Zerto Reviews

We have critical servers at remote sites that failover or are replicated to our main data center in case of an emergency. If a remote site has a failure, we can spin up that virtual machine from our data center.

We operate a hub and spoke design with a centralized data center hosting our main instance, reaching out to roughly 78 remote locations. We handle the VPGs through the centralized management console at our data center.

We also use the Zerto to replicate from a primary host to a secondary host in case the primary goes down; we have a kind of cold box to which the solution replicates.

Our final use case is if we are updating a plant's entire server rack, and we use Zerto to replicate the old servers onto the new ones, which results in less downtime.  

The product significantly decreased the time it takes to deploy new servers; we can work on them, build them, and then failover the old VMs to the new server with minimal business impact. What previously took hours to migrate the VMs with vMotion typically takes 30 minutes with Zerto, which is a phenomenal time saving for us. Our plants also have the reassurance that when we replicate their main servers back to a data center, we can keep their business running even if they have a total loss of a server rack or power.

The solution has helped to reduce downtime; we had a situation where a plant had its server fail, and we could failover their server to our data center and had them back up and running within 30 minutes. The required parts for a fix took three days to arrive, but thanks to Zerto, they did not have three days of downtime. Additionally, we just updated our hardware at our plants from HP servers to Dell, and we had to move 10 to 15 VMs per location from the old servers to the new ones. We completed this relatively significant move- roughly eight TB worth of data- in 30 to 45 minutes versus multiple hours, a remarkable reduction of potential downtime. Depending on the plant, downtime can cost $100/minute and potentially much higher if they are into online sales.   

The product helped to reduce our organization's DR testing; we previously used a Hitachi failover or manual VM move, but now we have Zerto VPGs at all sites. We can click the failover button, and it's done about 30 minutes later. It's good not to have to failover manually. Regarding time saved, we can get testing for a plant done in 30-45 minutes, resulting in between two and six hours' worth of savings.

The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days.

The solution is very straightforward, especially after using it a few times. We had users who were daunted by it, but once we walked them through how easy it is to failover, they felt pretty comfortable. Zerto is easy to use and doesn't take long to learn, which is nice.  

We like the near-synchronous replication feature, and it's essential as we want to reduce the amount of data lost during a failover. The RPO and RTO are excellent, thanks to Zerto, and we have some sites with poor bandwidth, so we understand the limitations we're working with. Near-synchronous replication allows us to roll back to a specific hour or minute in case of a failure, which is a great feature.  

One of our primary uses for the solution is to protect VMs in our environment, which has an excellent effect on our RPOs. We had a data breach several years ago, and Zerto helped us quickly get back up. We like it a lot because we can failover within minutes once we detect an issue.  

I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent.

We've been using the solution for over five years. 

Zerto is very stable; we only have problems with sites with poor bandwidth, and there's little we can do to get around that. Sometimes VPGs get outdated because those sites can't copy the data fast enough, but the application is very stable.

The solution scales exceptionally well; we add more licenses when required and keep running. We currently have over 400 licenses.

I recently contacted technical support, and I rate them seven out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used Veeam, Commvault, and a Hitachi solution. We switched because Zerto has a better RTO and RP, and it's much easier to use than Veeam. The Hitachi solution was very cumbersome as it was CLI only, and we had to unmount and remount storage.

Comparing the ease of use with other solutions, Zerto is excellent; once we have the VPG, there's a large failover button which allows our entire team to carry out the function. It's elementary. After showing a team member once or twice, they can operate the tool independently. The graphics and GUI show us the failover progression, so we don't have to wonder if it has taken place or how long is left. The tool keeps good stats and informs us of the step it's on. 

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, but we operate the solution with one team, our server team. Regarding maintenance, a minimal amount is required to keep up to date with patches etc. We occasionally run into an issue that necessitates upgrading to a newer version; for example, we were trying to move some vast data stores, and Zerto support said we needed to increase the timeout count. We keep fully up to date with security patches, and two staff members are responsible for maintenance. 

We have seen an ROI with Zerto, though it's hard to quantify precisely how much. It saved us a significant amount of downtime, and plants lose money when they're down, so it's a hidden ROI in that respect.

As far as I know, the pricing is around $1,000 per VM, but Zerto is changing the pricing model to more of an enterprise-class license. I don't know if there are any additional costs or fees.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Zerto did not reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery, overall backup, and DR management because we already run a very lean staff; there are eight of us on the server team, and we manage over 3000 servers across the company. On the other hand, Zerto enables multiple staff to do the failovers rather than one of two specialized employees. 

None of the time saved in DR testing has been allocated to value-add tasks because the time saved occurs outside our regular business hours.

Comparing the solution's speed of recovery with other disaster recovery tools, Zerto is excellent and rapid; we can restore everything in the VPG simultaneously. A tool like Commvault is single-threaded, so we would have to restore VM by VM, which is very limiting. VPGs are excellent because we can restore everything within them and get on with life.  

We have not used the tool for immutable data copies; we use our pure storage.

When we had a ransomware attack, the solution didn't initially save us time as they attacked our Zerto environment and took it down. Once we had it back online, we could speed up the recovery, and we've since hardened the product with additional security.

We use Zerto to replicate data between our on-premises data centers, as well as for replicating data to the cloud. It is used primarily for disaster recovery, and we're not using it very much for backups.

Continuous data replication is the most important feature to us, and we use it for disaster recovery. We have very short RPOs in the event of a data center outage.

With respect to ease of use, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. It is very easy to set up and utilize. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is that I would like to see more export capability. Right now, you can export your VPG to a spreadsheet, but you don't have a lot of control over what data goes there. You just get everything and the formatting isn't the best.

When we need to failover or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. It only takes a single person to activate a failover and we can pretty much automate everything else. Instead of a week to recover a major application, we can do it in a day.

Mostly, this solution protects us from data center outages. With ransomware, it gets a little more complicated because depending on what they're doing, you could be replicating the encryption that they placed on you. Then, depending on how large your journal is, how far back you can go and how long the malware has been sitting in your network, it might not save you from a ransomware attack.

That said, it's still a major plus because if you have enough tools in your environment where you can catch the fact that they've been there, then if you've got 14 days, just as an example, in your journal, then you can go back far enough before they place any kind of encryption on your file. But, if you don't have other tools to also help protect you from ransomware, Zerto by itself may not be sufficient.

It's very rare that you have a true disaster where you have to failover a data center. I see Zerto more often being utilized to deal with some sort of database corruption. You can restore your primary site back from before the corruption. We need this Zerto protection, but it happens so rarely that you would actually have a full data center failure that, I can't say that we have had any staff reductions because of it. We have no staff specifically set aside for data recovery.

Beyond your normal path for backup and recovery, and those daily backups and managing that stuff, whether you're using Zerto for your backups or another backup utility in addition to Zerto, it hasn't really changed our staff.

The most valuable feature is the quick RPO for replication, which is our primary use case.

Zerto should add the capability to replicate the same VM to multiple sites.

The export capability should be improved so that it is more customizable in terms of what fields are exported and what the formatting is.

I would like to see the ability for Zerto to handle physical servers, although that is becoming less important to us.

I have been using Zerto with my parent company for the past several months and had been using it at a previous company for two years before that.

Zerto is very stable.

The scalability is generally good.

We're on an older version so this may have changed, but when it comes to cloud DR, they haven't kept us with the Azure capability. For example, Azure used to have an eight terabyte limit on disk drives. Azure now has a 32 terabyte limit, but Zerto still has a limit of eight. 

That said, when it comes to the number of VPGs and the number of instances, that has been sufficient for us. We have 646 VMs and 60 VPGs that are protecting 650 terabytes of data.

We have about four people who are managing it day-to-day. It is a shared role; our server engineering team is responsible for Zerto, and that team has approximately twelve people. They are all capable of utilizing Zerto, depending on their individual responsibilities, but there are probably no more than four people who currently use it on a daily basis.

We don't have one specific person to manage it but instead, we rely on the team. We're in the process of getting them all trained adequately. 

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them a seven out of ten. They are similar to a lot of companies, where they're very quick to respond to simple issues that might be in a playbook, yet slow sometimes to get a more complex problem resolved.

This was our first true DR tool. Before that, we were just using backup solutions. The one that we were using most recently was IBM Spectrum Protect.

I have a lot of past experience in my previous company with RecoverPoint, as well as with CloudEndure. CloudEndure was used specifically for cloud DR with AWS.

Zerto is much easier to use than RecoverPoint. Both Zerto and CloudEndure are very easy to use.

The initial setup is pretty easy to do. I was not with this company when they implemented it, so I don't know how long it took them to deploy. However, in my previous company, we initially installed and set it up in a day. We didn't have much trouble.

At first, we only had a couple of small test instances. We started adding things that we needed, over time.

Using Zerto has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud because we did not have to purchase the infrastructure at the alternate site. It's difficult to approximate how much money we have saved because we never built a DR site for the applications that we now have replicated in the cloud. There has never been an on-premises solution for them.

It is relevant to point out that we're not using it so much for day-to-day backups, but rather, we're using it for continuous data protection for DR and we have not had any disaster, so it's difficult to quantify our return on investment from that perspective.

However, from the perspective of being able to do cloud DR and not having to pay for that infrastructure, and even when it comes to the ease of use when we're going from data center to data center, I think we've got a definite return on our investment in comparison to not having a continuous data protection tool.

There is a difference between what we do and what we would have been doing without a tool like Zerto. In this regard, Zerto is a kind of overhead because hopefully, you're not using it day-to-day in a real disaster. It's more like insurance.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, but Zerto's better integration into vCenter was probably the reason that we chose it.

We do not currently use Zerto for long-term retention, although we are looking at the feature.

I highly recommend Zerto. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to go through all of the best practice guides and be sure to review whatever database they have in there. This way, they keep themselves efficient.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that it's only at a VPG level that everything is consistent. So, if you have multiple servers and applications that need to be consistent with each other, then, they really should be in the same VPG.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

Zerto is part of our disaster recovery plan. We have it set up in our main office and in a remote location in another state. We replicate all of our ERP data over to the replication site utilizing Zerto. In case there's a failure or a ransomware attack, or anything that we need to restore back to a point in time, in real time, Zerto covers those scenarios.

Being able to bring a virtual machine online in a test environment, look at it, make changes and then say, "Okay, we're done," and turn it off again, is pretty helpful for us. It has actually saved us a couple of times.

For example, we had an order that was put in by a customer but the entire order got deleted. There was no history of it and no way of retrieving what was on the order. So we actually spun up our production ERP system on our remote location, utilizing Zerto. We brought it online and restored it to the point of time when we knew the record was there, and made a screenshot of the record with all the line data included. Then we shut it back down. We were able to re-key the order and it worked out great.

With Zerto, our disaster recovery is probably the one piece that we know is reliable and available. The way Zerto works, and the way we are utilizing it as part of our disaster recovery solution, make our disaster recovery plan very easy to explain for us and to our auditors.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people needed. A failback literally takes minutes to do, and one person can do it. We can either put it into production or just say, "Okay, we've got what we need." We'll just end it and go back to our normal production cycle. It's very easy and definitely decreases workload. There are no tapes to dig out or backups to sort through. You just grab the time you want and say, "Hey, put me back into this period and time," and it does it.

Zerto's continuous data protection is unmatched. It's phenomenal.

It's also very easy to use. The menus are self-explanatory. Once you understand the terminology of the product, what the VPGs (Virtual Protected Groups) are, you're able to pretty much do what you want in the product. It's very easy to use.

It took me a little bit of time to get used to Zerto's terminology and to relate it back to how you do a backup traditionally. It was a little different. It took a little while to understand what a VPG is and what it does. That's an area that they could probably improve on a little, making the documentation easier to understand.

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

The stability of Zerto is outstanding. It runs 24/7 and works as described. If there are any issues or any problems arise, we get notifications from Zerto, but that does not happen often. Usually, if there's an issue, it's related to something we've done, or because we need to increase a file size or job log. Other than that, it works the way it's supposed to.

Zerto covers 10 production machines in our environment, which is not a huge scale. We only have one replication site. We could easily add more replications if we wanted to. Zerto has that flexibility. But for us, a one-to-one replication to our Nashville location works perfectly for us.

I have had to call their technical support and they're very responsive. The issue is always resolved. I give them very high marks for their support.

Positive

We didn't have a solution that does what Zerto does.

The initial setup was very simple, very straightforward. Zerto got online with us when we did the initial configuration and gave us easy guidelines to follow. We were able to have it up and running in less than an hour.

We took what Zerto recommended in their deployment guide. We knew the areas we wanted to cover and what we wanted to improve upon. Based on those things, we were able to come up with a nice, easy plan to follow to get it implemented.

When there's an issue, just one person is involved, but generally speaking, there's not much maintenance on Zerto. Once you get it up and running, it does what it's supposed to do.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Zerto. First, it's a time-saver. Second, for IT, it gives us peace of mind. We don't have to worry about it. 

One of the ways Zerto is really good in that regard is that you can actually bring your servers online in your test environment and see exactly what something would look like if you restored it. And if you don't want to restore it, you just hit "cancel" and it puts it back the way it was. It's great to be able to do that. The test features they have built into the product mean you can test a scenario like "What if I want to spin this up over here, how would it look?" You can do that.

Licensing Zerto was very simple. They had a product that fit our size and scale. It made it really easy to choose. 

As far as pricing goes again, we're a $150 million dollar company, meaning we're not a huge company but we're not a small one either. Zerto had the right pricing model that fit our budget, and they delivered on it.

Zerto was the leader in the category, and I'd used it in the past with another company, so we just went straight to Zerto. There was no need for a PoC with another product. We knew it would work for us.

My advice about Zerto would be "do it." The product is just that good. What it does is very impressive. And again, it gives you peace of mind, knowing your data is safe and secure and that it's replicating like it's supposed to. That's just a great feeling.

We don't do long-term retention currently due to how our backups are made. We use Zerto for anything less than a one-week window and we can revert back. 

Thankfully, we have not had to use Zerto for ransomware, but it would absolutely be a lifesaver should that scenario come up. Similarly, we haven't had a situation where we had to fully flip over to our DR environment. We have tested it, and it works great. Our recovery time would literally be 20 minutes and we'd be up and running in a brand new location, without missing a single record.

While Zerto hasn't necessarily changed the amount of staff involved in our overall backup and DR management, it has definitely made those tasks very easy. We set it up once and we don't have to worry about it anymore. It runs and does its thing. We don't have to babysit it or watch it or worry about it. It just works. For what we use it for, I don't see an area in which I would say, "Hey, add this feature or make this change." It works as described, right out-of-the-box.

We've got two data centers, and for any of our applications that are not in some kind of a load-balanced or high-availability cluster, we use Zerto to replicate them, to make them as highly available as possible, without building that into the solution. We replicate between 100 and 150 different VMs from our North Carolina data center to our Chicago data center.

A small example of the way it's made things simpler is that we were building out a new product, and the original recommendation from the vendor when we were deploying that product was to have the application server closest to the end-users and the database server at our main data center in North Carolina. Once it was implemented, we found out that wasn't the case. We used Zerto to fail over the database to the same data center that the application server was in. We were able to do that really quickly and easily, without having to do a whole lot of extra work, such as having to rebuild the database server. That's one example of how we use Zerto, not just in a standard failover scenario. It made the process a lot easier than it would have been had we not had Zerto.

We have also used it when something happened to a configuration or a database file and it had become corrupted. It happened in the evening, after-hours. Rather than getting the backup engineer involved and trying to restore the files from a backup, we used Zerto to grab the file from a couple of hours previous, restored it, and got things back up and running really quickly. It's definitely a time-saver. We were able to handle it ourselves without needing to get anybody else involved.

One of the most valuable things about the solution is the ease of use when it comes to failing things over. The ability to easily test your failover capabilities is really nice. We can actually stand up a VM in an isolated environment, validate that the VM is up and running and that it boots properly, and we can do that in a matter of 30 seconds. Being able to show that to upper management, and that it's working the way it should, provides a lot of value.

It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple.

If everything is set up and configured properly, a failover of one or two systems can be done by one person. Nobody has to be involved other than the application owner, to validate everything, once the failover is done. It's a one-man show.

Continuous data protection is what it's supposed to do. Being able to bring a system up within a matter of minutes is the next best thing to having an actual high-availability cluster. If you're not building high availability into a solution itself, Zerto is the next best option. If we're talking about one or two applications or one VPG (Virtual Protected Group) a failover takes under five minutes, from the point of clicking "Start Failover" to the point of validating everything on the application end.

The only thing we've noticed that needs improvement is the backend cleanup within VMware. There are some little issues there. I would like to see tighter integration with VMware. From a recoverability standpoint, it's great when using VMware. But what we have noticed is that orphan data is an issue within VMware. It doesn't clean up properly when you're moving stuff around.

Our company has been using Zerto for several years. I took over management of it within the last six months, but I've dealt with Zerto in the past as well.

We've had no stability issues. We've had to open one or two cases on small issues, but they've been pretty trivial. There haven't been any critical issues with its stability.

It scales really well. Out of 500 VMs, we're using it for about 150 of them. That's probably not a lot compared to other Zerto customers. But as you add more ESX hosts to your environment, you just add new VRAs to the ESX host. There's not too much to have to worry about when you're scaling up.

We utilize it for everything that we don't build in a high-availability cluster. A lot of our stuff is designed as an HA cluster, but anything that is not designed that way is automatically protected by Zerto.

The technical support is as good as, if not better than, most of the technical support that we deal with. Opening tickets is easy. The support portal is easy to use. Depending on the severity—I've never had to open a Sev 1 case—Sev 2 and Sev 3 cases are answered within 24 hours.

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution.

I did not do the initial setup of the solution, but the upgrade from version 8.5 to 9.5 was very simple.

Our engineering team members, three systems engineers, are the main users of Zerto. We don't have segregated roles. I'm the point person for Zerto, and the other guys are backups for managing it and doing recoveries. Maintenance only requires one person.

We have seen ROI from a time-management standpoint.

I don't know if Zerto reduces the number of people that we need to have involved in a recovery scenario, but it definitely simplifies the process compared to using Commvault, which is our backup solution. If it's something that we need recovered from within a day or two, it's much simpler to recover that file with Zerto than it is from a backup solution like Commvault.

Anybody on our engineering team can probably recover a file using Zerto. I'm not so sure that's the case for Commvault. Our backup admin would probably have to get involved if we're doing a recovery from Commvault. Using Zerto, the UI is so much simpler.

There may be a small possibility that we will look at Zerto to replace Commvault whenever we do replace Commvault. That's a possibility, but it hasn't been brought up yet. We do know we are getting rid of Commvault at some point.

I've used other solutions, like Dell Avamar and Veeam. Veeam is definitely pretty easy to use and on par with Zerto. It's 100 times easier to use than Avamar. Ease of use is one of Zerto's strongest points.

Go for it. It's the best-of-breed for high-availability replication solutions. It really is dead simple to use and easy to implement and maintain. It's not one of those solutions that you have to spend hours a day managing. You look at it for five minutes a day and forget about it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that high availability, having a good replication solution in place, doesn't have to be a big, complicated, scary mess. It can be simple. It doesn't have to be some huge hurdle that you have to overcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for about four years now. 

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

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

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

I would rate Zerto support a seven out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

There are additional VM resource costs.

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

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

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

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

We're using it for site plate replication and fail-over or disaster recovery. We're primarily using it to replicate between the data centers that we own and operate.

We've had a few disasters where we've had a site go out and we've had outages or hardware failures. However, with a single click, we can have all of the failover and when the other sites come back up, it can auto re-replicate in the reverse direction so there is no extra manpower required. Whereas, normally, we would be spending hours and hours cleaning up from the failover event.

We enjoy the simplicity of not only configuring replication but failing over with a single click and then having it automatically reverse replication. We've had other products such as Veeam, and their replication works, however, it's very cumbersome to configure. When you failover, there's a bunch of work you have to do after the fact to reverse the direction and to restore the VM and how it names it and which environment it shows up in.

In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window.

The solution is very easy to use. It's very straightforward. You don't really have to do a lot of reading through the documentation, or things like that. You can basically scroll through the menu and figure it out.

We have not had ransomware, so we haven't had to deal with that, however, we definitely had a disaster recovery issue we had where we had the fail-over site stop unexpectedly. It did save us a bit of data loss, whereas, normally, we would have lost six hours' worth of customer data. In this case, it was seamless. We lost seconds' worth.

The solution has reduced downtime. It has done so a couple of times. There could be some cost savings there. It's just not something we calculate.

The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product. Zerto can do backup, and yet it's really a disaster recovery product. It would be great if they could improve upon the backup functionality, or continually improve. We've seen some improvements, however, if they continue improving upon that it may eventually eliminate the need for the other product.

I've been using the solution for about three years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. The only issue we had was a DHCP issue where we didn't static a couple of the DVMs, which is the agent for each ESX host, and we were having a few gaps in replication when the IPs would change, however, we've stacked those and that has resolved that issue.

We find that it's very easily scalable. The resource overhead is very minimal so it's really easy to scale up the environment and the product kind of automates the process for you. You select where you want it, hit install, and it handles it for you.

About five people use the product in our company. We have some system administrators, we have a couple of programmers and we have a DBA.

We have around a quarter of our environment replicated with Zerto. It's mostly our critical infrastructure.

We may possibly increase usage over time.

Technical support is good. I'd give it an eight out of ten. They're pretty quick to respond. They are almost always able to resolve my issue. I have no complaints. I only had a couple of support tickets, however, the experience was pretty good.

That said, their web portal is a bit clunky to navigate. For example, putting in a request, knowing where to go, or pulling up documentation or upgrading information wasn't quite as intuitive as it could be.

We are still using Veeam mostly for backup tasks. We use Zerto for site recovery.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

The installation was simple. There are lots of guides and information. There are YouTube videos. They had training classes that were free that you can go to and they have a little lab environment. Even without the assistance offered, the way you install it is very straightforward and very simple. Really anybody can run the installer and have an idea of what they're doing right out of the gate without really any training.

Deployment took around a day.

We did have a specific deployment plan and we were able to execute that in about a day. Getting all the sites set up and then the VMs replicated was fast.

We have five people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance.

We didn't use an integrator or consultant. We just did it ourselves.

There's not a direct ROI as it's being used as an insurance policy. The only time it really benefits us is when something bad happens.

It's reasonably affordable. Obviously, cheaper would always be better, however, it's not out of the expected range. We are just paying by VM. It's my understanding there are no extra fees.

I can't remember the companies off the top of my head as it's been a few years since we've done it, however, we evaluated five or ten different options that were popular at the time. Some of them were integrated with hardware. Some of them were software only.

In the end, it came down to Zerto due to simplicity. It's very simple and straightforward. It removes all the overhead of management and knowing what is active or what's the standby copy. It handles all of those pieces for you.

We're probably on the latest version or one version behind.

We very lightly use the product for very specific things. We have a couple of things that are very high data rate, very high IO, for which we cannot use traditional snapshot-based technology and we are using that to do a long-term backup.

The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We have maintained exactly what we had. It's simplified it so it's possible to have a reduction, however, we haven't done any reduction from that.

The biggest piece of advice I could give is if you want the best-in-class for failover and replication, as well as ease of management, there is no better product that I've seen so far. Whether hardware or software combinations, this has been the simplest deployment and it just works.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

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

It helps us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

The pricing follows normal industry standards.

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

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

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

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

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

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