Zerto Reviews

We use the solution for running demos for HPE partners and customers, regarding disaster recovery and backup.

Although our primary use case is to show demos to partners and customers, we think it's really valuable.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery and that the RTO takes less than ten seconds. It's a reallypotent tool.

The near-synchronous replication is really good and an advantage for customers. This feature is really important because we can show it to customers and partners, helping recovering from ransomware, and does provide huge value.

You can protect your VMs in the environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful. 

Also, the ease of use and speed of recovery are wonderful. 

I'm happy with the solution, but I would like Zerto to support other hypervisors too

And the price could be cheaper, but it is reasonable.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It's very stable. 

The scalability is really good. 

We have used SRM from VMware and RapidDR from Simplivity. In comparison to those products, Zerto is really simple to use and helpful. 

We are constantly trying new products. Zerto has the lowest RTO, you can recover a lot more quickly than using other solutions. 

The initial setup is very easy.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

Our clients think it's quite expensive but I advise them to consider all of Zerto's features.

You need to start with 25 VMs, which sometimes is too much for SMB clients in some countries. It would be better if they had the option to start with a license for less VMs, like 5 or 10.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten because of the low RTOs, the ease of use, and how helpful it is for clients.

I use the Zerto in my company for all of our applications built on it. There are around 1,600 applications.

Zerto has enabled us to move and replicate systems much faster than we ever had before. We could move entire data centers in six months versus what would have taken three years.

The solution's most valuable features are its user interface, ease of implementation, and ease of execution.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication works. I work in the healthcare industry, where systems have to be up and working and are mission-critical, and Zerto is a part of that journey.

I have used Zerto to help protect VMs in your environment.

Zerto is an effective tool for bringing systems back at a pace. The limiting factor in Zerto is sometimes the application, but it has certainly allowed us to deliver more streamlined SLAs to our business.

In terms of comparing the speed of recovery of Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions that I have used, I can say that my company moved from an old Commvault-based solution to a Zerto-based solution since the latter was far superior to the former.

Based on my usage or evaluations of other solutions, I would compare the ease of use Zerto provides with a product named Commvault. Compared to Commvault, Zerto is faster and more cost-effective.

Zerto can reduce its price.

In the future, the tool's user interface needs to be refreshed since it seems to be becoming somewhat antiquated.

I have been using Zerto since 2017.

The tool has been 100 percent stable for our company. In reality, the tool has been up since 2017.

I have not seen any problems with the product's scalability, especially since we run 1,600 applications with it. There don't seem to be any problems with scaling up.

The solution's technical support is excellent. The tool's technical support team is responsive, easy to get a hold of, and kind, and the team also listens. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten. For me, to rate the support team ten out of ten, in a perfect world, there are more SLAs at fixed times.

Positive

I have used Commvault. My company chose Zerto because it was modern and easy to implement, and the demonstrations we saw indicated that it should be part of our organization's future.

The product's ease of setup made things straightforward, especially with good customer support, and backup when trying to get it all implemented.

My company uses the hybrid cloud services offered by GCP but hasn't added Zerto to it. My company also uses AWS and Microsoft Azure, but we haven't added Zerto to it.

For the setup phase, my company bought some professional services because, obviously, my team hadn't had training, but now they are trained. My company bought some professional services, and my team got some hands-on training, so we now run the system in-house. I believe that Zerto's team should receive more training about the tool. I rate my experience with the tool's system integrator, WWT, as seven out of ten.

It offers more cost-avoidance than the return on investment, although the return on investment is possible to a certain extent.

At the time I had purchased the product, the pricing was fair and reasonable. Over the years, costs have certainly gone up, which makes it hard for healthcare companies to use the solution.

I believe that Zerto's team should have more training.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use Zerto to protect our centralized environment on our data center.

We implemented Zerto to ensure our environment keeps running in the event of power failure or hardware issues.

Zerto is extremely easy to use.

The near synchronous replication is powerful and eliminates the need to use other storage solutions. The near synchronous replication is important for the services that we are providing.

It has drastically reduced our downtime. Previously, recovering from an issue took three days, but now with Zerto, we're back up and running in about an hour, minimizing disruption and keeping our business operational.

The continuous data protection has transformed our IT operations. By enabling us to restore our entire environment and resume functionality within hours, it eliminates the multi-day downtime we previously experienced in recovery situations.

Zerto has significantly reduced our operational costs and time commitment by 90 percent. Compared to our previous solution, Zerto requires fewer resources and allows us to complete tasks much faster.

Zerto safeguards our virtual machines, ensuring critical applications recover in minutes while less essential ones are restored within hours. This significant improvement replaces our previous recovery time of two to three days for the entire environment.

It has reduced our downtime by 85 percent.

While we hadn't previously tested our disaster recovery plan, our current backups and improved recovery time give us greater confidence in our ability to respond to an incident.

Zerto strengthens our IT team's disaster recovery plan by boosting their confidence in the system's reliability. With Zerto, the system can now recover quickly from the biannual power outages that used to cause instability, thanks to its improved stability within the failover environment.

The most valuable features of Zerto are the ease of use and recovery speed.

The most valuable feature for enhancing our data protection strategy is the ability to test and validate that the protection is up and running when we need it.

While Zerto's current version supports VMware environments, I'd like the added flexibility of using Hypervisors as well. Although previous Zerto versions offered this functionality, it seems to be missing in the latest iteration.

I have been using Zerto for one year.

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

I would rate the scalability of Zerto nine out of ten.

The technical support team was responsive and effective in resolving the small number of problems we encountered.

Positive

We used to rely solely on Veeam for backups, but now we have a layered approach. We still perform Veeam backups for long-term data protection. However, we've added Zerto for disaster recovery, enabling much faster recoveries of our critical systems in case of a major outage. This way, we have both comprehensive backups and the ability to get our key functions back up and running quickly.

Zerto boasts faster recovery speeds than Veeam and offers a significantly easier testing process.

The deployment was straightforward. It was completed by one person in one day.

The time Zerto saves us restoring our services provides a significant return on investment.

I would rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Our Zerto deployment spans multiple locations and is managed by a team of eight administrators who are responsible for protecting 30 virtual machines.

While Zerto itself doesn't require regular maintenance, it's important to conduct periodic tests to verify our disaster recovery functionality and generate reports to monitor its health.

I would recommend Zerto because it provides better and more simplified protection.

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

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

Zerto helps in automating disaster recovery capabilities. It allows automation and orchestration of complex activities.

We have used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Zerto’s overall effect on our RPOs has been pretty good.

It has also been effective for our RTOs.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime, specifically for failover and failback, but it is hard to qualify the time saved.

Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes because we have not been impacted by any such issue.

Zerto has helped to reduce the organization's DR testing. There is about 20% reduction.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation, but I have not seen any reduction in the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

Its ease of use and scalability are valuable. 

I also find the near-synchronous replication to be valuable. It is extremely important for organizations.

There should be more comprehensive cyber recovery capabilities.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is deployed across multiple locations. There are roughly about 4,000 VMs.

We might use it to migrate to cloud solutions. It is to be decided.

I have not reached out to them myself.

We were using SRM. We switched to Zerto for automation.

Zerto is highly effective in terms of ease of use as compared to other solutions. Zerto is also pretty effective in terms of its speed of recovery.

We can easily migrate data using the Zerto console.

Zerto has not yet replaced all of our legacy backup solutions but it will.

Our setup is all on-premises. I was involved in its deployment to some degree. It was pretty straightforward to deploy.

It took about three months. It was an enterprise-wide solution.

It was a combination of in-house staff and a third party. The third party was a VAR or value-added reseller.

It required just a handful of staff for deployment. It does not require any maintenance from our side.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.

It is not a bad pricing model.

We evaluated other options on paper, not physically.

Zerto is an effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities.

The biggest lesson that I have learned by using Zerto is the need for application involvement and defining protection groups.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

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

Right now, I'm having issues with delays when archiving. We're facing issues with RPU and getting 20 or 30-minute delays. That's a bandwidth issue.

We do rely on the replication capabilities. When our one system went down, we were able to immediately replicate. 

It's a reliable solution - if we have great bandwidth. It offers near-synchronous replication. This is very important. We're a fintech company relying on Zerto for disaster recovery. We tend to only use the replication features.

We use the solution for immutable data copies. The 3-2-1 rule is very reliable. 

We can use Zerto to help protect our VMs.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. We have virtual protection groups and haven't had any issues. Our production server does need to be replicated in real-time, and everything else can be replicated whenever we like. 

It only takes five to ten minutes to switch over or failover.  During data migrations, our users can continue to collaborate just fine. It's fine and fast. 

The RTO is good. If a machine is storing more than two to three terabytes, it takes longer than ten minutes, but any time the storage is less than that, it takes ten minutes or less.

Our downtime is minimal.

We've saved a lot of time in a data recovery situation. 

We do switchovers from time to time to test DR. We do switchovers every three months. It only takes half an hour. It saves us about one hour at least. We can allocate the time we save to any other activity or task. 

It's reduced the number of staff needed for DR by three or four people.

The solution did replace some legacy solutions. It replaced small backup solutions. It's helped us save on the costs needed to manage them. We've saved around two resources so far. I'm not sure how much those tools cost. However, we needed four infrastructure and two or three database people looking after those. Now, we don't need to.

We don't have great bandwidth. When we don't have good bandwidth, it doesn't work so well. 

We're not fully satisfied with the support team.

The first time, it's difficult to migrate data. However, after that, it becomes easier. 

They need to give more options, such as more archiving options. 

The company has been using the solution for around one year. I've used it for three months.

The solution is stable, from what I have seen.

We have around 100 direct Zerto users. We have around 30,000 to 35,000 end-users. We have 10 production servers, Linux machines, five development servers, and five Unity servers. 

It is very scalable. We can scale up to 200 machines and have maybe around 80 right now. I'm not sure if we will scale more in the future. 

Support has dropped off. When I joined the organizations, they were very active. 

Positive

We also use Oracle. I used it in my previous company. In this company, we use HP, and it works well with Zerto.

Zerto is very easy to use, and the GUI is very comfortable. We can configure, replicate, and sync right from the GUI.

We have Zerto on an HP machine. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

Maintenance is necessary, and we have two people handling maintenance tasks. 

The solution is worth the cost. Having disaster recovery is necessary. If we ever suffer from a hardware failure, we can easily replicate in one click. 

The solution is a bit expensive. 

We did not evaluate other options. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

The primary use case is disaster recovery. 

The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality. 

The most valuable features include the ease of use and the usability of the user interface. Long-term, the solution has proven to be very resilient and stable. It meets our DR needs for VM environments. 

The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. You have near real-time DR capabilities. In the years I've used it, we've had application-consistent profiles. To meet the recovery point and recovery time objectives, it helps to have that on hand. 

It's affected our RPOs positively. It totally meets them via near-synchronous replication. That means the VM stays in a consistent state and is always available. 

Zerto could improve its reporting capabilities. That's lacking. The alerting capabilities are lacking as well, partly due to the fact that there's no way to trim down the alert fatigue if there are failures within the application. It will send out alerts consistently instead of spreading the alert times every 30 minutes, hour, et cetera. 

We've been using Zerto at our organization over the past eight years. 

The solution is very stable. 

I cannot comment on scalability. We only have two Zerto instances installed, one in production and one in DR. We haven't had to scale out or to the cloud. 

We are protecting upwards of 100 virtual machines. 

Zerto's support is good. They are responsive from an email perspective. I've never had to pick up the phone to call them for anything beyond our DR testing every year. In those cases, we do open a proactive ticket in the case that we run into issues with recovering virtual machines. 

Positive

We did not use any other solution previously. We chose Zerto since it was an application we inherited. It wasn't something I specifically chose, however, understanding the industry, we know that it is the top player in terms of software recoverability for virtual machines. 

I did not initially set up the solution; I inherited it. However, over the past eight years, we have gone through a number of upgrades, which for the most part have gone seamlessly. We did have a few issues in the past that support was able to fix in a timely fashion. 

I'm unsure if the company has witnessed any ROI. We have not gone through any TCO analysis. 

The licensing is outside of my purview. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If the reporting and alerting functionality were better, I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

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

We do disaster recovery in the cloud. Having DR in the cloud is absolutely fundamental. Backups are great, and disaster recovery is quick. If something is down, with the click of a button, we would be able to spin up multiple assets. Zerto allows us to do that.

We primarily have Azure, but we also have some integration with AWS. We found it pretty seamless. There are a couple of pain points every now and then with setting up policies and getting things to work as expected, but their support is very helpful for any of the cases that we run into. Whether it is running against RTO or having issues with certain VMs and certain workloads, we have been able to work through these issues and get it functioning as expected.

Zerto has been very helpful for RPOs. It definitely keeps us at our target recovery point. It is definitely the most important toolset for us to meet the RPOs.

Zerto definitely helps our engineers sleep better at night because we know that we can meet our RPO. We have an immediate button if we have to do a restore. Sometimes, we look in Zerto first rather than having to dig out of backup. That is probably Zerto's highest value-add.

It does near-synchronous replication. CDP has definitely come a long way. They were the first ones to do it, and they have definitely done it the best in my opinion. Other solutions that are out there are trying to emulate it, but in our stack, Zerto will always be the one on which we rely the most for continuous replication. For production workloads, this continuous replication is absolutely critical. We have a lot of SQL data and things that are constantly changing. It is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for Zerto to keep up with that much change rate, but with the tweaks that we have made, it has definitely been more possible. It is definitely something that is important to us, and for production apps, it is absolutely key. 

There are a lot of features. The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want. If we want to select an entire cluster, we can do that, or we can group it by application, which is the best practice and what we do as an organization.

The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions. That might be on us, but that would be my main suggestion. There might be a way to tweak the settings. There is an option to exclude scratch disks or temp disks in SQL, and that helps, but we still struggle a little bit with the databases with high transaction volume for the VPGs to keep up. We have done a little bit of work with the monitoring features that they have in the portal to identify whether ZVM or something else is overloaded and then allocate more resources to it, but there can be a little bit more transparency. If there is something they can do along those lines, that would be awesome.

Deployment is an area that can be improved a little bit. Sometimes deploying new ZVMs and things can be a little confusing. Also, with the supportability matrix, there is a little bit of a gray area sometimes as to which version is supported. There is some opportunity there to improve transparency around versioning and what to use moving forward for all workloads.

I have been using Zerto for about five years between multiple organizations.

It is very stable. We have no issues. We do not have to worry that Zerto will go down. We shifted most of our on-prem into Azure, and it works flawlessly.

It is definitely scalable. It just works. We can add more VMs. We can add more ZVMs to scale with the business needs.

We are using it mostly for the production workloads. We have a couple thousand VMs.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. It is hard to get a ten out of ten. There is always more that you can do with support, but they are always very responsive. They helped us through multiple issues with different VPG replications. We have had some issues there, and they were always very good at guidance. They always have a solution and a lot of good documentation as well to reference before opening a case. That is helpful. 

Positive

I have only used Zerto in the past. That is the one I am the most familiar with and comfortable with. I can compare it to other backup tool sets that I have used in the past, but I know Zerto is not exactly a backup solution. 

Its UI is very simple. I always find what I am looking for relatively easily. As they have evolved the web portal, it has only gotten better. The UI is definitely on point today.

I believe we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the exact number. We are definitely seeing a good return from what we have put into the Zerto product. Our business users said that it is very important to them to have disaster recovery and for us to be able to perform quarterly tests with all these different application stacks. We can show them what it is like to bring up a bubble environment and do full testing.

It was a little before I joined the company, so I cannot comment on the solutions they evaluated. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement. There could be a little bit more transparency around releases and what version to use. They have done some rebranding in the past such as ZRA and ZVM. There is some confusion there sometimes related to some of the internal terminology when you do not work on it every day, but overall, we are very happy with the product. It does what it is intended to do, and as a customer, that is all you can ask for.

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

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

Since we are at a bank, there are certain protocols in place where we need to have RPO and RTO times of two hours or less. Zerto does a great job of setting those times and alerting us if those can't be met. We have our help desk actively monitoring that. It is extremely helpful that Zerto lists what is falling out of compliance in regards to RPO and RTO. It has been great in that regard.

If we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the number of people involved by half versus companies of similar size who don't have Zerto.

We have had patches that have broken a server. We then needed to have it right back up and running. We have been able to do that, which has been a huge plus. 

The real-time data protection is the most valuable feature. We are able to quickly spin up VMs instantly. 

We have also utilized it, from time to time, if our backups didn't catch it at night. If something was deleted midday, this solution is nice because you can use Zerto for that. 

I would rate Zerto very high in terms of it providing continuous data protection. We have had multiple instances that took days with our old DR test (before I was at my current company) and DR tests from other companies where I worked that didn't have Zerto. Now, we can realistically do DR tests in less than 30 minutes.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. If 10 is absolutely dummy-proof, I would give the ease of use an eight.

It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default. However, we have done it with other things. It is pretty handy.

I would like it if they would really ramp up more on their PowerShell scripting and API calls, then I can heavily utilize PowerShell. I am big into scripting stuff and automating things. So, if they could do even more with PowerShell, API calls, and automation, that would be fantastic.

I have been using it at my company for almost four years. My company has been using it for six years.

I would rate stability as eight and a half out of 10.

I would rate scalability as eight out of 10.

We monitor and use it every day. Our current license count is 150 VMs. I could definitely see us increasing that license because we keep adding more VMs.

As big as our company is, we don't have a very large infrastructure sysadmin group. I wouldn't say that Zerto has reduced our staff in any kind of way, but it definitely has helped the small amount of people that we have.

We have around 20 people using it: 

• Our core admin group is four people, including me. To put that in perspective, we have a $10 billion bank and our core infrastructure team consists of just those four people. The core admin group does administration, creates VPGs, and executes the main day-to-day operations. 
• We have a few users who are just monitoring it only. This is a read-only role. 
• We have our help desk, which is basically read-only, but they actively monitor RTO and RPO every day, all day long. They leave up the dashboard on a huge TV and just keep an eye on things.

I would rate the technical support as nine and a half out of 10. I thoroughly enjoy the fact that they are located in Boston, and you feel like you are talking to someone just like you. They do an excellent job of following up and escalating anything that is needed. I rarely have to call Zerto support, but I am confident that anytime I need to, then it will be resolved.

We stay in close contact with our main local rep.

My company never used anything quite like Zerto. We still use things for backup and recovery, such as Dell EMC Avamar, which used to be NetWorker. We also use RecoverPoint for applications, but it is not at all the same. There is actual real-time recovery. It is kind of a different animal.

I have had to redeploy it a few times with data center changes and such. We went from your typical data center to Cisco UCS Blades to VxRack, a VMware Dell EMC product. With that, I had to deploy it from scratch.

It was pretty straightforward. There is plenty of very easy to follow documentation when it comes to implementing it. There is also a lot of training provided so you can understand it before you implement it. Those two things make it pretty easy.

Just to stand it up and get everything going, that took an hour or two. The overall implementation was over the course of three days, because our core is heavily utilized.

We had a ZVM Virtual Manager on our production side and another on our DR site. Most of our data is replicated from production to DR. We do have some that are in the DR replicating back, but not a lot. Our main concern was between both sites, because we don't have a very large pipe. Even though Zerto's compression is pretty good, we didn't want to send that data all back over. Our main priority, when we set it up again, was that we were able to retain a lot of the data at our DR location and remap it by using preseeded disks, which was huge.

At least two staff members are required for deployment and maintenance. Whenever an update is released, we try to do that fairly quickly. For quarterly updates or major releases, we try to stay on top of them. Then, whenever we deploy new systems, applications, or servers, depending on the RTO and RPO, we add Zerto to those. That is daily, depending on how much workload we have and how many servers we are deploying. Those two people add those groups and such configuration into Zerto.

From an implementation standpoint, just follow the guide and check their support page for things. Worst case, reach out to support if you have already paid for it. It is pretty straightforward.

Zerto has helped reduce downtime. We have had servers go down and could easily spin them back up at our DR location almost instantly. Instead of taking an hour, it took a minute.

On average, it saves us three to five hours a day.

We pay for 150 VMs per year. It is not cheap.

Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well.

Zerto did really well with presenting their solution to the management here, really getting people involved, and helping them understand what and how it could be used. At the time, their real-time recovery was pretty far above anybody else available, and even still somewhat.

Other solutions would take an entire workday to recover our core infrastructure. With Zerto, we are done within an hour for all our major systems.

As far as the GUI goes, Zerto is more user-friendly than a lot of other products, such as Avamar and Commvault. It is fairly easy to use, but I think the GUI interface of Zerto is pretty far above the rest.

We use Avamar, and I don't see Zerto replacing Avamar for the simple fact of retention and how expensive the storage is. Using an RPM storage is pretty pricey, especially to try to rely on that for a long retention of seven years, for instance. 

When it comes to purchasing, I highly recommend Zerto all the time to friends that I have at other companies. 

It is just for DR. We keep an average of three days of retention, e.g., journal history of three days. However, it is not always the same for all products. We don't really keep it for backups. That is more of a convenience thing.

Currently, we don't utilize the cloud. It may be an option in the future. The cloud was a bad word for our bank for a long time, and that is starting to change.

Biggest lesson learnt: DR tests don't have to be so painful.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.