Zerto Reviews

We primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zerto's technical support team is pretty knowledgeable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

We have been using Zerto for about three years.

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

Scalability has met our needs.

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.

Positive

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

We're replicating mainly some of our critical applications. One is our backup solution and then also some critical applications that we don't want to have to recover from tapes. That's been working very well for us. We actually just recently went through a DR rehearsal, where we ran a quick test and that ran for about a week and then completed that test. Then we were able to report that we were able to successfully recover our critical ERP system inside of the remote location successfully.

I don't have to worry about Zerto so much. It definitely continues working. We definitely have monitoring and everything like this to make sure things are working just fine, but I can't complain about it in any kind of way. I know we are a little behind on the version that we're using and we need to be on the latest and greatest. Right now we're on version 7.0.

It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery or in a data recovery situation. It's now only one person while it was four previously. 

Comparing it to VMware SRM, Zerto is by far the best that I've used before for providing continuous data protection. 

Different parts of the company use VMware, we use Zerto, and then we saw where they were taking us. Ours really takes less than an hour just to do a quick failover. So it didn't make any sense to go with VMware one, so we ended up going with Zerto.

An employee had actually introduced us to it and we looked at it and wanted to try it. He was working for a bank that does quite a bit as far as doing disaster recovery. So if a bank used it then I would definitely use it. 

It is fairly easy. It's not as technical to get around it or anything like that.

It's a fairly easy tool to use. 

I know that Zerto can definitely improve some functionalities. I know some of the cloud pieces probably enable that. At the moment, it's doing what we want for us, and what it's doing for us right now is plenty. I can't say there's any improvement that I can see that needs to be done at the moment.

I'm not sure if it has throttling, meaning, what's going over the wire and how we can throttle that to reduce the amount of data that's going across the bandwidth. I can't remember if that's something that's in this product. It might be in the more recent version. 

I have been using Zerto for three to four years. 

Their support has been very good. I can't complain about them. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for the admin that deployed it. It was not complicated. That person left and then another person came in who didn't know anything about this product and he picked it up fairly easily and he's able to manage it with ease.

He's a VMware administrator and he also maintains Zerto.

The deployment was done within a day.  

We don't have plans to increase usage because we are at the point where we're closing out. We're migrating some of our data centers and right now I know it's going to continue utilizing what we have. We haven't even hit the capacity of what we've got right now. Because I think the license we have is around 75 servers. We haven't even hit that. The only thing that's stopping us from right now is just that we need to increase the storage at the remote location to handle additional workloads. We have around 14 servers. 

We have seen ROI from Zerto. 

It has reduced downtime. It went from 24 hours to four minutes. It could even be seconds. It's fairly quick.

The dollar amount would equate to something in the millions. For an environment to be restored it means restoring our ERP systems. Then in that ERP in that system, it also has some manufacturing as well.

Pricing is fair. I don't see a big issue with the pricing for what we are trying to do. The things that we're replicating, if it were to go down it pays for it in itself there.

We don't have any plans for long-term retention. They talked to us about it. But at the moment it's not in our forecast to look at that.

We don't have to failback because we just fail to a bubble, in other words. We don't want to bring down production because we're going through migration of our ERP. So we fail it over into this bubble. And that's what we're using. It is the test failover that we're using in that environment. Then in that environment, everything is isolated. That's how we use it today. We have never had to failback back to our main site.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We offer Zerto to our application owners and system owners as a DR solution for them. It's part of our service offering from the VMware side because we do the infrastructure for them. We help orchestrate and set it up for them at the back end.

We also use Zerto to remove RDMs from the environment and help manage our storage. If we need to relocate the storage, we use Zerto, especially when going from multiple vCenters or multiple clusters. It's very convenient.

We can completely replicate a server so that when an issue arises we can be up and running with no downtime. Also, if we're doing a planned DR exercise, it works really well. It can be set up in advance so that there's zero downtime.

Using Zerto to get off of old storage has been more convenient than using VMotion.

The replication for DR is really good, and the test failover within the application is really solid, along with the ability to manipulate RDMs or remove them.

We are required to do DR testing for almost every application every two years. Zerto made it more convenient and significantly faster for us. Our job is a nice little 15 to 20 minute stint that anybody can do within our organization. I don't need a full-on engineer. I can have an operations person handle it.

Zerto has really great online training, and they gamified their training pretty well too.

When you compare Zerto's ease of use with that of SRM and Veritas, Zerto is really easy, especially when you're doing a DR exercise or a failover. It has evolved and is now even easier. With every iteration, they make the verbiage clearer, and people just gravitate to it. I can have someone from the operations team help with DR when Singapore's doing a DR exercise, for example. This helps a lot as a company with a global presence. The other solutions require a little bit more understanding of the technology. They are not as forgiving if you make a mistake.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is faster than that with SRM. Much more engineering management needs to go on after the fact with SRM.

Without Zerto, in the event of downtime, it could take hours to get back up and running. Some VMs could take eight to ten hours just to get to a point where they could accept a restore from a backup solution, if that solution is even available.

Zerto does a really good job with their packeting on the networking side, and I've never had a site experience an impact because Zerto was running a replication.

The only thing I really don't like about Zerto is that the ZVM has to be a Windows server. I can spin up any OBA template whenever I want to, but if it has an OS that's tied to it, then I have to involve the OS team from my company. That drives me crazy.

I've been using this solution for five years.

It's exceptionally reliable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. Any complication we've had has usually resulted from the Windows team patching that server or some other behavior.

Zerto scales really well. It scales out really wide, and you can tie it all into your primary site. You don't need central management.

We have around 900 hosts across the world globally. We have a little over 10,000 VMs and have mixed usage with lots of databases, applications, and web-based applications. We have about 27 primary vCenters and seven manufacturing vCenters.

Zerto's technical support takes really good advantage of the community. When you put in a service ticket, they redirect you to a message blog or message group. Then, you can use that to also vet what other people are saying, and you can use that as a great resource.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support at ten.

Positive

We used SRM before we switched to Zerto, and Zerto is very cost-effective.

Zerto is very straightforward to set up. The only drawback is having to have the Window server.

After the Windows server is deployed, it takes less than an hour to deploy the solution.

Zerto does exactly what it says it's going to do. I don't have to go back and babysit it. If something happens, it alerts me. I don't have to sit there and add hours of babysitting or monitoring. I can be doing other tasks. That is our ROI.

Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service.

We looked at Veritas.

I'd give Zerto a good look. Put it through its paces. Look at how you're already offering a DR exercise and how complicated it is in your life. If you're looking at a run book for a DR exercise and your part is two or three paragraphs, Zerto can make it one paragraph.

I would strongly recommend Zerto to make it a little easier and would rate it a ten on a scale from one to ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our biggest use case is real-time replication to a secondary site in case of the need for a disaster failover. We also use it for file-level protection and restore, but the main purpose is to help add another layer of protection in the event of a disaster.

The biggest improvement we have seen is that Zerto has taken our anticipated recovery time from between hours and days down to seconds or a minute. Zerto has also helped us to protect VMs, and the effect on our RPOs has been incredible. Pre-Zerto, it was days if not weeks. Now it's six seconds. I don't even know if you could compare it to the RPO of our old solution. It's 100x. If we were to recover using our old system, we would lose between a day and a week's worth of data. With this, we lose virtually none.

And in terms of our RTO, recovering and validating the system has gone from between hours and days, to now happening in a matter of 30 minutes to a few hours. It has helped reduce downtime by days. Similarly, our DR testing has gone from being a multi-day process to a multi-hour process, and we use almost all of that time we save for bolstering value in other projects.

As for the number of staff involved in our backup and DR management operations, Zerto has helped us decrease it.

It has also allowed us to locate our DR in the cloud. We currently use Azure, and this ability is incredibly important as it has enabled us to reposition our resources in an environment that is separate from our main environment.

The most valuable features for us are the analytics and reporting. Being able to see a snapshot of our environment, and knowing where we stand in our recovery atmosphere using Zerto, are really valuable aspects.

The near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10.

We also use Zerto for immutable data copies. We have two recovery locations and both of them are immutable, both for short-term and long-term recovery. Using this component has essentially enabled implementation of the 3-2-1 rule for us. Zerto has been pivotal in that process. Before that, the process hadn't changed in about a decade and a half. This enabled us to take a leap into the 21st century in that facet.

Zerto's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms. Zerto does have an API, but a lot of those automation platforms have prebuilt runbooks to enable that process, whereas Zerto does not.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's incredibly stable, to the point that we don't have to second-guess whether it is functioning properly.

Its scalability is infinite. We have yet to run into an issue of resource allocation or scalability.

Their support is very good. Debatably, it's the best support we have seen out of all of our vendors.

Positive

One of our previous solutions was VMware Site Recovery Manager. We switched because we have some servers that have a lot of transactions and we weren't able to afford to lose even an hour's worth of data. Zerto takes that potential data loss down to seconds.

And Zerto is much easier to use.

Our deployment is both on-prem and, for replication, in Azure. The initial setup was straightforward. There was a learning curve in transitioning from our old environment, but it didn't take very long to learn.

It took us about a month to fully deploy.

Outside of updates, it doesn't require any maintenance.

We did it in-house with support from Zerto when needed. On our side there were two or three people involved, but it was primarily done by me.

It's expensive, for sure, but for us, it comes down to the fact that we do not replicate our entire environment using Zerto. We replicate the mission-critical servers and services, so the yearly cost of Zerto is heavily outweighed by the potential cost of an outage. It's expensive but worth it.

We very briefly looked at solutions such as Veeam and the option of continuing to use VMware SRM. The biggest difference was the de-snapshotting of the environment into journals with extremely low RPOs, versus scheduling a snap at a certain time.

Overall, Zerto is pricey and it fulfills a very specific need, but it is incredibly worth the investment if uptime and recoverability are priorities.

Right now, we use it just for disaster recovery.

We have always had a centralized data center. Therefore, if we were to lose connectivity or power, then access to county resources would be cut off until that issue is resolved. If there is a hurricane, it would be the same thing. If we lose power, then we would be down until something comes up. With Zerto, I can quickly get us up and running at the disaster recovery site, provided it is still operational.

For most use cases, the failover time is a handful of minutes, if that. A single user can run the system.

Zerto will reduce the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. As of now, we have been lucky. We have not had to deal with this type of issue. However, it will require less people going forward. So, I can dedicate people to other tasks in a situation like this.

Disaster recovery would initially require four or five people to handle just the server side. This has now been cut down to just one person.

It provides great continuous data protection. The RPOs on things are in seconds.

We have been using it for two years.

We haven't had any issues. It literally just runs. Once you have it set up, you just leave it alone.

As long as I have the resources and licensing, I can keep going from a scalability perspective.

The tech support on my latest issue wasn't so great. I had to figure a lot of stuff out myself. It could be that I had a Level 1 tech who was new or something, but it seemed like the tech was spitballing, which does not help me.

In previous instances, the technical support was great. They were able to get me up and running fairly quickly.

We didn't have a solution like this before that allowed for disaster recovery. Everything was restored from backup, then we had to wait. So, if something went south, then we would need to restore from a backup. I saw the Zerto product was literally one button click, then I can failover to a disaster recovery site and keep going. That was amazing during the initial review of the product. It was just easy.

We started looking at how long it would take to restore from a backup. Rebuilding that infrastructure would take hours, if not days, as opposed to having the ability with Zerto to do a single click, then we are up and running at another site.

It is being used in conjunction with our legacy backup solution.

It was actually fairly easy to set up the solution. Installing it, creating the VPGs, and adding the VMs to it was fairly straightforward.

Working with support on the line, we deployed Zerto in a couple hours.

It is about $1,000 per VM, so it is pricey. However, the cost and time (the manpower cost) that it would take several members of IT to restore a backup and every individual piece of the virtual environment would easily exceed the pricing cost.

If we had to trigger it, downtime would go down to whatever the RPO is at that time. Right now, our RPO average is between four and 10 seconds. This is a big cost saver for us. Anytime certain systems are down within the organization, money is lost.

The only negative part that I have seen so far has been the cost. It is kind of pricey, but you get what you pay for. Zerto is a lot faster than other solutions and you get enhanced performance.

Eventually, we will expand solution use. While there are some competitors in the market, I don't think any of them get to the ease of use and speed that Zerto has. Even Veem has CDP, which is similar, but it is not as fast, user-friendly, or worry-free.

Veeam CDP was still fledgling at the time of our evaluation. It existed, but wasn't that great. It wasn't anywhere near as robust as Zerto. Commvault had something similar as well, but even their solution doesn't do disaster recovery as quickly as Zerto.

It is important that it has both backup and disaster recovery. As I am looking for a backup and recovery solution, I am looking for something that can do everything.

The solution was bought to help with the mitigation of ransomware.

Right now, we are still in a physical data center. We haven't looked at their solution for going to the cloud. That is something which is coming up. Eventually, we will make the switch over. Right now, we are working on a new backup and DR solution. So, that will go hand in hand once we are done with the on-prem.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10 based on the way that the product works.

We use Zerto to replicate to a cloud center.

Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs.

We got hit with ransomware about three years ago, so we had to do a full recovery with Zerto. The recovery is the best feature.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SAN, Zerto is a lot easier because you can do it at the actual virtual machine level versus doing the whole LUN. In the latter case, in the event of a recovery, you would have to recover the whole LUN and see what's in there. It is a lot easier to do any operation with Zerto.

We were hit with ransomware about three years ago, and the amount of time that it took us to recover from that with Zerto was weeks less than it would've taken us with our previous DR solution.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is a lot easier and faster because you can choose what to recover and when. In the event of a disaster, for instance, you can recover your most important stuff first.

Zerto certainly reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation. It's so easy to use that one person can do it all in those events. You won't need a guy from the VMware team and another from the storage team. It's all done at the DM level, so, it's easier to recover without having to involve other teams. With our previous solution, we would have needed three to recover, and I was able to do it all myself with Zerto.

It absolutely helped to reduce our organization's DR testing because it's so fast and easy to test without disrupting anything. We can choose what to test, more critical versus noncritical, and how frequently we want to test. About 75% of that saved time is allocated to value-added tasks.

I would like to be able to replicate one to multiple without having to recreate every VPG. That would save us a lot of time. When we add a site or move our DR to a different site, I have to recreate everything from scratch. So, it'd be cool to be able to just repoint an existing VPG to a new site without having to recreate everything.

We started using Zerto in mid-2018.

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's always up and running. Whenever there's an issue at the DM level that affects it, it'll give an alert.

It seems like Zerto would be good for a big environment. Ours is small and doesn't really grow a lot; the size stays static. However, having worked with it for a few years I wouldn't be worried to use it in a bigger environment.

Zerto's technical support is good. Whenever we have issues, which is rare, they are fast to respond. When we had our major issue, I had a lot of calls with them, and we had to work around the clock. They did a good job of passing us through every time zone and keeping us engaged with someone. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used the snapshot and replication of our SAN that we used to have. It wasn't necessarily a true DR replication tool, but it would do a snapshot and then put a copy of that snapshot somewhere else. That was our DR plan before switching to Zerto.

The initial setup was really easy and fast. We had it installed in less than an hour, maybe even half an hour. After that, we created our groups. The time for that would depend on how many DMs you have, but it's easy and intuitive.

We had someone from Zerto walk us through the installation and setup. They explained every step as we went through it, and it was excellent.

We certainly have seen an ROI. When we got hit, we saved a lot of money because we were able to recover RBMs. Without Zerto, we would have been in serious trouble. So, it definitely returned the investment many times over.

The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions.

We looked at Veeam and Avamar. At that point, Zerto was the only one that did CDP, and that was the reason we went with Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate Zerto a ten.