Zerto Reviews

I am actually a value-added reseller. I personally do not use Zerto. I have customers that use Zerto, and they use it as their cyber recovery. They have also used it to move VMs.

When exactly a company can expect the benefits of Zerto depends on the use case scenario. In the instances I have seen with my customer, it has been both near and immediate-term benefits. Since it is easier for them to use and they are able to work with it and get their workloads done, they also saw benefits from a budget standpoint down the road.

The most valuable features in Zerto are ease of use number one and the support that has come from the Zerto team. They have been very hands-on with 'we are here to help you, train you and teach you how to fish, so you can drive it yourself.'

For us, the impact that Zerto has had on the IT resiliency strategy is that we use it as a way to help our customers set up data recovery should something happen. What we appreciate about it is the snapshot and how much easier it is to access.

The near synchronous replication works very well. This is not my experience. It is my customer's experience. They have been very happy with it. They had a bunch of VMs they wanted to move since they wanted to migrate some stuff, and it worked very well for them. It actually helped them beat their timeline as it worked so well. They were going to have a very, very, very hefty renewal that they had to pay. And so it saved them lots of money. It worked quickly and they were able to meet their timeline.

It's helped with DR testing. 

Better communication around pricing would be useful - particularly in light of the economic and tariff situation we have going on.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

We have not had any reports of instability in Zerto from clients. The use case I keep coming back to is our customer who used it to move a bunch of VMs. Once they got it up and deployed, they handily beat their schedule. At one point, they thought they were not going to get all the VMs moved and would have to do a renewal on part of them, however, the ease of use was so good with Zerto that they were able to migrate things much quicker.

Zerto's scalability has been good. One of the things that works for our customer set is what they call t-shirt sizing with extra small, small, medium, large, extra large and jumbo. Those are nice to have as a starting point to talk to a customer, however, then you can go in and tailor that specifically to the customer's needs.

I haven't had a need to contact Zerto's technical support.

Positive

I have used or sold alternatives to Zerto such as Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Zerto is the clear winner.

I find that the initial deployment of Zerto for a client is quite easy. The instances where we rolled it out at customers, the deployment has gone very smoothly. There seems to be something intuitive about Zerto that makes it easier for folks in a company to use.

There's not really any maintenance needed once deployed. 

On average, four people are required for the deployment.

The pricing is competitive.

If I were to compare Zerto to its competitors, Zerto is the winner in data recovery.

I am not a technical person, so I cannot answer that from a technical standpoint regarding what Zerto does better or worse than its competitors. I can answer it from a customer ease of use perspective. The biggest thing we have heard is that it is easy to use and intuitive. The sales teams and technical resources that Zerto has are there to help answer questions and teach the customer how to use it in their environment, so they are able to do things after the Zerto resources are no longer there.

My clients have tried to protect the virtual machines in their environment. I have not seen any effects on RPOs or RTOs. I am an official reseller of Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto overall a nine.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery replication between two sites.

We started to use this solution to help with disaster recovery planning and fast recoverability.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have two different SANS by EMC, VMware as our DOS network operating system, and we have a mixture of Windows, Linux, Red Hat, and Cisco switches.

We haven't done DR in the cloud because we don't do anything in the cloud.

We haven't used Zerto for immutable data copies because everything is on-premises. We just use it in a VM environment for the VMDK replication.

It's made us feel more secure, and we used it a couple of times for failover, so it's an essential part of the business operations.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been business critical. It's almost as important as a running production server.

It reduced our downtime. We can recover in five to six minutes versus 12 hours. That amount of downtime would have cost our organization $30,000.

The solution saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware. We got infected, noticed the infection within seven minutes, and restored it to a point in time. We failed over to our disaster site, deleted the infected server, and 24 hours later we replicated back to our corporate site.

It helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It's easier to plan, and the procedure is the same no matter the operating system or the applications installed.

It reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery. It also reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management, but we have not reduced our workforce because of it.

Real-time or near real-time replication is the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential.

The ease of use is great. You just have to be familiar with it, know how to set up your virtually protected groups, and know what fits your environment the best.

I love the solution's near synchronous replication. It's business critical to our organization.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment.

It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual.

Zerto hasn't replaced all of our legacy backup solutions.

I have been using this solution for about nine years.

I would rate the stability 10 out of 10.

I haven't had any issues with scalability. We don't have any plans to increase usage and buy more licenses, but we will if we need to.

Technical support is really good. We've used the solution for more than eight years, and we've only needed to call them three or four times.

I would rate technical support 10 out of 10.

We previously used VMware DRS. We made the switch to Zerto because of reporting and ease of use.

There was a learning curve, but the setup was pretty easy. For our deployment model, we have one VPG per server, so it's one-to-one.

For maintenance, there are quarterly patches, and we set up testing of our VPGs every six months.

Deployment was done in-house.

We've seen ROI in active disaster recovery and failover.

I wish it were cheaper, but I would purchase it again at the same price.

We haven't reviewed any other product in the last eight years, but if I can say that I can get six to eight seconds RPO and RTL, that's incredible.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is just easier to use, it's not as cumbersome, it's straightforward, and training is easy.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

For those who are interested in this solution, my advice is to evaluate it, test it, and buy it.

We have typical use cases for it: resilience and disaster recovery. They have some other functionalities that their software can help account for, but we are using its disaster recovery and resilience, which are kind of its core functions.

I have used it in many scenarios, including a temporary data center move in Europe. I had to move all my resources from Belgium to Budapest, and then back, once our data center was physically moved across town in Belgium. I am not sure how this would have been accomplished without Zerto. 

With Zerto, the move was incredibly easy to do. It was click of a button, wait 10 minutes, and everything is up, then turn on the data center. Once the data center was relocated and rebuilt, click a button, and wait a few minutes, then it now runs back to the original site. It was that easy. The data center move part was obviously the hard part, as it should have been, not keeping the applications going at a secondary site during that time. That was a pretty big success with Zerto and our largest use case for it: a data center move.

We are currently using Zerto with some more modern databases, application servers, and tertiary systems to provide redundancy and resiliency to our crown jewel application. We have been doing a lot of DR testing scenarios, part of which relies on Zerto and part of which are other mechanisms. In general, when we have done our recent testing using the Zerto portions, once we say, "Okay, we are doing this now," it is taking less than three minutes on average for the systems to be fully back online at the new location once we start. That includes booting all the Windows VMs up. The actual VMs were ready to go and functional within 30 seconds. However, some of them are larger Windows machines and those take their time to boot, getting services online and connected to everything. So, the Zerto part was literally under a minute in these test scenarios to clear a total failure and initiate our disaster recovery function.

The near real-time replication is probably the biggest value of this solution. There are some other ways to get that done, but this seemed to be the easiest and cheapest way to get near real-time replication. In most instances, our RPO is about five seconds, which is pretty aggressive and not that taxing to achieve with Zerto.

The ease of use is pretty high. It really isn't very complex to use. They did a good job with the UI, and it is fairly obvious where you need to click, what you need to click, and what you are doing. There are good confirmation screens, so you are not going to accidentally take down or move loads that you are not trying to. It is fairly user-friendly, easy to use, and you don't need to read a manual for three weeks to start using it.

Previously, our main need for Zerto was actually database cluster servers running fairly old software, SQL 2008 on Microsoft Windows clusters with none of the advanced SQL clustering functionality. Our environment is all virtualized. The way we had to present the storage to our host machines in VMware was via raw device mapping (RDM). Technically, Zerto can do that, but not very well. We have gone to some different methods for our databases, which don't actually use or rely on Zerto because the solution wasn't that functional with RDMs. This is an old, antiquated technology that we are currently moving off of. I can't really blame them, but it definitely is something they thought they could do better than they could in practice.

They had a bug recently that has come up and caused some issues. They currently have a bug in their production versions that prevents their product from functioning in some scenarios, and we have hit a few of those scenarios. Aside from that, when it is not hitting a bug, and if we're not trying to use it for our old-style, old-school databases, it functions incredibly well.

I had an early Zerto certification from their first ZertoCON conference. I received a certification from them in May 2016, so I have been using it for at least five years. I would have been one of the initial users at my company, so they have been using Zerto for at least five years.

Stability is reasonably good, but I wouldn't say excellent. We have had some odd issues with vRAs, which are little VMs that hang off of every VMware host that we have. Those aren't consistent, but they do occasionally happen. As I referenced earlier, there is a bug in the system right now that can affect my VM recovery. It tries to put too many requests into VMware at once, and VMware will timeout those requests, which causes Zerto to fail. That has not been constant throughout our use of Zerto. It is usually a flawless operation, and that is why I can still say good to very good, even though they currently have a bug. It is very uncommon for them to have anything that affects the platform negatively.

Scalability hasn't seemed to be an issue. We started out with two sites connected in the same city. Now, we are running the connected infrastructure of Zerto on three different continents. Some of those continents have various cities and/or countries involved. That has not given us an issue with scalability at all. It seems to be fairly flexible in adding whatever you need it to do. As long as you have the bandwidth capability and reasonable latency between sites, Zerto seems to work quite well.

10 to 12 people are actively in Zerto, or even know what it is besides a word that an IT guy uses to say, "It is okay." Generally speaking, their titles would be network administrator, network engineer, or senior network engineer. 

For all our sites, most of our IT staff wouldn't be allowed to mess with it. Because if you hit the wrong buttons in Zerto, you can take down an application. So, there is a fairly small list of folks who would be able to get into this. Only a few sites can actually access the management console. They are located in Louisville, Kentucky; Belgium, Budapest, and Melbourne, Australia.

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. They know the product very well. I have had a couple misfires at times, but they are pretty good in general.

One of the issues that we had early on was regarding some of the storage functionality, especially regarding RDMs. I had contacts and conferences with the Zerto development staff, whom I believe are in Israel, about the ability to ignore disks in Zerto for my virtual protection groups (VPGs). What they can do currently is mark them as temporary disks, then they will do a one-time copy, and that is it. However, some of those temporary disks are extremely large, so it wasn't a great answer for us. I would like the ability to ignore disks instead of still trying to replicate every disk on a VM as being protected by Zerto. The biggest thing that they can do right now is improve their product. This would have been much better a few years ago rather than now. Now, we are finding other ways around it.

We previously had some storage-based replication, which we are currently still using, but nothing that really fits the same mold that Zerto does.

Zerto's database storage replication is not good with RDMs. We are still doing storage-based replication for those. 

Our new schematic is self-replicating. It doesn't require any type of Zerto replication or storage-based replication, so that was a need removed.

It was quite straightforward. You just install the software, point it to your vCenter instance, and then deploy your vRAs, which is done automatically. Updates have been the same, e.g., quite straightforward. The only challenge with updates is if you have multiple Zerto instances that are linked to each other. To be able to replicate to different sites, they can't be out more than a half a version. For instance, I am running version 8.5 on all my sites that are currently running Zerto, but I couldn't be running those if I was running 7.5 anywhere. That would have been too far out of appliance. That is more of a minor challenge than a problem. I don't consider that to be a shortcoming, but it is well-documented, easy to figure out, and also pretty straightforward.

The first site was also kind of a learning experience. That deployment took less than a day from, "Okay, let's start the download," to, "Look, it's doing something," and you need to stand up two sites to go from site A to site B. That took less than a day to get them up and functional in at least some capacity, protecting some machines and workloads.

We generally try to perform all functions in-house instead of bringing in a third-party or contractor service to help for deployments. That was the model that we followed. We read the documentation, had Zerto's number handy in case we ran into issues, and deployed it ourselves.

There are probably only five of us (out of the 12 who have access) needed for deployment maintenance. Their titles would be network administrator, network engineer, or senior network engineer. 

It is fairly simple to deploy and maintain. We do product upgrades every six to 12 months.

We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal.

Zerto has reduced the time involved that staff would spend on a data recovery operation. We don't have dedicated resources for disaster recovery. It is a scenario where, "Everybody, stop what you are doing. This is what we are all working on right now." We haven't had a reduction in headcount because of Zerto, but we have reduced the use of existing headcount.

DR management is less time-intensive and resource intensive. Therefore, there are less staff hours involved because of Zerto, but not less headcount.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime in any situation. The easiest one to point out was the data center move. It took minutes to move an application to a different country, then minutes once again to move it back. That would have been hours at best to days with the other solutions that we had at our disposal.

Even though we are on-prem, the licensing model was changed to more of a cloud licensing model. We pay for blocks of protected machines. You need to buy a block for use and pay for maintenance annually based on the block size that you have.

When they changed their licensing model, pricing might have gotten a little more expensive for some use cases, but it has been pretty straightforward.

It is a little easier to use than Cohesity or Rubrik, but we haven't really had another DR platform in place. 

At the time of evaluation, we did not have a good snapshot-based backup platform, such as Cohesity and Rubrik, so that was not much of an option. The only thing we were aware of and investigating was VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which is VMware's built-in system, SRM, and played around with it. In comparison to Zerto at that time, Site Recovery Manager is a nightmare. Zerto was definitely the easy button when we were last investigating solutions. Zerto was better in terms of ease of use, visibility, and costs. Frankly, these are all the metrics that we looked at, and Zerto worked better than SRM as well as it was easier and cheaper.

Do a PoC. Test it along with other solutions that you are looking at and make a decision. Our decision was easy, and it was Zerto.

We are changing the infrastructure supporting our primary crown jewel application and will be utilizing Zerto more heavily in that. We are expanding the amount of application servers as well as adding some database servers that Zerto will be responsible for, and currently aren't. We are expanding using Zerto because we are expanding the assets for our application. That is happening currently. We have been working on that switchover for the last 12 months. We are getting close to actually deploying all those changes in production, so that is a fairly recent and ongoing task.

We haven't had to deal with a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We have a combination of luck and some pretty good security measures in place to where we haven't had an impactful ransomware event, CryptoLocker event, etc. In that event, I don't think Zerto would probably be the first thing that we would try to utilize. We have some pretty good backup mechanisms as well. We would probably look to those first to restore from backups. We have a fairly aggressive backup schedule with many servers backed up once an hour or more, which contain critical data. That is probably where we would go first.

There is a need to have both DR and backup in one solution, but it is not important. There are better backup methodologies that we use and they cover more use cases.

We are not utilizing any cloud resources for DR at this point. Our applications are very CPU and memory intensive, which becomes very expensive to run in the cloud.

We have other mechanisms for long-term retention.

Biggest lesson learnt: Disaster recovery doesn't have to be the biggest challenge in your organization.

I would rate Zerto as eight out of 10. The rating may not sound great, but it is pretty high for me.

We use Zerto to enable our hot site configuration. We have two data centers. One of them is in one of our corporate buildings, which is our primary, and then we have a co-location center rack that we rent for our hot site backup or app. We use Zerto to replicate our servers and our VMs between those two sites. So, primarily, it is there in case of a disaster or malware attack, etc.

We also use it to restore files on the fly for users if they accidentally delete the wrong file or something like that. From a restoration standpoint, it is closer to the frontline of our security posture. We would first look to restore items. For removing the threat and everything like that, it obviously wouldn't be involved, but from a restoration standpoint, it would be frontline.

We have not yet used the cloud with Zerto. We just use on-prem physical servers. 

The primary focus of Zerto was to give us the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster. We've gotten pretty close to using it a couple of times, but fortunately, the disaster didn't quite hit us. So, there is the peace of mind to know that we can fail over at any time and keep our operations. We're spread out over a good chunk of the state of Nebraska, and if there is a disaster in one part of the state, our other branches will still be operating in the event of that disaster. So, our primary focus was just to get something that can keep our other branches running in case a disaster happens to a different branch or one of our data centers. So, that peace of mind is what we wanted out of it, IT-wise and management-wise.

It has improved our ability to restore files rather quickly. Previously, we had to use hard backups that we had to pull from nightly backup jobs, which used to take an hour or two, whereas now, we can restore them in minutes and get people working again. So, that's one clear metric that we've done in terms of improvement from the file restoration standpoint, but its primary focus is just a disaster recovery capability.

It provides continuous data protection very well. I have no complaints. It replicates, and we can easily maintain 10 to 15 seconds failover time and replication times. So, we can fail back rather quickly, and when we've done it, it works flawlessly.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes. In the times that I've restored back servers to previous points in time, usually, I'm doing upgrades on those servers in the evening or the middle of the night when nobody is using them. I basically restore those servers back myself. I get the replication process started again and the reverse protection done on my own without any help. I can fail it over and fail it back before the next business day. It is a very easy and one person's job.

It has helped in reducing downtime in those instances where server upgrades go wrong and we can just fail back the server to a previous state before we did the upgrade. It would save probably a good day's worth of downtime on that particular software. We have a server that runs all of our loan processing software. If the upgrade that went wrong broke that software, fixing it would have taken at least a day. So, by being able to restore back to a previous version, we saved the downtime that probably would have costed us thousands of dollars. There would also have been a lot of unhappy customers who couldn't get their loans. It would also have led to bad public relations and things like that.

The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do. It is pretty easy to use. I've done the restoration of servers several times, not as a disaster. When an upgrade on a server goes wrong and it messes things up, I can just fail back to a previous version and try it again. So, that has been really helpful.

It is very easy to use. By using their training materials and their site, it doesn't take long to get up to speed as to how the software works and how to configure it. Once you get into the process, it probably takes just four or five hours to get your sites up on-prem, at least for more simple configurations, and get the data replicating between different VPGs. So, it is very easy, all things considered.

We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement.

I have been using Zerto for about six years.

It seems pretty stable. We really haven't encountered any serious bugs or issues. It is doing its main job of replicating our servers. We can pretty much count on it to be there ready and waiting if something should happen. So, it has been pretty good.

We just use the on-prem version. So, as long as we have the capacity to keep up with it, I feel comfortable scaling it up. We don't have a lot of VMs. We probably have about 20 to 30 VMs. We don't push it too hard, but I feel pretty comfortable in growing our infrastructure. It will be able to grow with us.

We just use it on the 30 servers we have. We actually maintain IT infrastructure for two banks, and we have it at both banks in the same configuration with two individual VMware hosts that we replicated in between. We just do it on-prem at the moment. We probably will maintain that structure for the foreseeable future for the next couple of years. We may look into the cloud features a little later on to see what those can offer us. We will then also see moving our infrastructure into the cloud and seeing what we can do with that. 

In terms of users, we have an IT staff of seven. Probably four to five of them use Zerto in some fashion. Two to three of us maintain it and set it up and configure it. Others use it to restore files for users on help desk functions. So, at least 75% of our staff uses it on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure all of our staff have touched it at some point to pull reports, help users, fail servers over, or do things like that. 

I probably had to use their tech support three or four times over the past six years, and usually, they're pretty good after we supply them with the logs and the stuff that they need to get to the root cause of the issue and then getting it fixed. They're good. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

We used traditional backup with a software called vRanger back in the day before we got Zerto. I don't know if that software exists anymore. We basically use Zerto to do replication between sites. It is for quick and instant disaster recovery, but we still do the physical backups with Veeam. So, it has basically augmented our restoration capabilities rather than truly replacing our backup solution. It hasn't saved us any costs in managing our legacy solutions. Adding Veeam and Zerto together, I know we're paying more than what we paid before we added them or before we had either of them. The additional features are what we really wanted out of it, so the extra cost is worth it.

So, we use Zerto to give us a quick replication and file restoration ability, but we also use Veeam to do traditional physical backups that we can store offsite. If something happens to a server, we can quickly fall back on the replicated snapshot and restore the server quickly. We use the physical offsite backups with Veeam to store those on portable hard drives that we store in the vaults. So, there are air gaps so that ransomware can't get to them.

Zerto provides both backup and DR in one platform, but because we don't use Zerto's backup features, this feature is not super important for us at this time. We may look at that again to see how they've evolved that product over the past few years to see if it is more valuable to us, but as of now, it is not critical because we don't use it. In our eyes, Veeam and Zerto do two different things. So, we use both products to accomplish separate goals.

Zerto is easier to configure and set up than Veeam. Veeam can be a little tricky to make sure you have all the settings correct. From a restoration standpoint, they're probably both on par with each other. It is pretty easy to restore things in Veeam. It is just the initial configuration of getting everything lined up that is a little tougher.

It has been pretty straightforward. Initially, when we first got out of the gate with Zerto, we did have a third party to help us set it up, but we rebuilt it about a year later. We did that on our own, and it was surprisingly easy. It pretty much took a quick and free training course on their site. After that, I was up to enough speed to get it set up for us. It took four or five hours of training, and it was very easy. It took a day when I implemented it.

In terms of the implementation strategy, basically, we just wanted to get two sites set up, one on each data center. So, we set up two sites there with the appliances, and then we set up an individual VPG for each VM server. After that, we got them replicating. We set up our retention time and all that, and we were done.

For its deployment, there are two people at most. Usually, there is one. Zerto is easy enough to use, and one person can usually do whatever task is necessary to do in Zerto, whether it is setting up configuration or servers or restoring files. Usually, it is only a one-person job. If it is a more in-depth configuration, then you might need one more person for another pair of eyes to make sure everything looks right.

We initially had a third party to help us set it up, but now, we do it on our own. They are probably called The Integrators now. Our experience with them was not too bad. Once I learned how to set it up and how much work was involved and stuff like that, we probably overpaid for what it was at the time, but we weren't 100% familiar or comfortable with it at the time. So, it was a good experience. Obviously, they knew what they were doing, and they got it set up correctly. There was nothing wrong from a technical standpoint. Only the pricing standpoint was probably a little off but not too bad.

We have not done a return on investment. We aren't planning on doing one at this point. We know what we've got out of it, but we have not done a formal ROI.

Its licensing is yearly. You can do multi-year contracts, which is what we did. You pay per VM, and you replicate a license per VM. So, we bought about 20 licenses. We paid somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

There is an initial upfront cost. Basically, you buy the license, and then you have a maintenance cost on top of that. So, the upfront cost is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. The maintenance is $5,000 to $10,000 over a three-year period.

We did look at other options. VMware has a replication software capability as well. We did take a look at that. Zerto was an easier and cheaper solution to accomplish what we were looking for, and it has been pretty good.

It is a really good product for creating yourself a DR site that you can basically fire up in an instant. If you're looking for getting a hot site for your company and you are looking for something that in the event of a disaster or ransomware can quickly restore files for you, Zerto is a good product for that. I don't think it is terribly expensive for what it does, and it is really easy to use. I would definitely recommend Zerto if you're looking for a hot site setup.

We have not had to use it for ransomware yet. We've been fortunate. That was actually one of the reasons we did get it back in 2015. At the time, we were getting hit by ransomware.  We've invested heavily into security measures since then and haven't gotten hit with ransomware. So, we haven't had to use it for data recovery in situations due to ransomware, but it is a part of the incident response plan in case we do have to use it that way.

We do not use Zerto for long-term retention. We will probably evaluate the idea, but right now, we're pretty happy with the long-term retention product that we use. At this time, there is no firm commitment to switch over.

Zerto has not particularly reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. It has probably reduced the manhours required to maintain, but we're a Jack of all trades staff, so everybody has their hands in everything. So, it really hasn't reduced the number of staff, but it has reduced the overall hours of maintenance a little bit. It has also not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup in DR management. There is still a decent amount of staff involved in the overall process, but the overall hours for maintenance have been reduced.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that having a good DR configuration setup doesn't have to be a painful process. Zerto is a good software for just giving you that capability without you having to have a deep background and a lot of complicated software. The ability to restore and the ability to have a DR site on the fly is really valuable to our company. So, that's what we've been doing.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of 10.

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.

It was a pilot. We did a bake-off between Zerto and RP for VM, which was an EMC product. It was to fail over 130 Oracle databases.

We wanted to handle disaster recovery for our data center. Zerto was mainly a failover product. We did not use any security layering.

When we tested it, it had more functions than what we used it for, but it was a very good BCDR product. We liked the reliability and availability.

Zerto enables you to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, but we did not use that feature. We used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It was strong in that aspect. I would rate it an eight out of ten there.

Zerto's speed of recovery was comparable. There was no synchronous and asynchronous replication. If I had to give it a number, it would be a seven out of ten. It was the same as others. There was not much difference.

It was easy to migrate data. There was some initial configuration in syncing, but it was easy. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of migration.

Zerto’s ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration was good. I would rate it a seven out of ten in this aspect as well as in terms of its impact on RTOs.

Zerto helps reduce downtime in any situation. We can bring up a database in minutes. It probably takes five minutes for the final sync. The cost of downtime depends on the database. It may be 50,000 if you have call center people sitting around. Normally, most of our small outages like that ranged in the tens of thousands.

Zerto did save time in a data recovery situation. We did not have ransomware, but there were times we had database corruption where the users would corrupt the database, and the database would not start. It would do snapshotting. It was not necessarily ransomware, but it was testing upgrades or Oracle upgrades. The data recovery happened within five minutes, if not sooner. A normal restore would probably be four to eight hours if we had to restore from a tape and apply logs.

Zerto helps to reduce an organization's DR testing. You can spin off an extra database pretty quickly and have users test against the third or fourth copy. It saves one to three days of testing depending on test cycles. You could do sequential testing. I would probably measure it more in days than hours. All of that time can be used by a DBA to do something else.

Zerto reduces the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. One person could probably orchestrate it now versus one to three people.

It did not reduce the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management because we are pretty thin. We would not have gotten rid of anybody.

Zerto offered a very good front-end GUI for orchestration. The graphic interface was very good.

The replication layer can probably be improved.

We ran the pilot for about nine months. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

In terms of our environment, we had 130 databases, 35 prods, and 2 data centers. In terms of end users, in our call centers, we had probably 10,000 users who accessed the databases.

They are good. 

Neutral

We used VMware SRM. We used Veritas clustering, which was a Veritas/Symantec product. We then went virtual, so we went from physical to virtual infrastructure, and we went from HP-UX to Red Hat infrastructure. Zerto was probably 50% easier than others.

Zerto has not replaced any backup solution.

It is a private cloud deployment. It is all VMware vSphere.

Its initial setup was straightforward. It was not as complicated as any other product. It took two to three weeks.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we wanted to reduce our synchronous synchronization. We wanted a better RTO, so we went to an asynchronous replication on private network infrastructure for faster syncing. There were a few technical aspects, but we took our time to lay out the network infrastructure.

In terms of maintenance, you have to patch it and upgrade it. We have a team of four for backup and storage.

Zerto helped us. They had very good staff. We got great support. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

We had two people working on that project, primary and secondary. We did use some of the networking team, maybe a half-person worth of time, because it is a little network intensive.

It is hard to measure an ROI. It is more like an insurance policy. You may or may not use your insurance policy, but it provides comfort to management. There may also be some soft cost.

It was a little higher. We were in a corporate agreement, and we had a software package that included RP for VM. It is easy to compare pricing when you are already in a corporate agreement. Zerto lost on the pricing scorecard.

We evaluated Zerto and RP for VM, which was an EMC product. They were different in replication logic and how they did journaling.

In Zerto, the replication is done through vSphere, and they did not license that product, so at any point, they could have probably lost it. We licensed RP for VM. We felt more comfortable with an EMC replication product because it was Dell and VMware combined or merged. The replication in Zerto was good, but it was using VMware hypervisor replication.

To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend doing an architectural design and implementing best practices. Involve your network team early and use Zerto's expertise.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is primarily used for disaster recovery. In rare cases, it is also used for backup, but only for long-term storage.

We deployed our on-premises infrastructure in two data centers in Russia located in two cities, and multiple regions with combined infrastructure. We also had two data centers in Europe.

Zerto is extremely easy to use. When I started to pilot the product in 2016, I was able to deploy all required components in one or two hours without any help from Zerto engineers. I only used the provided documentation and user interface. In the years since my engineers have also had no issues with the implementation or configuration of the product. Zerto's ease of use is one of its best features.

To ensure good synchronization and replication of changes in a timely manner, we need to have a very good storage subsystem. In our case, we replaced our old storage subsystem with a new one that is based on full flash storage. After that, Zerto started to replicate changes at lightning speed. Many companies experience issues with Zerto if they do not have full flash storage. When full flash storage is implemented, Zerto is the best replication solution because it is highly dependent on the latency of the storage. Therefore, any kind of storage that is not based on full flashes, such as hybrid storage that combines flash and disks, is not a good foundation for Zerto implementation.

Prior to implementing Zerto, our disaster recovery tests had a 70 percent success rate. After implementing Zerto, all DR tests were 100 percent successful. This represents a significant improvement in our DR capabilities.

We used Zerto to replicate our virtual machines from our primary data center to our disaster recovery data center in another city over a single connection.

Zerto can achieve very low recovery point objectives due to its efficient use of resources and compression techniques. However, our company has different RPO requirements for different-sized companies. Since our company is small, our standard RPO is four hours. Zerto exceeded this requirement by achieving a typical RPO of about 15 seconds.

Zerto is a very easy and fast tool to use. However, it is important to note that Zerto requires some time to accept changes after migration. This means that if we do not finish testing within the required time frame, we may run into issues with storage space, as Zerto will continue to collect logs and other data. If the testing period is short and we are comfortable switching between data centers frequently, then we should have a very good experience with Zerto. Compared to VMware SRM, Zerto is much more reliable. I have never had any issues switching between production and the DR data center with Zerto, while I have had to start DR exercises from scratch multiple times with VMware SRM.

We always define and perform the required RTO values in our company. RTO is the time required to recover from a switch. It is about how long it will take IT staff to restore the environment. With Zerto, we can now do this in hours, typically one or two hours, for all switching activities. We have 70 virtual machines configured in Zerto, so it takes about one hour to switch all of them. This is four times faster than our previous solutions, such as VMware SRM or storage-based replication.

Zerto has saved us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes. It is very easy to use, so we do not need to spend extra time training engineers on how to use it. All of our engineers were able to start using Zerto immediately. Zerto is also very fast at replicating data. For example, when we set up a new replication, the initial replication was completed very quickly. Another advantage of Zerto is that it does not require additional steps to change the size of virtual disks. With our previous solution, VMware SRM, engineers had to perform additional manipulations in VMware when changing the size of virtual disks. This was a complicated process, but it is not necessary with Zerto. Overall, Zerto is a very user-friendly and efficient data protection solution. It has saved us time and money, and it has made our data recovery process much easier.

Zerto has saved us around 50 percent of our time.

The most important thing to me is Zerto's ability to deliver continuous protection for all data without any issues or incidents. Zerto is a rock-solid product in terms of protection. We migrated to Zerto from VMware SRM because we had a lot of issues with VMware SRM, including the loss of one server.

Zerto's price has room for improvement.

I have used Zerto for six years. 

I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten.

Globally we have around 200 engineers that use Zerto.

Zerto's technical support is excellent. When we first started using Zerto, we had Russian technical support to help us with some complex tasks, such as configuring unique virtual machines. Our engineers had no communication issues with the support team. Later, when we were in a stable period, global technical support was also very helpful. I cannot recall a time when technical support was unable to help us. Overall, I give Zerto's technical support five stars.

Positive

For many years, the company globally used a variety of different solutions for data protection and disaster recovery. These included storage-based replication solutions based on IBM and EMC storage, as well as special appliances from Dell EMC. For smaller companies, VMware SRM or VMware replication without SRM was used, with manual configuration of replication. In order to simplify and unify its data protection and disaster recovery strategy, the company decided to adopt Zerto. Zerto was initially implemented in a small region, the Middle East/Asia. After a couple of successful migrations of data centers in this region and a parallel unsuccessful DR exercise in EMEA, the company selected to use Zerto globally. Following this, smaller companies in Russia started to receive a recommendation to implement Zerto instead of any existing solutions. Zerto has been a success for the company, providing a unified and simplified data protection and disaster recovery solution that has improved the company's overall resilience.

We used one internal engineer to perform the initial setup on two data centers in two days. In general, this involved installing two virtual machines with Zerto Virtual Manager on each data center, creating the corresponding network access rules, and then deploying Zerto replication agents to all virtualization hosts. The last activity was automated, so it took about one hour to deploy Zerto for all virtualization hosts. The replication took one week.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto is a premium disaster recovery solution. It is not the cheapest option on the market, but it offers a number of features that make it a good value for businesses that need a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

I give Zerto a ten out of ten. Based on my experience with different replication solutions, Zerto is the best one I have used. I am very disappointed that my current company decided to stop using it due to existing standards. Zerto is not cheap, but it is very stable, available, fast, and easy to use.

The most time-consuming part of a disaster recovery test is the testing of small and medium-sized enterprises, business users, and other stakeholders. IT-led environment restoration activities typically take up about 30 percent of the overall DR process. Zerto can reduce this time by 50 percent. Overall, this is not a significant impact, and Zerto is a very stable and reliable solution.

Zerto has not reduced the number of employees involved in data recovery situations. This is because we have a small team, and we always use engineers to perform disaster recovery activities related to storage and virtualization infrastructure. As a result, we have not had to reduce the number of staff members used for these activities.

Zerto did not replace all of our legacy backup solutions. Our legacy backup solutions were dependent on IBM Power servers, which required corresponding backup agents. Zerto is not compatible with these agents, so we use a separate backup solution for these servers. This separate solution is still in use.

We have two data centers, each with its own equipment, servers, storage, network equipment, and so on. In each data center, we deployed two separate VMware vCenter server infrastructures connected using an L2 line. There was no L3 connection between the data centers. This created a flat L2 network with two data centers and two vCenters on each data center. After that, we deployed two VM servers configured for replication. This allowed us to have a highly available and resilient infrastructure in the event of a failure at one of the data centers.

Regarding Zerto's maintenance, we configured some monitoring for related Zerto services. However, we do not have any daily routine procedures to manually check Zerto to ensure that everything is working properly. Instead, our engineers spend one hour per week reviewing monitoring items and other metrics to ensure that Zerto is operating as expected. From my perspective, Zerto is a self-operating system that requires very little manual intervention.

Zerto is very easy to pilot. I recommend that any customer pilot Zerto before making a decision on whether or not it is the right solution for them. Zerto is a self-selling product. When I piloted it in 2016, I was able to install it in hours and start using it immediately without any help. I believe that a pilot is the best way to see how easy and beneficial Zerto can be.

In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.

It's easy to use. It wasn't too difficult to start with. With most vendors, initially, you have a learning curve or configurations. In this case, Zerto was quick to understand. The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple. The experience is comparatively good with Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication has not been used much. That said, it does help when talking about storage layers. The availability of the VMs is good. In terms of resiliency, there are a lot of benefits to it. Most have a recovery of 24 to 48 hours; Zerto has gotten recovery down to four hours. 

We've done a POC with a DR to AWS. It was limited, however, it worked well and there was support. We didn't run into any challenges. 

The effect on the RPOs has been excellent. It's been impacted greatly. Customers enjoy the shorter timeline to recovery. The customer confidence is high. 

Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that. 

I've used the solution for almost five years. 

The solution is pretty stable. Sometimes there may be bugs, however, so far, I haven't personally found any bugs beyond the initial setup. 

There is a wide range of scalability with different storage solutions. 

We've deployed Zerto with 40 TB of storage layers. 

Technical support is good. 

Positive

We used NetBackup and v-Motion. I'm familiar with Commvault and Veeam, which is also a fast solution.

When we used VMware V-motion or other methodologies, with Zeto, once you have your SAN hooked up well and your networking component set, then you failover to the recovery. With Zerto, the recovery times were less compared to what we witnessed with our previous traditional methods. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. My job was to get Zerto up from scratch and make sure the configuration, network, storage, et cetera were up and running. It's fairly simple. There's a learning process, however, once you know it, it gets easier. 

I'm not involved in the licensing process. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.