Zerto Reviews

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

It's allowed us to save a lot of money by collapsing a few data centers. We have been able to evacuate the hardware in the one data center in our virtual environment, and then shut down and get rid of all those hosts. And it has saved us time in our failovers, from collapsing data centers to our primaries. It enabled us to do that on the fly.

One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end.

The syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

It's pretty stable.

I've never had to use the technical support.

We use VMware SRM pretty exclusively for our disaster recovery stuff. SRM and Zerto are very similar in the way they work. Zerto enables features that SRM doesn't give us and that's why we purchased it.

Also, it takes half as much time to failover with Zerto as it does with SRM. Every six months we do a failover of our Epic environment from one data center to another, and we use SRM for that. We've been using Zerto for failovers from one data center to another for data center consolidation, and those seem to happen a lot faster than SRM.

We've definitely gotten our money's worth out of it for what we've been doing. We have been able to close three data centers so far.

We looked at Veeam, but that was a long time ago.

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

It's given us a sense of trust that if we have to fail over in a DR situation, it's going to be kind of like Apple, it just works. It gives us peace of mind.

We use it to help protect VMs and its effect on our RPOs is that it is exceeding what we set out to achieve. And the RTO is exactly what we're looking for.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. It's at least 300 percent faster than our previous solution.

I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use.

It's hard to say where it could be improved. The few times I've had issues with the interface, which is, for the most part, intuitive, we have been able to take care of most issues without having to open a case.

There are a couple of areas in the interface that are not very intuitive. Most of them are pretty easy, but there are a few areas in the journal and replication that, unless you've done it before, you really have no idea what to do. When I get to those points I'll reach out and ask for a little assistance or do a Google search to find the solution to the problem that we're having. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution.

We haven't had to scale it up yet from the initial licensing that we got, but it seems pretty straightforward that, if we grow, it can grow right along with us, and it's pretty easy.

We have not done anything other than replicate to a warm data center for DR purposes. We have not looked into taking it to the cloud, but that may be something we'll do in the future.

Their technical support is pretty good. The few times I've had to open a case, the response has been a little bit slow in the sense that it's almost like they want me to prove my need for a case; more than I think should be necessary.

If I'm looking for help, I need help, and their first response is to tell me to run logs and to put them up, and "Are you sure you covered this and that?" I have to tell them, "I'm already past that point and I'm ready to speak to somebody."

That would be the only thing that could use some improvement, having quicker access to somebody I can speak to, or at least email with, without having to jump through a lot of hoops first.

Neutral

We used VMware's SRM, which is their site-to-site replication solution. We made the switch because we needed something that actually worked. VMware SRM was very complex, very clunky, and it was constantly falling behind our RPO. Zerto is lean and mean and gets the job done, and I don't have to babysit it.

Also, the ease of use is much better than anything we have used before.

I was amazed at the ease of the installation and how quickly it went. I actually did the install with the support engineer looking over my shoulder, and it was done in 30 minutes.

We went through a reseller to purchase the product, but it was the Zerto engineer and I who did the actual install.

We were pretty happy with the pricing. When we switched to Zerto, we were a little on the small side of things. Zerto was looking at more of a larger-environment customer base. We're in at the bottom tier of supported servers, but they gave us a very good price. It was really a no-brainer for us to be able to have such a good product for our size environment. They came down and met us in the middle and gave us an enterprise-quality product for our mid- to small-size business needs.

It's been a while since we have looked around. We came from VMware, and there were at least two others. Cisco had a product, and IBM had a product, and they were way overpriced.

It has been very consistent in keeping up with our RPO and RTO and we have been very happy with it.

Zerto hasn't replaced our other backup solutions, just so that we have redundancy. We don't own the license for long-term retention with Zerto, so we have an offsite backup in addition to the production environment replication.

Give it a shot. It's quick, it's easy, and reliable, and you can run an evaluation pretty inexpensively. You just need another location that you can replicate to for that.

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

The biggest benefit we get from using Zerto is due to the fact that we have to answer to our gaming authority and prove that we have a DR solution in place. With Zerto we can do it out-of-the-box: do a test restore and actually have documentation that we can provide to our auditors.

Also, before Zerto, we didn't even have a way to fail back or move workloads. Now we do, and we can do so with a few clicks.

When it comes to continuous data protection it does the job. With the RTOs and RPOs, it does exactly that. It's the only one that I've seen that you could call a continuous data protection solution.

And one of the most valuable features, something that I wasn't even anticipating, is the file backups. We weren't even considering Zerto to do restores, but it actually is able to do that. Eventually, we could just use this as our backup solution.

It's easy to use. Once I got it installed and going, it was less than a day until I was already confident about using it. I've done numerous upgrades since then without any third-party support.

The only issue I've ever had is that I wish that Zerto would work more closely with VMware. There have been a few times that Zerto has released an update but it wasn't supported with that version of VMware. I would like them to coordinate their updates with VMware's updates.

I have been using Zerto for going on two years now.

It's rock-solid. I haven't had any issues whatsoever.

From what I've seen, because I have four different vCenters coming into it, I'll be able to scale out as much as I can physically handle on the storage side.

We're currently protecting about 100 terabytes with Zerto and we plan to increase our usage of it.

We're not using Zerto for long-term retention right now, but we do have plans to do so once we get some hardware that we can use for that.

Their tech support gets to the point. They've really been on-task and I haven't had to wait for anything. They've provided me with what I was after or answered any questions that I had.

Positive

I did the initial installation, and it was very straightforward. I've never had a solution that is this intensive and yet this easy to deploy. It took a few hours to deploy.

And in terms of working with Zerto on a day-to-day basis, it's just me.

We haven't calculated an ROI, but just comparing what it's been able to do for us, versus not having a solution, there has been ROI. It has the potential to help reduce downtime. Fortunately, we haven't had any, but it puts something in place to help us if we were to encounter some downtime. We're a casino, so every hour that we're down we lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously, I wish it were cheaper and more affordable. But I get what I pay for, so I can't complain.

I looked into the VMware solution, but it was just way too complex. It seemed like it would require a longer deployment and fine-tuning well beyond what it took me to deploy Zerto.

The fact that Zerto provides both backup and DR in one platform wasn't very important at the time. I've seen the benefit now and I'm happy that it does, but it really wasn't a factor in what I was looking for.

The only lesson I would pass on is that when we updated VMware, that version of VMware wasn't supported with the version of Zerto we were running. That could be a "gotcha," so make sure the hypervisor is supported under the Zerto matrix.

Request a trial. It's simple enough to install and configure on your own. My advice would be to see, firsthand, how easy it is.

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

It is deployed on-premises at several sites.

It is a good DR solution for a number of databases that we use. It is just a DR solution that works. It does that continuously. I like it. Once it works, it is set and forget.

We have used it as a test in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use the actual recovery. We haven't actually had to use it in an actual DR scenario, but we do DR testing. The switchover is pretty good.

Recovery is the most valuable feature. It has a good DR solution.

Zerto's ability to provide continuous data protection is good. It works. It has continuous availability.

It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great. 

I like that it's low maintenance; it's set and forget.

As far as replication technology goes, it is a pretty good product.

It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor. It doesn't really affect the overall functionality.

I have been using it for a couple of years.

The stability is good. There have been no major issues.

I have 12 engineers on my team. We maintain/administer Zerto to our organization.

It scales pretty well.

We have a large environment, but this actual deployment is pretty limited. It has a targeted use. We are protecting some production databases.

The support is good. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

We had another version of Zerto that we decommissioned, then we built a new one.

Zerto was already present in the company when I came onboard. We just renewed the support and built several new instances.

I was involved in the initial setup from the start. It is very complex as far as requirements go and what needs to be set out for Zerto. Once you set it up, it is fine. It works.

Back and forth, our deployment took a couple of weeks. It was deployed on different sites. We needed to set up, provision, have networks open, firewalls, and allocate dedicated storage. We also needed to install it, build it, deploy the agent on the host, and configure it.

I deployed the solution myself.

I am pretty sure my company has seen ROI.

It is a good solution. It doesn't work for everything, but for certain use cases. You can't restore your entire site with it. However, if you need to restore or replicate a certain number of production and mission-critical applications, it is a good solution for that.

I like Zerto. We have big databases, so it does take a lot of storage to replicate it, but I think it is a good solution. I would recommend it.

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

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

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

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

We had a ransomware event on one of our file servers. We detected that event very quickly using other methodologies. However, because we had Zerto in place on that server, within about 30 minutes from seeing the problem, we were able to go back and recover that machine before that ransomware event had happened. This is a great example of the solution's ability to restore so quickly that it really helped us.

Because of its ease of use, it has increased the number of people in IT who can failback or move workloads. This used to be something that was done only by our infrastructure team, because it was manual processes and complex. We now have the virtual protection setup so effectively, and Zerto does it so effectively, that we have now been able to get another three or four people from other groups of our IT company trained on how to do recovery operations. This helps us tremendously when we are doing recovery because there are just a lot more people who might be available to do it. On average, we have saved two hours per workload, and we have hundreds of workloads. We have taken about a two-hour process down to about 10 minutes in terms of recovery. Zerto is really good at what it does. It has been tremendous.

We can have a single person restoring scores of machines as well as doing DR. Backups are still managed separately. In our case, we did not reduce staff. Our staff was already kind of a limiting factor. We put Zerto in to enable our staff to do more, not to reduce our staff. Therefore, we have tremendously reduced the amount of workloads being handled by specialists.

The most valuable features are the ease of use, i.e., the relatively low complexity of the solution, as well as the speed and effectiveness of the solution. This allows us to protect our workloads with extremely small latency, making it very easy for us to monitor and recover. So, we are very happy with it.

In terms of Zerto providing continuous data protection, I would rate it as a nine out of 10. It is incredibly effective at what it does. I really have no complaints.

I would like to see more managed service= options. While Zerto isn't doing this a lot, there are a ton of third-parties who are doing managed services with Zerto.

For this company, we have only been using it for about six months. However, I have used it at two other companies for a total of about four years.

It is stable.

For our current needs, the scalability seems excellent. The scalability of the solution is really more of a function of your bandwidth and the amount of virtual resources you can point at it. I don't think there is any conceivable scalability limit.

Probably 10 people on my team touch Zerto in a meaningful way: 

• Four of them are infrastructure and data center engineers. They support the storage, users, communications, the software, and the configuration of most of the back-end system as well as monitor the solution. They do a lot there. 
• The other six people are our technical support director, enterprise applications team, and information security officer. Those people also get into Zerto. They generally do failover testing and monitor certain VPGs for parts of our system that they are responsible for, and they do some protection configuration. 

The heavy lifting is done on the infrastructure side, but the other teams monitor, maintain, and most importantly, test it. This is a big deal because we previously had the infrastructure team do all the testing for us before Zerto. Now, the business unit managers directly in IT can do their own testing, which is a big change for us.

Their technical support is excellent. They have a great support portal, which is easy to use. They are very responsive and generally able to help us with any configuration or performance issues that we run into.

Our previous product was VMware Site Recovery Manager. We switched to get a less complex system that could protect our workloads better and enable faster recovery. Those were kind of the main reasons why we switched. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed Zerto initially with a VAR. They explained the process very well. It was just an initial installation service which included some training. Then, we took over the management of it and have been managing it in-house ever since.

We have seen ROI. The biggest way that we have seen it is in avoided downtime. We have had outages before, and we count downtime in terms of dollars spent. We have cut that down so dramatically, which provides us a very quick ROI. We have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes us to recover workloads, from an average of two hours to an average of 10 minutes.

We measure our downtime in thousands of dollars per minute. While it depends on what is down and who it is impacting, we take in an average of $1,000 a minute at a minimum. So, 120 minutes of downtime at $1,000 is $120,000 per workload that is down, and that can add up very quickly.

My only business complaint is the cost of the solution. I feel like the cost could be a tad lower, but we are willing to pay extra to get the Premium service.

Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that.

The costs are the license and annual maintenance, which is the only other ongoing fee. I would imagine a lot of customers also have an initial project cost to get it implemented, if they choose to go that direction, like we did.

We do not currently use it for long-term retention. We have another solution for long-term backup retention, but we are in the second year of a three-year contract, so we will evaluate Zerto when those contracts are up. We will probably test it out. It is certainly something that we will look at. We will also plan to vet having backup and DR in one platform.

The incumbent was Site Recovery Manager, so we evaluated them as an incumbent. We also evaluated Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator. We use Veeam for data backup, and they have a disaster recovery piece. It would have been an add-on to our Veeam, so we evaluated that while also looking at Zerto.

It would be ideal to integrate your backup and disaster recovery into a single solution, so that is a pro whichever way you go with it. Zerto certainly has an answer for that, but so did Veeam. Zerto's replication is superior to anyone else's out there. It's faster, simpler, and effective. I don't think I could get as low an RTO and RPO with any other solution other than Zerto.

When comparing this solution to Site Recovery Manager, pay special attention to the fact that Zerto is hypervisor-agnostic and hardware-agnostic. It is a true software-based solution, which gives flexible options in terms of the types of equipment that they can recover on and to. Ultimately, it is very flexible. It is the most flexible platform for system replication. 

I would definitely advise them to give Zerto a chance and PoC it, if they desire. It is the best solution in the marketplace currently and has maintained that for quite some time.

I would give them a nine (out of 10). I really love the solution. I want more Zerto, but I can't afford more Zerto. I would love to protect everything in our environment, but we do have to make a business decision to do that because there is a requisite cost.

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. 

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

It's the easiest way to support DR as it does the conversion for you. After converting, it protects again. If you don't want Azure, you can just go back on-premises, for example. 

We can monitor VMs more easily with Zerto. We can always check if they aren't properly syncing. The migrations are also easy. 

The overall impact on our RPOs has been amazing. The ease of using it is great. Everyone is embracing it in our company.

The ease of use is ten out of ten. It's the easiest to use. 

The speed of recovery is great, especially the failover/failback. It helps our company a lot. 

The most valuable feature is the GUI. It's very simple. 

Setting it up is very easy. 

Everything is automated using scripts. 

The solution saves a lot of time and there is no downtime based on how the product is designed. If there's any downtime, it's only a second or two if we move. 

The near-synchronous replication is great. It just works. I'm a big fan of Zerto.

Right now, the solution is perfect. They shouldn't try to do everything. Zerto is DR and needs to focus on that. Everything works for us. There is nothing to improve. 

They already released the features that we want. We aren't missing any features. 

I've been using it for almost five years now. 

At first, when Zerto was bought by HP, we thought it was just going to be HP. However, Zerto is really working out and the stability is great. I hope they continue what they are doing and refrain from making major changes. 

Zerto scales pretty well. They have a lot of customers. The word of mouth is helping with growth.

It scales well with our environment with the conversion from VM to Azure and vice versa. It's so easy. There's no middle-man involved. It's just Zerto. 

The technical support is hit or miss. If it is a high-priority ticket, you get great Zerto support, however, if you just have a question, they redirect you to their documents. 

Positive

We previously used SRM before Zerto. 

The initial setup was not hard at all. We deployed a VM and had our team open the ports and we were all set. 

It only takes about an hour or two if you have the proper people helping you with the networking. 

We have witnessed a lot of ROI. Being technical, I always ask to make sure management is happy with the product we are trying to use. With the migration feature, it's way better now. We are able to migrate from the old data center without any disruption. That's a big win. 

The pricing is fair. The pricing is very competitive and it works well. You are paying for a product that is easy to use and just works. 

We've evaluated multiple DRs and some VMware products. Zerto was the winner due to the GUI. Also, it just works.

I have colleagues who are doing a POC with Zerto and will begin using it based on my recommendation. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. If I could give it eleven out of ten I would. 

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

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

Positive

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time. 

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication. 

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.