Virtualization Manager at Teknor Apex Company
Real User
It gives us peace of mind that we can recover our systems in minutes or hours instead of days
Pros and Cons
  • "Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another."
  • "Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter."

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and DR testing.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another. 

It gives us peace of mind that we can recover our systems in minutes or hours instead of days. Zerto is also helpful for insurance purposes. Our insurer wants to know how long we'll be down in a disaster. Of course, the company owners love Zerto because we won't lose business if something happens.

When we had a firmware failure, it saved us time performing a failover to our DR site. It isn't easy to calculate, but it saved us days and possibly weeks of downtime. 

A firmware update on our SAN went wrong, crashing the entire device. We're in Rhode Island, and it failed over to our DR site in Tennessee within 18 hours. Our users didn't notice because it happened on a Sunday. They had all their data when they returned to the office, and we reverted the following weekend. Without Zerto, some applications would've been down for days, if not weeks. 

Zerto has also improved our DR testing. In the past, we had to test over the weekend, but we can now do it during the work week without any outages. Our IT staff doesn't need to come in over the weekends, so it doesn't affect their personal lives. Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by about 50 hours. 

What is most valuable?

The interface is easy to use. It's not intuitive per se, but the average IT expert will have no problems using it. A non-IT person might have a little difficulty at the beginning.

I love Zerto's near synchronous replication because I can get up-to-the-minute data back in a disaster. This capability is essential because a disaster could cost the company money and even cause it to go out of business. We can sleep better at night knowing we can restore our systems in minutes.

Surgical blocking of unknown threats is a feature that's available on the cloud, but we're on-premises. However, it's certainly a feature I'd like to have, especially with all the malware and vulnerabilities. It's great to know that Zerto offers this capability, but we don't take advantage of it because we're an on-prem customer.

What needs improvement?

Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zerto is highly stable. We haven't experienced any noticeable bugs. We're sometimes too stable. Sometimes I want to upgrade my VMware ESX host, and I can't because they have not approved it on their matrix. They usually take about a month or two to accept it as a supported system, which is probably the industry norm or better, but I want it faster. 

How are customer service and support?

I rate Zerto support 10 out of 10. Zerto's support team is knowledgeable and goes out of its way to help. Instead of just throwing KB articles at you, Zerto support walks you through the solution.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously restored everything from scratch using tape backups, but we had no software disaster recovery solution. It hasn't replaced our legacy backup solutions because we do not use Zerto as a backup. Our hardware backups are still online and working. 

We do not use Zerto as a backup solution. It is mainly for recovery. However, we use Zerto/Keepit for Office 365 backups. We still back up to tape and restore using Zerto. It has made the recovery around 20 times faster. 

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Zerto was straightforward, and I did the job by myself.

What was our ROI?

We've seen a solid return with Zerto

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto costs more than most, but we negotiated a fair price. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have Veeam Backup and Replication, but we don't use it for disaster recovery. We also tried another solution for Office 365 backup. We prefer Zerto replication for the speed and support. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. When implementing Zerto, you should consider your internet speed and the difference between the WAN connections at the sites you want to replicate. You need enough bandwidth to handle the volume. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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John Skarja - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Analyst at Niagara Health System
Real User
Top 10
Makes it much easier to test functions as we can get reports on the test runs
Pros and Cons
  • "Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail the motor is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live."
  • "With secure boot enabled, which is the case for newer systems, it is not easy to rotate passwords and we would have to reinstall the DRAs."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and business continuity. We have also used it significantly for transferring workloads between different environments.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto's Near-Synchronous Replication is very important and was one of the main factors that drew us toward the solution. Some of the other solutions now have a similar feature that wasn't available before or doesn't support RDMs that we use. Fortunately, we haven't been hit by ransomware, but if we ever were, Zerto would be a great help. The fact that we would be able to easily pick a point with minimal data loss compared to having to go to a backup is a major advantage. 

We have definitely been able to do some functions that we wouldn't have known how to do without Zerto. For example, we get hardware refreshes every so often. We are still using Dell VxRail, but for some of our clinical workloads, we created a new cluster for PACs and radiation oncology. We had to move many workloads from Dell VxRail to this dedicated cluster, which was traditional SAN. Zerto saved us in this situation, as we were able to start a VPG and move the workloads. Additionally, we have different data centers, and if someone decided they wanted the workflow to run in a different data center, Zerto saved us a lot of time by not having to rebuild the system. Lastly, it gave us the ability to test failovers with staff to prove that it would work before we had to trigger a live migration.

We primarily use Zerto to protect our virtual machines.

Before we found Zerto, our backup environment was so slow that it could take multiple days to recover certain servers. This was not practical, so we looked for a better solution. Zerto has had a much greater effect on our Recovery Point Objectives than we could have achieved with any other solution before it. We could have potentially lost a day's worth of data, whereas with Zerto it is only a matter of a few seconds. Therefore, for any critical workload, Zerto is the best choice.

Our only other option was to recover from a backup. We found that for larger VMs, it would take days to do that compared to using Zerto. Zerto would spin up in a matter of minutes, and with the recording running through testing, we had the actual times recorded that we could accomplish all the tasks. It was drastically different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our DR testing. Before Zerto, we never had a DR test plan. It is still a work in progress, but Zerto makes it much easier to test functions as we can get reports on the test runs. This makes it easy to hand over to someone explaining the details of how long it took. Whenever we have done testing, it has been easy to perform and not very time-consuming.

What is most valuable?

Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail them over is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live. Additionally, the support and RDMs, which many products do not have for this type of workload, are useful. Furthermore, the ability to easily move something between different sites and the general ease of Zerto is great.

Zerto's ease of use is the best I've seen. We initially looked at different options such as Veeam Backup & Replication and VMware SRM, but Zerto appeared to be the most straightforward. We have had other options come up since then, but they are not nearly as user-friendly as Zerto. Zerto is quite straightforward.

What needs improvement?

The only challenge we have encountered is with rotating passwords on our VMware nodes. With secure boot enabled, which is the case for newer systems, it is not easy to rotate passwords and we would have to reinstall the VRAs. This is not ideal, especially when our security team wants to rotate them weekly. Aside from that, everything has gone smoothly. The updates are easy and it does not hinder us when updating the VMware. The only issue is that we have to wait three months after a major release. This lessens the complexity of the update of the software itself. Other than that, there is no issue and it does not hinder us from running different versions of VMware.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for over five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zerto is stable and we have never had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not increased our original purchase, but Zerto would scale if we needed it to. As new projects came along, we were supposed to identify if Zerto would be a use case. We have enough licenses for everything that has been added so far. We do eventually want to go into the cloud and potentially add more workloads, and Zerto seems to be sufficient for that.

How are customer service and support?

I always find the technical support to be quick in responding to us, and the issue seems to be resolved almost instantly. It has been nothing but positive with support. They are definitely one of the better companies to deal with in terms of support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. We had someone from Zerto come down and set up the system in just a few hours. They provided us with knowledge transfer on how to create VPGs and other items and gave us an overview of the architecture of the whole solution so that we were confident in managing it ourselves. We have done all the updates ourselves.

The full deployment including the planning phase took a couple of weeks and required a few people.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of a Zerto specialist.

What was our ROI?

Zerto has been more of an insurance policy. We haven't had to use it yet, but if that day ever comes, it will be invaluable. Zerto has already helped us in other areas, such as moving workloads, which has saved us a lot of time that would have been spent rebuilding and decommissioning. more of a safety net.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We do renewals and haven't added any additional licensing yet. When we purchased Zerto, we felt it was worth the cost as it would protect us from any potential problems and give us peace of mind knowing that any critical items could be recovered quickly.

What other advice do I have?

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

When we bought Zerto, our goal was to be able to failover to the cloud. However, we have not yet fully adopted the cloud, so we have not yet upgraded our license or paid any connection fees. Our goal is to upgrade the license once we are ready, but that has not happened yet.

Zerto's ease of use, and straightforward use, is the reason we chose it over other solutions. We don't want to be in a situation where, during a crisis, we have to hunt around and try to figure out how to use something. It's nice to have something that is straightforward and easy to use, instead of adding stress to an already stressful situation.

We are still using other products for backups. We have not really ever used Zerto for backups. I know Zerto has changed its licensing model, but when we initially started using Zerto, we had to license every VM for basic protection, which was more costly than other backup solutions. I know Zerto has changed and we can now buy a backup license for VMs. However, due to the time, we are locked into a certain backup product, we will look at other potential solutions when the contract expires.

We have Zerto deployed across two of our data centers.

We have one person that maintains and monitors Zerto with an additional person who acts as a backup.

The maintenance consists of updates and tweaking of journals for VPGs.

If we have any specific use cases that we want to discuss with the Zerto team, they will often arrange a peer meeting with organizations. Zerto did that for us when we were using Meditech MAGIC so that we could make sure that anyone else with experience running it could help us. We were able to do a trial run with Zerto to get confident. I suggest taking advantage of doing a trial to make sure Zerto meets our needs, and if we have any unique workloads, then talk to the Zerto account team to try to arrange a conversation with someone else who is doing the same thing.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Zerto
March 2024
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Disaster Recovery Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Replicates and recovers within minutes and enables our growth
Pros and Cons
  • "There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."
  • "The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

What is most valuable?

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

What needs improvement?

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

How are customer service and support?

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented the solution in-house.

What was our ROI?

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

What other advice do I have?

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
D. Ngunyen - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at State of California
Real User
Top 10
Helps reduce downtime and has a simple user interface
Pros and Cons
  • "When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto."
  • "Zerto can improve the dashboard by making it even more simple. Right now, there's a lot on the dashboard, and it can be overwhelming. If you're an experienced user, then you'll find it easy to use, but if you're a beginner, it will take you some time."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery and backups.

What is most valuable?

When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto.

It's the easiest way to do disaster recovery. It's less complicated than VMware.

Compared to the ease of use of other DR or backup solutions, Zerto's dashboard is the easiest. The user interface is much simpler, and maybe, that's what makes it easier.

Zerto helped reduce downtime when our data is corrupted. We're able to restore it relatively fast. There may be downtime of about half an hour for us, but the users don't see it; it's transparent.

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other DR solutions is about the same.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in DR situations. We went from ten people to two for the whole organization.

It also reduced our organization's DR testing by about 30%. We've actually been able to move a lot of our resources (people) to AWS Innovation.

What needs improvement?

Zerto can improve the dashboard by making it even more simple. Right now, there's a lot on the dashboard, and it can be overwhelming. If you're an experienced user, then you'll find it easy to use, but if you're a beginner, it will take you some time.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using it for seven years now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zertos' stability is very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's very easy to scale, but the only problem is that there are additional costs associated with it. 

How are customer service and support?

Zerto's technical support is excellent. When you open a ticket, they get back to you right away. If you mark it as a priority, then you have instantaneous access to support. I would give technical support a nine out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have VMware products and tried to implement VMware Site Recovery Manager. However, it was just a little too difficult for our environment.

How was the initial setup?

At first, the initial deployment was complex, but now it's relatively easy. For someone experienced, it is not a problem.

We have five data centers, and we started with one and deployed it in phases. Because there are lots of firewalls and access, we picked one data center and then built the next one.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it ourselves, and it took about a year to deploy it across the whole system.

What was our ROI?

For a long time, we needed disaster recovery that was more than IBM's, which is in Colorado. We needed something on-premises that was instantaneous. That's what Zerto offers, and that's the ROI we have with Zerto.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The last time I looked at pricing, it was very good. It's much cheaper than VMware by far.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at VMware Site Recovery Manager and IBM, but they didn't work well.

What other advice do I have?

The best way to look at it is from an ease-of-use standpoint because when you look at VMware's version, it's a little bit more complex even though it is native to where we use it. That's why we went with Zerto.

Considering what we use Zerto for, I'd give it a ten out of ten because it is our primary solution.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Head of IT at Leadway Pensure PFA
Real User
Top 20
Provides near-synchronous replication, immutable data copies, and impressive recovery speed
Pros and Cons
  • "Real-time replication is a valuable feature, ensuring that changes made to the production site are immediately reflected at the recovery site."
  • "Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site."

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for our application data recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto's near-synchronous replication delivers exceptional results. The data at our recovery site is kept nearly identical to production in real-time, minimizing data loss to near zero.

By utilizing Zerto's immutable data copies and adhering to the three-two-one rule, we have established a highly effective recovery strategy.

While Zerto doesn't inherently block unknown threats or attacks, its detailed history logs enable us to revert to a pre-attack state, essentially restoring a clean system.

Our production machine experienced changes that caused the application to crash. To resolve this quickly, we restored the machine to its previous state using a recovery copy located at the recovery site that was made by Zerto. After powering on the restored machine, we changed its IP address, making it accessible again.

Zerto has a positive effect on our RPOs.

It boasts impressive recovery speed. As a customer, all we need to do is power on the machines at the recovery site - that's how simple and fast it is. Even if the recovered state isn't ideal, we can easily rewind to a specific point in time and power up another instance of the machine at that moment.

Zerto makes it easy to migrate data. The total configuration is user-friendly.

While our current RTO is three hours, Zerto can significantly reduce it to just five minutes.

Zerto helps us significantly reduce downtime during hardware failures, software updates, and natural disasters.

While we haven't experienced a ransomware attack, we have a recovery plan in place. If one were to occur, we could quickly restore production to a previous point in time, minimizing downtime and data loss.

Zerto helps us reduce the amount of disaster recovery testing we need to perform, which also allows us to reduce the number of staff required for the testing down to two.

The Zerto application is licensed per VM. However, the amount of data stored on each VM does not affect the licensing cost. Whether we have terabytes or just a few bytes on each VM, the licensing fee remains the same. This means we only pay for the machines we are replicating, which can lead to significant cost savings.

What is most valuable?

Real-time replication is a valuable feature, ensuring that changes made to the production site are immediately reflected at the recovery site.

Another feature I appreciate in Zerto is its detailed logging. This functionality allows us to easily access past data and reconstruct the machine's state at any given point in time.

We can recover the replicated machine at the recovery site by simply clicking it back up from the replicated machine. This allows us to keep the original machine running while the recovered machine is active. It's also vendor-agnostic, meaning it works with different hardware vendors like HP or NetApp. In other words, Zerto adapts to the specific hardware we have regardless of the vendor.

What needs improvement?

Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zerto is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto is scalable. We just need to add a license and they provide a new key.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support team offers an excellent service. They empower customers by providing comprehensive documentation and guidance, helping them resolve future issues independently.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?


How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was straightforward, and I handled it independently. My only reference was the provided documentation; I required no further assistance.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto's pricing doesn't depend on the number of virtual applications. Even if we have a server with 200 terabytes of data, we'll only pay for protecting that single server, not for the total size of the replicated data. This simplifies our cost structure.

The licensing cost is fair.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I evaluated Veeam and SIM before choosing Zerto. Zerto's interface is much easier to use than the other solutions I tested. Integrating into our environment is also seamless.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

You can save a lot of time researching solutions by choosing Zerto. It's efficient, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain. Additionally, Zerto offers excellent support, including comprehensive documentation, breach and RCM coverage information, and a knowledgeable customer support team.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Jagadeesh Ethiraj - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead, Global DataCenter Services at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Is easy to migrate data, helps reduce our recovery and staff time
Pros and Cons
  • "Zerto is scalable."
  • "The RPO for our SQL server has room for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and cloud migration.

How has it helped my organization?

The near-synchronous replication is valuable to our organization.

Zerto's immutable data copies three-two-one rule is great.

The ability to block ransomware attacks and help recover our servers is great.

Since we don't have a backup data center, Zerto's cloud disaster recovery is of the utmost importance.

The recovery point objective for our virtual machines is good. We haven't encountered any significant issues. However, there have been some delays due to the substantial volume of data being written to the SQL server.

Migrating data using Zerto is easy.

Our RTO went from three days to a few minutes after implementing Zerto.

In the event of a ransomware attack necessitating data recovery, Zerto would undoubtedly prove invaluable in expediting the process.

Zerto has helped reduce our recovery time from days to minutes.

Zerto has reduced the time our staff spends on data recovery by 25 percent.

What needs improvement?

The RPO for our SQL server has room for improvement.

On-premises to cloud migration lacks certain features, such as the ability to directly rename virtual machines. In the cloud, renaming resources often requires cumbersome workarounds like cloning and manual renaming.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Initially, we had stability issues with the older versions but now I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The level one technical support is slow to respond and we usually need to escalate our issue to get a resolution.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Azure Site Recovery and switched to Zerto because it is more user-friendly with more features.

How was the initial setup?

While the initial deployment presented some challenges and took approximately two weeks to finalize, subsequent deployments have been significantly more streamlined.

What was our ROI?

In the event of a disaster, we will certainly see a return on investment.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

Deploying Zerto in the cloud saves us costs on maintaining on-prem hardware.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Shawn Woods - PeerSpot reviewer
US Infrastructure Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
Easy to migrate data, great recovery speeds, and helpful support
Pros and Cons
  • "The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
  • "Their data backup and restore have some ways to go."

What is our primary use case?

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

How has it helped my organization?

We needed to meet the requirements of the client, and, previous to this solution, we would not have been able to meet the distance. That's why we implemented it.

What is most valuable?

The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The near synchronous authentication is great. It's critical for our organization.

We haven't had to use Zerto for blocking threats, however, we like that we have it as an option.

We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud or the AWS platform. It can do it. We just don't opt to use it that way.

We've used the solution to protect virtual machines.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Our RPOs are eight seconds. It blows past RPOs out of the water. It's great.

The speed of recovery is excellent. We've only had to test it and never used it in production. That said, it works better than anything we've used previously. 

It's easy to migrate data. 

Its ability to keep users collaborating during a data migration is good. It goes very quickly, so it's not a disruption.

The impact on our RTOs is great. It far exceeds what we've needed it to do.

It will save us time in a data recovery situation.

It's helped us reduce our DR testing. It has gone from hours to minutes under Zerto.

It enables us to make better use of our staff. We have reduced the number of staff involved in overall DR management. 

What needs improvement?

Their data backup and restore have some ways to go. We looked at replacing our traditional backup system with Zerto and found it was lacking about a year ago. We have Commvault, which is very customizable and feature-rich in comparison. Their offering needs to be more robust.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used the solution for close to six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is very good. It can scale out to quite a lot of VMs.

How are customer service and support?

I've contacted technical support once or twice. It was for integration and customization and they've been great.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very straightforward. It took about a day to set up. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The only maintenance is the annual upgrade. It's pretty much set and forget.

What about the implementation team?

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

What was our ROI?

It's hard to quantify the ROI. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did look into VMware. It didn't meet our requirements.

What other advice do I have?

The solution has not replaced any of our legacy backup systems.

It hasn't helped us to reduce downtime, as we haven't had any yet.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The only issue is that someone would move the VMs involved around. If you have a global team, make sure they understand the strategy and everyone is on the same page so that issues like that don't arise. We had silos on our side and once we dealt with that, we were fine.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Oran Turner - PeerSpot reviewer
ISD Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Powerful and reliable
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to precopy data to a remote destination prior to the actual live migration period. That saves us a lot of time and has been very helpful. For example, if we had migrations occurring in waves over a period of several weeks with a VPG or VPG setup of approximately 50 VMs, that is multiple gigabytes of data, even terabytes in many cases. Having that data already copied on the evening of the migration saves considerable hours of time. It easily saves us four to six hours a night."
  • "The VPG model causes us a bit of concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager is very easy when we have entire data scores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings. It is all covered. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work much closer with the applications teams to develop the VPG configuration and determine how the VMs will be grouped. It will be a lot more overhead for us to go that route."

What is our primary use case?

We have previously used Zerto for data center migration projects. We have another data center migration coming up within the next year where we will be using Zerto as well.

How has it helped my organization?

We had pretty strict requirements when it came to cross data center migration capabilities. We wanted to ensure that no plugins or drivers were needed. We also wanted a simple deployment. Zerto very easily fit that bill.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to synchronize data to the remote destination prior to the actual live migration date. This saves a massive amount of time during the actual migrations, and has been extremely beneficial. Having the data already synchronized on the evening of the migrations makes the final moves fast, easy, and seamless.

The interface is very easy to use. The product is easy to understand. We have had great success in using it for migrations. The benefit for us has primarily been the ease of use and stability of the product.

What needs improvement?

The VPG model has caused a bit of a concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. SRM is very easy when we have entire data stores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings of VMs. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work closely with our applications teams to create VPGs and determine how the VMs will be grouped. This will probably be beneficial in the long term, but short term it will create more work for our team.

I spoke to a Zerto engineer who mentioned that we could do a VPG at the cluster level and a VPG at the datastore level. However, the one issue we've seen with VPGs is if the synchronization fails the entire VPG has to be recreated. Even though we can cover our environment at the cluster level or datastore level, that wouldn't be ideal. We really need a simpler solution for DR that will cover all of our VMs at once, instead of spending a considerable amount of time on VPG creation. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Zerto for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good. All of the components that we set up for Zerto have been very stable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability has met our needs.

How are customer service and support?

Support has been excellent. We had a couple of issues initially with a VPG that wasn't functioning properly. Support was very quick to respond. They were able to assist us and resolve the issue very quickly. We have only had to call support one time.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We also use Site Recovery Manager. SRM does not have the same feature set for migrations that Zerto has.

How was the initial setup?

The product was easy to deploy. At the time, the only thing that we wanted to improve was to have an appliance for the ZVM, instead of a Windows server. I understand an appliance is available now. This will be very beneficial in the future.

The deployment was straightforward. We basically went through the documentation and then had a planning meeting with Zerto. Once we understood all of the requirements we were able to deploy very quickly with really no issues at all. We deployed Zerto in less than a week.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented the product ourselves. Zerto's expertise has always been very good.

What was our ROI?

Our migrations were all successful. We had no issues at any point during the project. That is what really sold us on Zerto.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing costs are not cheap. It is an expensive product. However, you do get what you pay for.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There was really no other product that compared to Zerto. Zerto had exactly what we were looking for in a data center migration product. It had the ease of use and interface that we were looking for, that is, very simple and straightforward.

Zerto's ability to copy the data first, then synchronize just prior to the migrations made it much faster and easier for us to use than other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

Understand the VPG configuration. Understand that you will need to make some decisions as to how to cover your VMs. We eventually went with one VPG per VM for our migrations. This is because we discovered if the VPG has a problem, then you need start over and recreate the VPG. If you choose to cover 50 VMs on a VPG, and if that VPG fails for some reason, then you need to restart the whole process. So you need to consider your VPG design and how you are grouping your VMs.

We haven't used it yet for disaster recovery, but that is something that we will be looking at over the next year.

We have had great success with the product. It is one of the very few products that we have recently used that literally had no issues and worked exactly as designed. At every single point in our migration, it was successful. We had multiple migration waves that occurred over a period of a year and a half. We literally had no failures during that entire time, which is of rare in the industry and made us very happy. Now that we have another data center migration project coming up, we decided we were just going to go straight back to Zerto.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zerto Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zerto Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.