Zerto Reviews

I've used it for a temporary migration. We had to shut down a data center and we moved some database servers over to a disaster recovery site. We then did the maintenance at the data center and brought them back.

We're using it only for on-prem and we use it to replicate from our onsite data center to a co-location, but there is a fiber connection between the two, so it isn't an internet-based replication.

In that migration instance we had six terabytes of data that we needed to protect and bring online quickly. We had a replication going and we made the protection group switch and brought the systems back within less than 30 minutes. It reduced our downtime on some critical applications.

If we hadn't used Zerto, we would have had to vMotion them to the other side and that could have taken hours. That could also potentially have been unreliable because there's a timeout period when vMotion works. We used Zerto to be safe.

It is pretty simple to use.

Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes. We'll do the failover and some preparation activities and then there's a checkbox you need to check to continue and sometimes it's small, in the corner, depending on which screen you're using. A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there.

We also had an issue with a misnamed network. They should make that a little more apparent when it's not available on the destination side. We were able to go all the way through with it, but when we did the recovery, it wasn't available. A pre-check to say, "Hey, it's not available. What network do you want to use?" would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for about a month because I'm new with my current company.

The stability has been alright. We have failed over quite a number of machines.

We did have an issue with one failover. It didn't fail over completely. You really don't want to have to contact support in those situations, but we had to. It could have been an issue on our side as opposed to something being wrong with the configuration. I don't know what happened, but they got it working.

We had to call support during that migration because one of the settings wasn't correct. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but we had to create a ticket. Zerto got back to us within an hour, so we were really impressed with the support from them. It was really good. They got us taken care of pretty fast and we were back online during the process, within an hour. They were quick to respond after we submitted the ticket and then they got it fixed. There's not really much more they could have done in that situation.

Positive

We use VMware-native as well as Zerto. It's all circumstantial, based on sites. Some sites ended up getting an SRM license, so we have kept them instead of wasting licenses. And some sites use Zerto. Maybe down the road we'll pick one of the products, but for now, we use both.

Zerto was already there when I stepped into the picture. I helped initiate some of the disaster recovery processes. Based on what I saw from the outside, it was easy because it was ready for that situation quickly. It was ready in a business day or less, aside from the replication aspect or the data sync from when you first set up the jobs. But the basic setup to get things going was ready within less than a business day.

I would think we have seen return on the investment in Zerto because we use it a decent amount of the time. We have reduced the downtime within the last month because of it as well.

We've used SRM from VMware. Personally, I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements and VMware tools get us stuck sometimes. If the VMware tools aren't working on a virtual machine, it won't replicate over as quickly or start up as quickly because it's waiting for that service. You have to do custom settings to avoid that. Zerto doesn't have that requirement. It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor and then trace back and see what went wrong.

Zerto is also probably faster because SRM waits for VMware tools to come up and say, "Hey, we're here." That's not a requirement that I know of, with Zerto. Maybe it is. I'm a newer user of the product.

In terms of the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, Zerto hasn't really reduced that. My team generally handles those situations and it's the same number of people, regardless of which product we're using.

Zerto worked and did its job and it was easy to use. My team liked it, and the database administrators, who were the customers in that instance where we did the temporary migration, appreciated it.

I would rate it at eight out 10. Sometimes the interface can be a little tricky. If you're using a disaster recovery application, you're in a stressful situation already. Sometimes there are a lot of confirmations you have to go through just to start the Virtual Protection Group, and then it starts and you have to confirm again a few minutes later. You're stressed out. You're talking via chats with a bunch of people and there were times where that prompt was probably sitting there for minutes, which cost money.

More confirmations upfront and removing that second one later on in the process would be good, or a popup, instead of it being a small checkbox in the corner of the screen, is my recommendation.

We primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

Zerto is good in terms of providing continuous data protection. We have databases that require point in time recovery capability and Zerto is very flexible in this regard, compared with some other solutions we use, such as Sybase Replication and Oracle Replication.

We do not yet use Zerto's long-term retention feature but we are planning to do so. Currently, we are exploring AWS Glacier for long-term retention, and we will see how Zerto can help with the process.

Using Zerto has helped to simplify our process. The DBS steps are very deeply involved in the case of Sybase replication. This means that it takes a lot of technical skill, time, and effort to manage Sybase replication. Compared with that, Zerto is very user-friendly.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the number of highly skilled people involved and the time it takes to complete. For example, to do a command-line restore and recovery of Sybase involves pages of steps and it requires a talented DBA. However, with Zerto, we can take care of that with an intern. Only one person is involved in the process for either case, but with Zerto, fewer skills and experience in recovery are needed.

Fortunately, we have not yet been the victim of a ransomware attack. However, I am confident that Zerto can help, should that situation occur. Similarly, since implementing Zerto, we have not had any downtime. That said, we have simulated different scenarios and our results were good.

The most valuable feature is the point in time recovery. This allows us to recover at any point in time, up to a minute or so.

Zerto is pretty user-friendly. Normally, data recovery involves a lot of DBS skills but with Zerto, it is point-and-click.

It is very important to us that Zerto provides both backup and disaster recovery in a single platform. Because of problems that people are facing, we needed to have recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for the major cloud providers. This is the primary reason that we were looking for an up-to-date and current solution.

I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files. I have not tested it yet, so I can't say for sure whether it will choke or not.

The two large clouds that we use are AWS and Azure, and compatibility with these is always important for us.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years. We are using one version back from the current one.

In terms of stability, so far it looks okay but I am not sure how Zerto will react to volume loads. We haven't had a chance to test that because we don't have such a large environment.

Scalability has been good but I have yet to see how large a file it can handle.

We have two DBAs using the product, and then we have some interns to help out.

Currently, it is running in a small network where it is backing up a couple of replicated environments. We may increase our usage in the future, as we are now just beginning to back up everything to AWS.

Zerto's technical support team is pretty knowledgeable.

Prior to Zerto, we were using Sybase replication. When Sybase was acquired by SAP, we began having trouble when we needed technical support. The reason that we started looking for a replacement product is that we used to contact technical support in California when we needed help. However, we now have to call Germany first, only to have them redirect the call to California. SAP is a mess.

I was involved in setting up the proof of concept, and I found that the initial setup was okay.

Once the PoC was complete, we went into small volume testing and then started using it after that. The deployment only took us a couple of hours.

A couple of people from our organization handled the deployment, and we had some Zerto technical reps available to answer questions. The Zerto staff are pretty knowledgeable and they answered the questions well.

Compared to the licensing fees with Oracle and SAP, we see a return on investment.

Price-wise, Zerto is fairly reasonable and I can't complain about it when we compare it against Oracle and SAP licensing.

We have not tried using any features that are outside of the standard licensing fees.

We looked into Oracle GoldenGate but it is pretty expensive and cumbersome. Sybase is better than Oracle in terms of pricing, but Zerto is cheaper.

We have not yet enabled data recovery in the cloud, but we are planning to use it. As of now, we haven't tested it. We always back things up but in terms of restoring and testing, we are behind.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is pretty user-friendly compared to Oracle and SAP. This is a good solution to start with. Once it has been implemented, I suggest moving to volume testing to see how well it handles large volumes of data.

We have never had a real situation where we were under the gun for the purpose of RTO and RPO recovery times. As such, I can't say for sure how it will behave in a real situation but we are satisfied with our tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Zerto was to enable replication at our DR site for virtual appliances and automation of the failover - failback process. This also gets utilized for recovery at our DR site at different timestamps using the journal history.

This solution is very light, with zero-touch deployment and very enhanced dashboards. 

It has enabled DR protection for virtual appliances with minimal administrator time. This solution also provides a backup option at the DR site without any additional cost of licenses. The Dashboards are very intuitive and can be published to the CIO and CTO. 

We loved the orchestrator, which allows us to specify IPs for our DR site in advance. It also allowed us to pre-configure the boot sequence for a failover test or actual recovery. Backup at the DR site is the icing on the cake. The concept of a journal history and keeping snapshots at intervals of seconds are quite good.

Mobile features are there only for visibility and not to take action. We would love to see the ability to perform actions through mobile apps.

It would be helpful if the reports can be generated periodically, on a schedule.

This solution is very stable.

This is a scalable solution that also supports multiple clouds.

Our earlier solution doesn't have a detailed orchestrator and didn't support appliances.

It is very easy to set-up this solution.

We implemented this solution in-house, without the need for any partner to assist with the set-up.

There is no need to think of ROI as this is a DC-DR solution.

The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features. The features are much enhanced compared to any other DC-DR solution.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated VMware Replication & Sanovi.

Overall, this solution is quite enhanced compared to other, similar solutions in the market.

I recommend trying this solution.

There are many valuable features. However, the one that sticks out the most is the simplicity of the process to protect or migrate a virtual workload.

It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome.

Zerto has changed how we think about protecting virtual workloads. It has enabled us to think about real time protection with full replication that provides checkpoints every few seconds and enables quick (< 10min) recovery times.

Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site. This is good stuff.

We have been using the product for more than two years.

Zerto is stable and works as expected.

Zerto scales as you scale your virtual environments. It simply and quickly protects virtual workloads.

Zerto’s support is good. They are quick to contact you back and get working on any issue. This is hard to get from other vendors.

I have been performing DR/migrations/replication for over 15 years. I changed during a bake-off of different products based on:

• Speed to setup and run
• Low to no dependencies
• Simple to use (easy to operationalize)

Zerto simply is the tool for protecting any virtual workload. I have set up and protected:

• DBs (DB2, SQL, Oracle)
• Many apps (Wintel and Linux)
• Virtual appliances.

It is extremely simple to set up and use.

The Zerto setup was straightforward. It is one of the simplest tools I have ever deployed to protect virtual workloads. It works hand in hand with VMware features such as DRS/HA, so there is no issue when your workload moves around.

Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical.

We evaluated PlateSpin, Recover Point/Recover Point 4 VMs, VMW SRM, Veeam, and VMW converter.

Put it in place as it will become your default tool for VM protection and replication, hands down!

I am a cloud provider and I use Zerto to provide disaster recovery solutions for my clients.

Recently, we had an issue where one of our customers using Oracle Server experienced corruption in a database. The customer doesn't know when the issue started, so we used Zerto. We started to do a real-live failover for the machine, and we were able to determine the timestamp for the start of the issue. Prior to this, Oracle engineers tried for four hours to fix the database but did not have any luck in doing so. Ultimately, we were able to save the customer's data by using Zerto.

A few of my customers are using file-level restore but the majority of them are using the replication features for disaster recovery.

Zerto offers features for long-term data retention; however, we don't use them. The longest time that we back up data for is 30 days. At this time, I don't have any request for this from my customs, although in the future, if we have a customer that asks for it then we can provide it.

Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center.

We have a customer with an on-premises data center that replicates the environment to our cloud. One day, this customer had a water pipe burst in his data center. The entire data center was flooded and everything stopped working. We did a live failover and from that point, he could continue working but it was running from the data center in our cloud, instead. Zerto definitely saved us time in this data recovery situation.

It took the customer between four and five days to return everything back to normal onsite. During that time, he spoke with us at 9:00 AM on the first day, and after an hour, his company resumed work with our help. This reduced his downtime to one hour from approximately five days.

Performing a failback using Zerto is pretty much the same in terms of how long it takes, and how many people we require. The customer decides when to do the fallback; for example, it can be done during the night. We replicate the data at their chosen time and it avoids issues for them because they don't operate during those hours.

In a situation like a burst water pipe or a database becoming corrupt, Zerto doesn't help to reduce the number of staff involved. The reason is that when something affects the company, management, including the CEO, has to be involved. They do not deal specifically with operating Zerto but rather, they wait for things to develop. The good part is that they know that with Zerto, they have a solution, and they don't need to figure out what to do.

In terms of the number of people it takes to recover data in cases like this, there is typically one person from our company involved, and one person from our customer's company.

My customers save money using Zerto and our facilities, rather than a physical data center because they do not have to do any maintenance on the backup equipment. It is also much easier to pay one company that will do everything for them.

Using Zerto makes it easier for my clients, giving them time to work on other things. The main reason is that they don't have to maintain or upgrade their environment. Not having to implement new recovery solutions as their needs change, saves them time.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do disaster recovery.

Zerto is very user-friendly and engineer-friendly, as well. When we need to create a new Virtual Protection Group (VPG) for replication, then it is done with just a few clicks of the mouse. We can see all of the environments and we don't need to install agents on the customer's VMs.

The live failover feature is very helpful.

With regards to providing continuous data protection, it's great. Most of the time, it's about five seconds for replication.

The monitoring and alerting functionality need to be improved. Ideally, the monitoring would include the option for more filters. For example, it would be helpful if we could filter by company name, as well as other attributes.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

Zerto is a pretty stable product. We have had issues from time to time over two years, but usually, it is stable. When we have trouble then we contact their excellent technical staff.

I have quite a lot of customers that are using Zerto for disaster recovery and it is simple to scale. Our intention is to increase our usage by bringing on more customers that will replicate from their on-premises environment to the cloud.

In my company, there are five or six people who work doing the backup and recovery operations. On the client's side, they normally have one or two people that are in charge of maintaining the data center.

The size of your environment will depend on how many VMs you need to replicate. For example, if you are replicating 100 VMS then you can use a small environment. However, if you are replicating 1,000 or more VMS then you will need a stronger and larger environment, with more storage and more memory.

The technical staff is excellent and we contact them whenever we need something.

We had a customer that replicated his VM and for some reason, when we tried to do a failover test, the VM came back with an error saying that the network card was disconnected. We spoke with the Zerto technical staff and they actually implemented an ad-hoc fix for our environment. In the next Zerto version update, they released it for all their customers.

The technical support is definitely responsive and they explain everything.

I began using Zerto version 6.5 and am now using version 8. We did not use a different solution for disaster recovery beforehand.

We use Veeam for backup tasks. We looked at Veeam CDP to compare with Zerto, and Zerto is definitely better. It is more user-friendly, agentless, and the technical support is better.

The initial setup is straightforward and pretty easy to complete. It takes about an hour to deploy. During the process, you set up the Zerto server to see the whole environment. You then install VRAs on all of the hosts. In general, the management server is pretty user-friendly.

The implementation strategy changes depending on the customer. We did have a few customers that required a more extensive setup because one had an IPsec connection, and a few of them were using point-to-point connections. That's the only strategy. But with Zerto, they need to decide which VMs they want to replicate, and then we create it based on that. First, we will want to replicate the DC, the domain controllers, and then we will want the infrastructure servers, and then the database servers, and the last one is the application.

During setup, one person from our company normally works with one person from our customer's side. Only a single person is required for maintenance.

My impression is that Zerto is more expensive than other solutions, although I don't have exact numbers.

We evaluated CloudEndure and we also had Double-Take, but neither of these solutions worked well. These solutions were based on agents, which affected the customers' server performance.

In terms of usage, Zerto is a different level of experience when compared to other products. It is easier to set up and use.

With other solutions, we need to install software on the customer's server and then reboot, whereas, with Zerto, we don't need to do these things. In fact, there is no downtime on the customer's side. Depending on the customer's environment, post-installation downtime may have been as little as one minute, or more than an hour.

In situations where downtime is expected, and there is an important application like a database running, these periods need to be scheduled. Normally, downtime will be scheduled at night, after business hours. Although there may not be a disruption in work, it is an extra effort that needs to be put into the other products.

Looking ahead, I have seen that the next version of Zerto will support Salesforce replication. This could be something that is useful for my customers.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from user Zerto is that every organization should have a disaster recovery plan. My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to calculate how much it will cost in the event of downtime or a disaster, and then compare it to the cost of Zerto. Once this is done, people will opt for a disaster recovery solution.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery data replication from our headquarters to an offsite data center at another location.

It has replaced all of my legacy backup solutions.

The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location. So if we were to have a disaster, it takes about five seconds right now if I look at it. If we were to have a disaster, we would not only have current data, but we'd also be up and running within hours at our offsite data center, rather than days if we had a tape backup solution.

We have begun using it for longterm retention. We also replicate our file server. Our file server has archive or historical data that we have to restore occasionally. And restoring from long term retention is applicable to those types of scenarios, versus the streaming of the data, the real-time data. The longterm retention allows us to restore from further back in time. Real-time is more for recent changes to the data, and the longterm retention is for if we have to restore from further back.

It provides continuous data protection. It has been extremely effective. I've done failover testing, and the data is accurate and current. It works.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is very intuitive. The graphical user interface of the application, both for monitoring VPG replication, longterm retention success, the configuration of VPG for longterm retention, and the analytics feature is intuitive and allows you to essentially analyze any changes to your environment. All of that requires some training but is not incredibly complex. It's presented in a very easy to use format. 

Zerto dramatically decreases the amount of time it takes to do a failover. I can essentially do it all by myself and I'm one person, I don't really need help. It allows me to restore our environment fully in a matter of seconds, literally. I can do that on my own from my desk very easily and with no outside help. 

Compared to other products, I would praise the intuitiveness of the product. But I think that can always be improved. The intuitiveness of the graphical user interface, while it is very solid and I don't have issues navigating it. I would say that it can always be improved.

I have been using Zerto for around three years. 

The stability is very solid. It just runs. It has not crashed or had issues. So long as you stay on top of the versions of the application and you have it installed on reliable hardware, you're going to be just fine.

It can scale into the cloud. I know it has that capability, but I have not done that yet.

It's essentially myself and I have one junior person that uses the application, but it's mostly myself.

It's used for all of our mission-critical servers. Not every single one of our servers, but probably about a third of our total servers.

I do not have plans to increase usage. 

The tech support is top-notch. I have an engineer who I work with on a regular basis that communicates with me anytime there is an issue. He has worked side by side with me on any issues, questions, and implementations that I have wanted to accomplish. They by far go above and beyond more than any of my other vendors and I have quite a few so that says a lot about them.

We previously used Asigra. We switched because of the cost, limitations, and complexity.

When we decided to go with Zerto, it was imperative that it provided both backup and DR in one platform. Granted, we didn't take advantage of it for a while but that's entirely my own fault. It was very important to have that functionality.

It was initially set up by a third party. But since then, I've had to re-set it up and it was pretty easy. It wasn't very complicated. It was quick. There were instructions that we followed pretty closely and there were no issues, so it was straightforward. There were a handful of steps, but nothing overly complex. The deployment took around 30 to 45 minutes. 

We haven't had a need to use it in an actual live disaster scenario, but we have that capability, which we did not before. But if we had to use it, it would save us a tremendous amount of money. Tremendous.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. 

We also evaluated Veeam.

It has not saved us time in data recovery situation due to ransomware just because we thankfully haven't had any issues. I've done some testing and in those types of situations, it would be greatly beneficial. But I have not had any of those situations currently.

At this time it has not helped to reduce downtime in any situation.

We don't have it replicated in the cloud at this time so it has not saved use money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center.

I would recommend Zerto to anybody considering it. 

My advice would be to make sure that after implementing the product, go through and accomplish the training labs so you know how to use a product really well, develop a disaster recovery plan in the event that you should need to use the product, and work closely with your Zerto engineer to ensure that the implementation fits your business needs.

The biggest lesson I have learned is how valuable real-time replication of data can be in the event of a disaster and how valuable that functionality is in the event of a disaster. It has the potential to save the company many days' worth of lost business.

If I could rate it an 11 (out of 10), I would. But we'll go with 10.

Real-time replication for our Disaster Recovery site, which is currently hosted in another on-premise site but will shortly be moving to a Data Center in the Cloud.

I have also used this solution to do point-in-time restores of Exchange mailbox items and to check updates from Microsoft.

This solution has given us the confidence to know that our complex systems are being backed up off-site in real-time and are testable on demand. This gives me a real sense of ease when speaking to Management about our resilience, and being able to demonstrate it includes everyone in the processes to confirm that.

The ability to fully test your entire environment without actually performing a failover is invaluable.

I really appreciate the Mobile app that allows me to monitor, at any time of the day or night, whether the replications are up and running.

Creating Virtual Protection Groups allows us to treat business services as one.

There needs to be more flexibility in the licensing. I've mentioned to Zerto Management that I find the licensing at twenty-five VMs to be very restricting to an SME business, and could there be some flexibility here? Businesses like ours constantly change their IT due to the flexibility of Virtualisation and it would be great to get Zerto on board with that same flexibility.

It has been very stable and gives me minimal problems, especially when compared to other parts of the business network.

I would imagine that the product would not have an upper limit due to its architecture. It seems to cope easily with our own environment of approximately forty VMs.

The person I worked with was very friendly and had excellent knowledge of the product and understood the wider implications of the installation.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. The installation and configuration are incredibly easy for someone who is reasonably familiar with IT Management.

We implemented this solution in-house.

We do not consider an ROI analysis to be relevant in this area.

While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install.

Before choosing this solution we extensively tested the built-in functionality of our EMC VNX SANs but they didn't function to an acceptable standard so we looked to third parties.

After researching the market thoroughly we decided that this was the one to go for.

I'd strongly suggest carrying out a proof of concept if you're looking at this part of your IT solution.

Our primary use case for Zerto is disaster recovery.

It's very simple to use and configure.

The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable.

This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We haven't experienced any issues.

We have a small environment so it may not be applicable to comment on scalability. What I can say is we took two of the largest virtual machines in our environment, created a VPG for them, set up the seeding and replication and Zerto easily supported this. If there was going to be any concern, we would've seen it with these two VMs. So far it looks good.

The customer support for this solution is okay. I have only opened up one support case. We were looking for someone to assist us right away. It was a Severity 2 case, with Severity 1 being the highest. They sent me an email but couldn't help me the same day. I was hoping that I could speak with them the same day to get some support.

I would rate them a six out of ten. 

Neutral

We previously tried Veeam's replication tool and it didn't work out too well. That's why we decided to go to Zerto. Zerto is much easier to set up and offers a faster speed of recovery.

The initial setup was straightforward. How the VPGs are configured and adding the VMs is simple and pretty intuitive. It took under an hour to set up. 

The setup was completed by myself and a colleague.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

I would advise others to take extra time before jumping into the setup, to consider the grouping of the VPGs and what makes the most sense for their business. It was important for our business to take that extra time to make sure that we got that right. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.