uptime of hospitals that had a disaster recovery scenario and how quickly they're back up and making money at those hospitals.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Senior Server Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Provides continuous data protection with live test failover and has an easy setup
Pros and Cons
  • "With Zerto CDP, we can pull to our recovery objective in six seconds."
  • "The live test failover is the most valuable feature because it allows me to validate that my data is protected in the event of a failure."
  • "It's pretty expensive per server."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for continuous data protection on our mission-critical clinical systems. I work for a hospital. We use it to prevent ransomware, malware, or basic recovery for things like our patient data and imaging system. At one point, we used to do recovery once a day. With Zerto, our recovery objective right now is in six seconds.

How has it helped my organization?

We had a database failure one night at around 11 o'clock, and it had probably been about 23 hours since it had a hard backup. With Zerto, we brought it up in my DR site within ten minutes, and it controlled all of the hospital's registration features. Without that system, we can't even ingest patients into our system. So we brought up that database within ten minutes, got it back in line, and continued operations.

What is most valuable?

The live test failover is the most valuable feature because it allows me to validate that my data is protected in the event of a failure.

The near-synchronous replication Zerto provides is awesome. This feature is very important, especially because in today's age of ransomware and everything is so data-centric in a hospital, I need to be able to identify the point in time of infection and recover to the most up-to-date available point in time that I can without having to lose patient data. At one point, we used to do a 24-hour recovery. but in today's day and age, you can't lose a day's worth of data.

We use Zerto to protect our VMs in our environment. It improved our RPOs because before we had 24-hour RPO, and now I'm within ten minutes. 

Zerto's speed of recovery is fast compared to other solutions. We use Zerto and Veeam. Zerto already has the disks, which must be signed into and presented. There's a lot of rescanning involved, but Azure builds the VM, attaches the disks, and powers it up. We're leveraging RTO in under ten minutes.

What needs improvement?

The price could be improved. It's pretty expensive per server, but in the long run, it's well worth the level of protection it provides.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto since 2023.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is excellent.

How are customer service and support?

Support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used Veeam, which didn't offer any CDP. We use Zerto primarily for continuous protection.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was easy. We had a professional services engagement when we bought our first pack of licenses. They came in and worked with us. We had monthly and weekly meetings for three months to set up everything.

What other advice do I have?

We do not use disaster recovery in the cloud. We have an actual on-prem DR site. We have a multisite Zerto environment that I can bring up in multiple locations, but we do primarily on-prem recovery.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten for its ease of use, functionality, and multi-tenant support with ransomware detection.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Real User
Top 20
Reduced my downtime by offering rapid recovery
Pros and Cons
  • "The Zerto functions I like the most are data protection, static discovery, and, most importantly, virtual machine backups."
  • "If possible, I'd like to recover my data in seconds."

What is our primary use case?

I use Zerto for data protection, data discovery, and disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is the most critical aspect because sometimes I lose data on my systems and use recovery mode.

How has it helped my organization?

Almost two years ago, I lost my data before I came to work the next morning. I reached out to Zerto, and he was able to retrieve my data for me within a few minutes. It was just wild. The recovery time is perfect. Zerto saved my life twice, and I hope they keep it up. It has reduced my downtime by offering me rapid recovery. 

What is most valuable?

The Zerto functions I like the most are data protection, static discovery, and, most importantly, virtual machine backups. Zerto's near-synchronous replication is user-friendly, and the solution has a very user-friendly interface. If I'm asked to explain the app, I can do it in five or 10 minutes. 

What needs improvement?

If possible, I'd like to recover my data in seconds.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Zerto for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zerto is like any other app. All apps have downtime and crashes. Zerto is effective enough, but it still lags sometimes. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto is scalable. 

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Zerto is easy because I have a tutor who knows it better than men. It took two or three hours. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto's price is reasonable enough.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Zerto eight out of 10. My only advice is to go through the YouTube page. Everything you see is helpful. 

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Support Engineer at BIOS Middle East
Real User
Top 20
Helps block unknown threats, ensures minimal downtime, and fast recovery times
Pros and Cons
  • "Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
  • "It would be great if Zerto could automate replication more."

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for replication.

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

How has it helped my organization?

In my minimal experience with Zerto, the near synchronization replication is good.

Zerto does a good job of blocking unknown threats and attacks.

Its easy-to-use application server has helped our organization improve its bandwidth.

Zerto has made disaster recovery in the cloud much easier for us than in physical data centers.

We've seen significantly faster recovery times compared to other recovery tools we've used, like Carbonite.

Zerto makes it much easier for us to conduct and manage our DR testing.

The replication feature ensures minimal downtime during disaster scenarios.

Zerto's failback capability automatically recovered one of our live applications after it disconnected.

Zerto helps us monitor our disaster recovery.

What is most valuable?

Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable. It's easy to use.

What needs improvement?

It would be great if Zerto could automate replication more.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for four months. I joined the company when they were already using it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability of Zerto ten out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I also use Carbonite but Zerto offers faster speeds.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment of Zerto took a few weeks.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

We have over 300 clients using our web applications.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zerto Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: June 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zerto Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.