Zerto Reviews

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're solving the issues of disaster recovery with it. So, our main use case is disaster recovery. We use it to do real-time replication of our data so that if we needed to failover for whatever reason or we had a disaster at our primary data center, we would be able to spin up in our colo disaster recovery location with minimum downtime. Our delay is about five seconds. So, if something negative were to happen to our data center, our DR copy would be within five seconds of the original copy, which is pretty good. We are also using it for testing.

Our setup is on-prem. It enables you to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but we didn't go that route. We went the route of creating our own colo location. So, instead of leveraging Azure or AWS, we decided to maintain our own facility. Our primary data center is on-prem, and our disaster recovery location is a colo location that we control.

The current version that we're using is 9.5, which is the latest. When we installed it, it was probably version 8.

The mere fact that we're able to do live testing has definitely helped us with deployment times. It has helped us with troubleshooting as well.

It saves effort, time, and money. It saves us the effort of having to make sure that information is replicated. It saves us the time that would be required to build that ad hoc, and it allows it to be more of a point-and-click operation than something for which we have to dedicate more time and effort. Especially in our use case, we're not replicating a crazy amount. We're only replicating about 40 virtual machines and about 13 terabytes of data. It's not a small amount, but it's not a crazy large amount either. To be able to load all those 40 machines at one time with one click and then bring them up either in production failover or production test is fantastic. We haven't really been able to find any competitor that can do that at least as easily as Zerto. That was the driving force.

It has helped to reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing. We can now do it in minutes, whereas previously, we could never do a valid test. We could only test that our backups were copied. We could never spin them up and run them all. Barracuda would do point-in-time backups, but we didn't have any place where we could actually deploy and test them all. That's not necessarily a hundred percent on Barracuda, but from basically not being able to do it, we are now able to do it within a few minutes. 

It has saved all the time that would've been spent validating copies of virtual machines. It can now be used to actually test that everything is connected, everything is spun up properly, and everything is connecting and speaking properly. So, there has been a tremendous amount of time savings. People who were responsible for doing it have saved time because they don't have to spend an entire day testing to make sure that the backup is copied properly so that they can be recovered. Now, we can do a test failover in a few minutes and be able to validate it like that.

It helps to protect VMs in our environment. It has been great in terms of RPOs. Prior to using Zerto, depending upon the level of disaster, it took us hours, days, or weeks to recover. Now, the average recovery is nine seconds. That's pretty big. We went from hours, days, or weeks to seconds and minutes to recover.

Its overall impact on our RTOs has been fantastic.

Its main feature is continuous replication. We are able to have continuous replication, and we are able to have the information available as per recovery point objectives (RPOs) and how much data to retain. The real selling point was to be able to have those statistics and be able to test and show that the replication is occurring properly and then to be able to do live passive testing.

We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit.

In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them. 

Everything is meant to be simple. When something doesn't work, even though what you were trying to do appeared to be very simple, there are probably a lot of pieces behind the scenes. So, to be able to narrow down where in those 100 steps something went wrong can be a little tricky. When there is a failure, there should be a more detailed explanation of what the error is and how to remediate it. Currently, it's a little vague. A part of that could be because we use Zerto on top of Hyper-V. VMware still has a very large market share over Hyper-V and a lot of the information and a lot of the deployment plans are geared towards VMware. So, sometimes, there are new features that first roll out to VMware and then come to Hyper-V.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It's a very stable platform, but sometimes, we've had instances where we've upgraded versions and went from version 8 to 8.5 or to version 9 to 9.5, and there were issues. When you deploy, depending upon how many host machines you have, something might go wrong with the deployment to a host. In that case, you have to do a decent amount of work so that you can remove your virtual machine and restart the underlying host, which is something that you try to avoid doing, but sometimes, that's required in order to resolve the issue so that you can do the upgrade properly and allow that. When there is a problem like that, it can affect the performance of the system, but that falls more under maintenance and upkeep. In general, it does run pretty smoothly. It comes down to the fact that whenever there is a problem, it's a problem. That's the same with anything. Everything works until it doesn't, but in general, it works more than it doesn't, which is what you want. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

Their tech support is pretty good. We've had issues where we have reached out to them, and in general, they're pretty responsive and helpful. A few times, we've had them jump on to do screen shares and pull information and do deeper dives into some of those errors that didn't have detailed inputs about the area we need to look into, and their tech support has been pretty good. Based on the help that they provided for the issues we had, I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were using point-in-time backups provided by Barracuda. The issue with that was that we were taking point-in-time backups, and we were saving them in the cloud, but if we didn't have a location to restore the data to, the backups weren't very useful. They were useful from the backup standpoint but not from a disaster standpoint. In such a case, our primary data center would be wiped out. We would have our cloud copy, which would probably be a day old, and then we would have to take that cloud copy and download it somewhere where we don't have machines. So, we would have to buy servers or buy something to download our backup copies to and then spin them up. That could potentially take weeks. Now, we already have the hardware in place, or if it was a cloud, we would leverage the cloud, but we already have the hardware in place. So, at any point, it's a matter of enabling, going live, and saying failover, and then basically, having our DR copy become live. So, the time to recover was the main reason for going for Zerto.

We still have the Barracuda solution in conjunction. A lot of that is due to the fact that we already have a long-term contract. We have a five-year contract with Barracuda. We probably don't need to renew that, but there are benefits of both. We have kept both solutions because they do slightly different things. The way we use Zerto is that it's focused mainly on disaster recovery. Barracuda gives us more of a long historical recovery for easily recovering things such as files. We have backups of virtual machines that might go back four or five years. You might argue that it is not worth it because a lot of the data that is multiple years old might not be of value.

The way it would work with Zerto is that we could keep a live copy within Zerto for 30 days. After that, we would have to take that data and throw it somewhere else for long-term storage, which would incur additional costs and adds a little bit. Because we already had Barracuda, we leveraged Barracuda for long-term retention. We don't use Barracuda for disaster recovery anymore, but we use it for point-in-time recovery. We take a backup that gets shipped to the cloud to have an extra copy that is just there, which then becomes part of a historical backup where we could go back six or seven months, whereas Zerto is only for recovering files up to a few days. Anything older than those few days would be recovered via Barracuda.

Zerto can do a backup for or recover data longer than that period of time, but it becomes a little bit different process. When we looked at Zerto three years ago, the ransomware, journaling, and being able to go back a few hours and restore your entire environment back to a point in time were nice features, but they weren't the selling point. The selling point was disaster recovery. So, that's the main thing for which we're using it. We are not looking at the ability to go back 30 days to recover a file. I definitely see it as a plus, but because it wasn't the initial selling point, and the way that we architected things, we don't necessarily use that right now. However, when our contract with Barracuda ends, instead of renewing, we could consider just buying long-term retention through a cloud provider and then maintaining a longer history with Zerto.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done. We were pretty much able to have it up in a few hours, but it also depends on your use case and the complexity of your deployment. Like anything, there are a thousand ways to skin a cat. So, it depends upon how you want to have it set up. It depends on:

• How complex groundwork do you want to put in?
• How isolated do you want your test case to be?
• How isolated do you want different things to be set up?

There could be a little bit more complexity, but in general, it's pretty simple to get going. Obviously, there is a lot that goes into it, but the actual work of setting it up, once you have those decisions made, is pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy.

We definitely did a lot of planning, but we did the actual deployment or the actual configuration of it before we engaged with the professional services aspect of our deployment plan. When we bought the software, we had a project management plan and support from Zerto directly. We pretty much did all the setup ahead of time by ourselves. So, in our case, the setup was very simple and very easy.

It does require some maintenance. There are always service updates that are available, and occasionally, there will be little bumps in the road that require maybe reinstalling or updating something. In terms of general maintenance, as compared to other solutions, its maintenance is probably a little bit less than other solutions. Maintenance is still required, but it doesn't require an extreme amount of maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

When we went to locate this software, we worked with ePlus. They made several recommendations on different solutions, and from those recommendations, we narrowed it down and picked Zerto.

I liked them a lot at the time. The sales rep that we had there was fantastic. Unfortunately, a few months after our project was purchased, our sales rep left the company, and then we just never really connected with any of the new people. That has not necessarily something to do with ePlus. They're a large, great company, but what really separated them and made that project beneficial was the account manager that we had during that time period. He was fantastic.

In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie.

We did look at other similar solutions, but what made Zerto the solution that we went with was the fact that it included the recovery of the actual virtual machine. Other solutions had the ability to do the same kind of synchronous or near-continuous data replication. However, if we had the underlying data replicated but our virtual machine's copy or our virtual machine configuration was different or was not at that target location, we would have to then configure those machines to load the underlying data. The feature that made Zerto useful was that it handled that and replicated the virtual machine information as well. So, we didn't have to do that. Once we configure and specify it to replicate a virtual machine, all the data that's associated with it and its configuration is replicated. We don't have to deal with additional steps.

Three years ago, when we were looking at disaster recovery options, a lot of the solutions were targeted at replicating the underlying data but not necessarily how to get that data usable. Getting the data usable part is often the trickiest and the most time-consuming part. So, when you don't have to take that into consideration because it's already being copied and it's current, your downtime associated with a failure event is reduced. That was definitely a selling point for us.

We looked at Veeam, and we looked at how we use Pure Storage for our underlying data storage. They have the capabilities of doing synchronous, real-time replication, which has improved a lot in the past three years. So, the limitations that made it less appealing a few years ago might have been removed now, but at the same point, that's only the underlying data. We would still have to recreate virtual machines that will spin up that data. There is no other real solution that I'm aware of that does this as nicely. Even some of the other Microsoft native solutions aren't as nice and user-friendly. They definitely don't give you the ability to do testing. We couldn't spin up a replicated copy without causing issues. Zerto allows us to spin up a test version of our production software or our production VMs without affecting the production copy.

There is a lot that goes into setting it up. So, the planning has to be done, but once it's running, it's very simple. If it's set up right, it literally involves a few clicks. Testing and failover can be done in a few clicks, which makes a very complex thing simple. So, if you set it up and you have the groundwork done, then with one or two clicks, you could do major testing, and you could do major failovers. From that standpoint, it's extremely simple to use once it's up and running.

They have a lot of other features that we don't really leverage 100%. We use it only for disaster recovery, but it also contains features for ransomware where you can recover files. Although we don't use that feature, that's definitely a benefit. We have recovered files from time to time but not because of ransomware. We maintain a history of up to 30 days for each of the virtual machines that we have. We have a different solution to recover files older than 30 days.

We don't really use Zerto for immutable data copies, which goes into the ransomware where you expect not to be corrupted by ransomware. We use it, but we've never had a case where we had to recover from a ransomware instance or anything like that. We use Zerto only for disaster recovery and continuous replication. We have a separate backup tool that takes point-in-time backups. In terms of the 3-2-1 rule for our organization’s recovery strategy, our separate point-in-time backups give us three locations. At a point, we have three copies of the data in different stages.

It hasn't reduced our downtime in any situations because we didn't need to do disaster recovery. So, from that standpoint, we don't have any baselines before or after.

It hasn't directly reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, but the amount of time required per person or the time required by people for validation has greatly reduced. We never had anybody dedicated to it as their only function, but the amount of time that's required to do testing is significantly less. So, there has definitely been a saving of time. Similarly, there has been no change in the number of staff involved in overall backup and disaster recovery management. In theory, it wouldn't because, in most IT organizations, a lot of people wear different hats at different times. We didn't have a dedicated person or a dedicated team only to validate backup and recovery.

Compared to other solutions, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

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. 

Originally, I was looking for a solution that allowed us to replicate our critical workloads to a cloud target and then pay a monthly fee to have it stored there. Then, if some kind of disaster happened, we would have the ability to instantiate or spin up those workloads in a cloud environment and provide access to our applications. That was the ask of the platform.

We are a manufacturing company, so our environment wouldn't be drastically affected by a webpage outage. However, depending on the applications that are affected, being a $15 billion dollar company, there could be a significant impact.

Zerto is very good in terms of providing continuous data protection. Now bear in mind the ability to do this in the cloud is newer to them than what they've always done traditionally on-premises. Along the way, there are some challenges when working with a cloud provider and having the connectivity methodology to replicate the VMs from on-premises to Azure, through the Zerto interface, and make sure that there's a healthy copy of Zerto in the cloud. For that mechanism, we spent several months working with Zerto, getting it dialed in to support what we needed to do. Otherwise, all of the other stuff that they've been known to do has worked flawlessly.

The interface is easy to use, although configuring the environment, and the infrastructure around it, wasn't so clear. The interface and its dashboard are very good and very nice to use. The interface is very telling in that it provides a lot of the telemetry that you need to validate that your backup is healthy, that it's current, and that it's recoverable.

A good example of how Zerto has improved the way our organization functions is that it has allowed us to decommission repurposed hardware that we were using to do the same type of DR activity. In the past, we would take old hardware and repurpose it as DR hardware, but along with that you have to have the administration expertise, and you have to worry about third-party support on that old hardware. It inevitably ends up breaking down or having problems, and by taking that out of the equation, with all of the DR going to the cloud, all that responsibility is now that of the cloud provider. It frees up our staff who had to babysit the old hardware. I think that, in and of itself, is enough reason to use Zerto.

We've determined that the ability to spin up workloads in Azure is the fastest that we've ever seen because it sits as a pre-converted VM. The speed to convert it and the speed to bring it back on-premises is compelling. It's faster than the other ways that we've tried or used in the past. On top of that, they employ their own compression and deduplication in terms of replicating to a target. As such, the whole capability is much more efficient than doing it the way we were doing it with Rubrik.

If we lost our data center and had to recover it, Zerto would save us a great deal of time. In our testing, we have found that recovering the entire data center would be completed within a day. In the past, it was going to take us close to a month. 

Using Zerto does not mean that we can reduce the number of people involved in a failover.  You still need to have expertise with VMware, Zerto, and Azure. It may not need to be as in-depth, and it's not as complicated as some other platforms might be. The person may not have to be such an expert because the platform is intuitive enough that somebody of that level can administer it. Ultimately, you still need a human body to do it.

The most valuable feature is the speed at which it can instantiate VMs. When I was doing the same thing with Rubrik, if I had 30 VMs on Azure and I wanted to bring them up live, it would take perhaps 24 hours. Having 1,000 VMs to do, it would be very time-consuming. With Zerto, I can bring up almost 1,000 VMs in an hour. This is what I really liked about Zerto, although it can do a lot of other things, as well.

The deduplication capabilities are good.

The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do. When it's on-premises, it's a little bit easier because it's more of a controlled environment. It's a Windows operating system on a server and no matter what server you have, it's the same.

However, when you are putting it on AWS, that's a different procedure than installing it on Azure, which is a different procedure than installing it on GCP, if they even support it. I'm not sure that they do. In any event, they could do a better job in how to build that out, in terms of getting the product configured in a cloud environment.

There are some other things they can employ, in terms of the setup of the environment, that would make things a little less challenging. For example, you may need to have an Azure expert on the phone because you require some middleware expertise. This is something that Zerto knew about but maybe could have done a better job of implementing it in their product.

Their long-term retention product has room for improvement, although that is something that they are currently working on.

We have been with Zerto for approximately 10 years. We were probably one of the first adopters on the platform.

With respect to stability, on-premises, it's been so many years of having it there that it's baked in. It is stable, for sure. The cloud-based deployment is getting there. It's strong enough in terms of the uptime or resilience that we feel confident about getting behind a solution like this.

It is important to consider that any issues with instability could be related to other dependencies, like Azure or network connectivity or our on-premises environment. When you have a hybrid environment between on-premises and the cloud, it's never going to be as stable as a purely on-premises or purely cloud-based deployment. There are always going to be complications.

This is a scalable product. We tested scalability starting with 10 VMs and went right up to 100, and there was no difference. We are an SMB, on the larger side, so I wouldn't know what would happen if you tried to run it with 50,000 VMs. However, in an SMB-sized environment, it can definitely handle or scale to what we do, without any problems.

This is a global solution for us and there's a potential that usage will increase. Right now, it is protecting all of our criticals but not everything. What I mean is that some VMs in a DR scenario would not need to be spun up right away. Some could be done a month later and those particular ones would just fall into our normal recovery process from our backup. 

The backup side is what we're waiting on, or relying on, in terms of the next ask from Zerto. Barring that, we could literally use any other backup solution along with Zerto. I'm perfectly fine doing that but I think it would be nice to use Zerto's backup solution in conjunction with their DR, just because of the integration between the two.  

In general, the support is pretty good. They were just acquired by HP, and I'm not sure if that's going to make things better or worse. I've had experiences on both sides, but I think overall their support's been very good.

Zerto has not yet replaced any of our legacy backup products but it has replaced our DR solution. Prior to Zerto, we were using Rubrik as our DR solution. We switched to Zerto and it was a much better solution to accommodate what we wanted to do. The reason we switched had to do with support for VMware.

When we were using Rubrik, one of the problems we had was that if I instantiated the VM on Azure, it's running as an Azure VM, not as a VMware VM. This meant that if I needed to bring it back on-premises from Azure, I needed to convert it back to a VMware VM. It was running as a Hyper-V VM in Azure, but I needed an ESX version or a VMware version. At the time, Rubrik did not have a method to convert it back, so this left us stuck.

There are not a lot of other DR solutions like this on the market. There is Site Recovery Manager from VMware, and there is Zerto. After so many years of using it, I find that it is a very mature platform and I consider it easy to use. 

The initial setup is complex. It may be partly due to our understanding of Azure, which I would not put at an expert level. I would rate our skill at Azure between a neophyte and the mid-range in terms of understanding the connectivity points with it. In addition to that, we had to deal with a cloud service provider.

Essentially, we had to change things around, and I would not say that it was easy. It was difficult and definitely needed a third party to help get the product stood up.

Our deployment was completed within a couple of months of ending the PoC. Our PoC lasted between 30 and 60 days, over which time we were able to validate it. It took another 60 days to get it up and running after we got the green light to purchase it.

We're a multisite location, so the implementation strategy started with getting it baked at our corporate location and validating it. Then, build out an Azure footprint globally and then extend the product into those environments. 

We used a company called Insight to assist us with implementation. We had a previous history with one of their engineers, from previous work that we had done. We felt that he would be a good person to walk us through the implementation of Zerto. That, coupled with the fact that Zerto engineers were working with us as well. We had a mix of people supporting the project.

We have an infrastructure architect who's heading the project. He validates the environment, builds it out with the business partners and the vendor, helps figure out how it should be operationalized, configure it, and then it gets passed to our data protection group who has admins that will basically administrate the platform and it maintains itself.

Once the deployment is complete, maintaining the solution is a half-person effort. There are admins who have a background in data protection, backup products, as well as virtualization and understanding of VMware. A typical infrastructure administrator is capable of administering the platform.

Zerto has very much saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud, rather than in our physical data center. To do what we want to do and have that same type of hardware, to be able to stand up on it and have that hardware at the ready with support and maintenance, would be huge compared to what I'm doing.

By the way, we are doing what is considered a poor man's DR. I'm not saying that I'm poor, but that's the term I place on it because most people have a replica of their hardware in another environment. One needs to pay for those hardware costs, even though it's not doing anything other than sitting there, just in case. Using Zerto, I don't have to pay for that hardware in the cloud.

All I pay for is storage, and that's much less than what the hardware cost would be. To run that environment with everything on there, just sitting, would cost a factor of ten to one.

I would use this ratio with that because the storage that it replicates to is not the fastest. There's no VMs, there's no compute or memory associated with replicating this, so all I'm paying for is the storage.

So in one case, I'm paying only for storage, and in the other case, I have to pay for storage and for hardware, compute, and connectivity. If you add all that up into what storage would be, I think it would be that storage is inexpensive, but compute added up with maintenance and everything, and networking connectivity between there and the soft costs and man-hours to support that environment, just to have it ready, I would say ten to one is probably a fair assessment.

When it comes to DR, there is no real return on investment. The return comes in the form of risk mitigation. If the question is whether I think that I spent the least amount of money to provide a resilient environment then I would answer yes. Without question.

If you are an IT person and you think that DR is too expensive then the cloud option from Zerto is good because anyone can afford to use it, as far as getting one or two of their criticals protected. The real value of the product is that if you didn't have any DR strategy, because you thought you couldn't afford it, you can at least have some form of DR, including your most critical apps up and running to support the business.

A lot of IT people roll the dice and they take chances that that day will never come. This way, they can save money. My advice is to look at the competition out there, such as VMware Site Recovery, and like anything else, try to leverage the best price you can.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees for the product itself. However, for the environment that it resides in, there certainly are. With Azure, for example, there are several additional costs including connectivity, storage, and the VPN. These ancillary costs are not trivial and you definitely have to spend some time understanding what they are and try to control them.

I looked at several solutions during the evaluation period. When Zerto came to the table, it was very good at doing backup. The other products could arguably instantiate and do the DR but they couldn't do everything that Zerto has been doing. Specifically, Zerto was handling that bubbling of the environment to be able to test it and ensure that there is no cross-contamination. That added feature, on top of the fact that it can do it so much faster than what Rubrik could, was the compelling reason why we looked there.

Along the way, I looked at Cohesity and Veeam and a few other vendors, but they didn't have an elegant solution or an elegant way of doing what I wanted to do, which is sending copies to an expensive cloud storage target, and then having the mechanism to instantiate them. The mechanism wasn't as elegant with some of those vendors.

We initially started with the on-premises version, where we replicated our global DR from the US to Taiwan. Zerto recently came out with a cloud-based, enterprise variant that gives you the ability to use it on-premises or in the cloud. With this, we've migrated our licenses to a cloud-based strategy for disaster recovery.

We are in the middle of evaluating their long-term retention, or long-term backup solution. It's very new to us. In the same way that Veeam, and Rubrik, and others were trying to get into Zerto's business, Zerto's now trying to get into their business as far as the backup solution.

I think it's much easier to do backup than what Zerto does for DR, so I don't think it will be very difficult for them to do table stakes back up, which is file retention for multiple targets, and that kind of thing.

Right now, I would say they're probably at the 70% mark as far as what I consider to be a success, but each version they release gets closer and closer to being a certifiable, good backup solution.

We have not had to recover our data after a ransomware attack but if our whole environment was encrypted, we have several ways to recover it. Zerto is the last resort for us but if we ever have to do that, I know that we can recover our environment in hours instead of days.

If that day ever occurs, which would be a very bad day if we had to recover at that level, then Zerto will be very helpful. We've done recoveries in the past where the on-premises restore was not healthy, and we've been able to recover them very fast. It isn't the onesie twosies that are compelling in terms of recovery because most vendors can provide that. It's the sheer volume of being able to restore so many at once that's the compelling factor for Zerto.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zerto is to get a good cloud architect. Spend the time to build out your design, including your IP scheme, to support the feature sets and capabilities of the product. That is where the work needs to be done, more so than the Zerto products themselves. Zerto is pretty simple to get up and running but it's all the work ahead in the deployment or delivery that needs to be done. A good architect or cloud person will help with this.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Zerto is that it requires good planning but at the end of it, you'll have a reasonable disaster recovery solution. If you don't currently have one then this is certainly something that you should consider.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

We've used it for disaster recovery. We also use it for file recovery. We extended our journal to more days, so we were able to back up a more detailed timeline. We recently did migrations. 

One of the biggest benefits is the migration. We had to move out of a data center very quickly. We were able to failover to our disaster recovery site and run our full production there for almost two months. We then fail back over to the production site using Zerto. 

The ease of use and the ability to quickly recover our workloads is very simple and easy.

The near-synchronous replication is great. It allows us to failover and run production.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs has been excellent. 

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions is night and day. We use Veeam for backups and the amount of time that it takes to recover is so much quicker mounting with Zerto. That's why we extended the journal so that we could capture a few more days and make it easier for us to recover files.

The amount of storage that it takes up for the journals could use improvement. Outside of that, it's been great.

I have been using Zerto for five years. 

They're very stable. We had been with them for a while before HPE acquired them, and they're still going strong now. We haven't seen a lot of big changes in the way they operate, so that's always a good sign.

Support is great. Every time we have an issue, which isn't very often, they're very responsive. We get in touch with somebody very quickly and they help us through it.

Positive

We use Veeam and we've used Datto. We chose Zerto for its ease of use. It was simple, and then we found out once we got it in-house how valuable it was. We just extended it from there.

We used Veeam, and we switched because Zerto was a lot easier. From implementation to actually protecting our VMs, it was so much easier.

Zerto is on top. Zerto is the best out there. 

The initial setup was easy. 

We worked with Zerto on the deployment. 

We have definitely seen ROI.

We had to move out of a data center very quickly. The data center we were in filed for bankruptcy, and we had two months to move out. The ability to flip over to our recovery site in one day, and then being able to ride that until the next time we came back up, then move all of our data back to the new data center was huge for us. That would have cost us a lot.

The initial pricing seemed a little high, but once we got into it and found out what it could do and how it benefited us, it proved itself. We didn't feel that it was too far out of the ordinary. We've increased our licensing to cover our entire environment whereas before we're only covering critical servers. 

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. When we started using it, it was very easy to use. It was easy to implement. Throughout the years, it's continued to be that same way. They've proven themselves. We've had the data center move, we've had failures, we've had different issues that happened in our environment, and they were able to meet all of our needs. 

I use it for yearly disaster recovery testing.

The main benefit we see from Zerto is that it helps to meet our disaster recovery objectives.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is important and impressive.

Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment and has improved all over RPO. 

The speed of recovery with Zerto is extremely fast. We're able to perform disaster recovery testing on dozens of VMs within an hour or even half an hour.

I like its fast recovery, fast RPO and RTO, ease of use, easy interface, ease of deployment, and that it's always available.

I would like for Zerto to improve reporting, provide more data on individual VMs and their performance, and maybe expand into backup with the ability to scan for malware or offline scanning.

I have been using Zerto for over seven years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The customer service and support are excellent. 

Positive

We previously used Commvault. It used a lot of scripting and configuration to make disaster recovery happen, and it was slow, with a low RPO.

We haven't tried disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We only use on-premises recovery.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was straightforward. 

We previously used or evaluated other backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

We compared Veeam and Commvault against Zerto.

We chose Zerto because of its performance and ease of use.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because there's always room for improvement. 

We utilize Zerto as part of our disaster recovery toolset. We employ a multi-tiered model, catering to a select group of customers, primarily hospital clusters. These customers maintain on-premise networks with cloud-based disaster recovery. In this managed service offering, we leverage Zerto to facilitate their cloud recovery.

The replication is quick. We encountered some challenges replicating the data during the first full copy. Since we weren't using Zerto, I suspect the bandwidth requirements for replication were a bottleneck for us. However, once the initial copy was complete, the process became seamless. The recovery was near zero after the first replication. Zerto worked perfectly.

We implemented Zerto because it supports a multi-tenant model, which was a critical requirement for us. We have five tenants located on-premises across five different data centers. However, we only have a single disaster recovery site in the cloud. Zerto's solution enabled us to consolidate our disaster recovery needs. Previously, managing five separate data protection solutions for each data center and five different cloud recovery subscriptions would have been incredibly expensive. Zerto significantly reduced our costs. Additionally, Zerto provides a single-pane-of-glass dashboard, allowing us to manage our infrastructure efficiently and effectively. This comprehensive view offers full control over our applications and complete visibility into all our tenants. As an infrastructure manager, I believe these features are the most valuable contributions Zerto has made to our organization.

Zerto has helped save around 30 percent of our time.

Zerto has helped achieve significant cost savings.

In the VMS portal, we had a relatively small amount of data overall. We also had multiple tenants, each with a maximum of 20 to 30 virtual machines on-premises. These VMs weren't particularly large. As a result, recovery was quick, typically taking less than a minute. My Recovery Time Objective would be less than a minute for any VM, even for a complete migration of all on-premises VMs to the cloud.

While I wasn't privy to the details of the client's previous DR solution before implementing Zerto, our discussions revealed significant time savings with Zerto's recovery process. Compared to their prior on-premises DR approach, Zerto offers a substantial reduction in recovery time – at least 15 to 20 minutes faster. This improvement stems from eliminating the need to coordinate with personnel and the time required for on-premises recovery procedures at their dedicated DR site. Previously, they relied on manual, on-premises to on-premises recovery, which inherently took longer. However, a direct comparison between their old solution and Zerto wouldn't be entirely accurate. Zerto offers significant efficiency gains, boasting up to 200 percent improvement.

Migrating data through Zerto is straightforward with careful planning. Our first experience involved Zerto's support throughout the process. While initially challenging due to our lack of experience, we were able to navigate the initial setup. One hurdle we faced was optimizing network traffic for the initial data replication from on-premises to the cloud. However, we embraced the learning curve, documenting everything as we gained control of the environment. This ensured a smooth integration for subsequent tenants. While the first migration presented some difficulties, as is to be expected, Zerto's excellent support made the process manageable. Their responsiveness in explaining and resolving issues made it a positive experience overall.

The RPO was very close to zero, meaning there was minimal data loss between replications. However, this could be impacted by the specific database being hosted and other factors. For application servers or virtual machines replicated on-premises to the cloud, I believe there was negligible lag or delay, assuming no network issues. Bandwidth and network traffic did play a role – we observed instances of slower RPO due to traffic spikes or network events. However, with Zerto providing the recommended data bandwidth, we encountered minimal challenges. In most cases, I'd say 90 percent of the data was synchronized almost constantly. The only exception was when network issues arose.

Our data center experienced an issue, necessitating a disaster recovery procedure. Fortunately, data loss seems minimal, and the impact on our clients appears negligible. This is partly due to the managed service we provide for a tenant, who fortunately didn't perceive any significant data loss. The success of the recovery is also attributed to our user-friendly, always-in-sync system. Upon receiving alerts and notifications, we promptly informed the client, who then quickly authorized the recovery process. From our perspective, the recovery went smoothly with minimal challenges. In the actual scenario, we believe data loss was negligible. While some data loss might have occurred technically, it wasn't significant enough to cause any noticeable impact on the client. It's important to note that our monitoring team maintained complete control of the situation, allowing for swift decision-making and a speedy recovery.

In a data recovery scenario, we'll still have our database administrator, Linux administrator, storage administrator, and Zerto operator available. While Zerto can automate disaster recovery and VM restoration, it's important to remember that it's not a foolproof solution. Even though Zerto streamlines the process, a well-prepared organization will always maintain backups and ensure a dedicated team is in place for data recovery. Zerto doesn't reduce the number of personnel involved; rather, it enhances their productivity by freeing them up for other tasks during a recovery event. During a recovery, it's still recommended to have everyone on call. While Zerto handles most recoveries, there may be situations where manual intervention is necessary. By being fully prepared, our organization can effectively address any data recovery situation.

It is easy to manage and monitor the DR plans using the Zerto GUI. 

Zerto's most valuable features include its user-friendly interface, multi-tenancy capabilities, and near-zero downtime recovery. Zerto is easy to learn and use, even for those with limited technical experience. Additionally, Zerto's failover testing functionality allows us to run tests in real time without impacting production systems.

We encountered some issues during Active Directory recovery. When we implemented Active Directory, we provided feedback to Zerto regarding the challenges of recovering AD from the on-premises environment to the disaster recovery site. Unlike other virtual machines, AD recovery presents unique difficulties due to its active-active nature. It's unclear whether these challenges stem from Zerto itself or limitations within Microsoft Active Directory. However, in our experience using Zerto for AD recovery compared to other technologies, we faced data discrepancies that necessitated workarounds to bring AD online at the DR site.

Certain applications we migrated from production relied on Active Directory authentication. To ensure successful application functionality at the DR site, a functional AD environment was a prerequisite to application migration. Therefore, our initial step involved copying and guaranteeing a running AD instance on the DR side before application recovery.

However, upon attempting application authentication on the DR side, data inconsistencies prevented successful authentication. To address this, we created an isolated clone of the AD environment and conducted tests. Through trial and error, we were able to develop workarounds to resolve the issue. Notably, these challenges were specific to Active Directory; other VMs didn't exhibit similar problems.

I have been using Zerto for over 3 years.

Zerto has been very stable for us. We do apply patch releases and upgrades whenever necessary to ensure continued stability. Fortunately, we haven't encountered any major bugs or issues that would cause significant downtime, unlike what we've experienced with some other tools. Zerto has been a reliable choice for us.

I would rate the stability of Zerto 9 out of 10.

I would rate the scalability of Zerto nine out of ten.

The technical support is fantastic. They offer same-day assistance, and their documentation is clear and comprehensive.

Positive

Before implementing Zerto, the client's disaster recovery relied on an on-premises to on-premises failover strategy. Seeking a cloud-based solution, they chose Zerto to leverage its expertise in this area.

We previously used another tool for DR orchestration. While Zerto can also perform recoveries, it focuses on virtual machines and doesn't extend to the operating system or database level for starting and stopping applications within those VMs. Despite these limitations, Zerto excelled in its support. The Zerto team provided excellent assistance whenever we faced challenges, joined calls to help us troubleshoot, and offered clear timelines for resolving issues. Their documentation was also thorough. In contrast, the previous DR tool lacked comparable support and documentation. This stark difference in support quality is why we favored Zerto and ultimately removed the other tool from our project. Currently, we rely solely on Zerto for our existing tenants, and we plan to continue using it for future ones as well.

We encountered some challenges during the initial setup. Zerto offers several data replication options, I believe 2 or 3. These include copying data to our hard drive or storage box, copying it to the DSR site, and replicating it over the network. However, only network replication worked for us.

The issue might have been related to bandwidth requirements. It's possible that either Zerto itself or our network infrastructure wasn't up to par. We faced some challenges during that initial phase.

However, after the initial setup and the application of delta copying, which happens daily, we rarely experienced any replication issues. Most of the time, network glitches and fluctuations caused brief disconnections, but overall, replication ran smoothly.

We went into the Zerto deployment with a clean slate. Both team members were new to Zerto, so we were all learning as we went. This initial deployment was challenging, but it gave us valuable hands-on experience. Once we had a firm grasp of the environment, onboarding subsequent tenants became seamless. We developed a clear plan and approach, which streamlined the process for future deployments. Technically, the challenges weren't ongoing. The main hurdle was understanding how to integrate Zerto with our existing infrastructure. While that initial learning curve was steep, Zerto's excellent support helped us navigate it successfully.

The deployment time for Zerto varies depending on the complexity of your environment. More complex environments will require a longer replication process. However, on average, we can onboard a new customer within 1 month. This timeframe encompasses the entire process, from the initial planning phase to the deployment of up to 30 VMs within a tenant.

Our project involved 2 separate IT teams at 2 different locations. One team acted as the managed service provider, while the other represented the client side. The client-side team, located on-premises, provided us with essential information about their data centers. This included details on virtual machines, such as their size, quantity, and basic data collection metrics. They also helped us identify their storage requirements. Based on this information, we planned our cloud storage procurement and other necessary actions. The project team comprised approximately 10 to 15 people, including project managers, IT personnel, storage specialists, network engineers, and development experts.

I would rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

Our organization uses Zerto to manage the replication of data centers from 7 on-premises locations to the IBM cloud for our midsize clients.

Our environment consists of VMware, data storage, and a network, with Zerto deployed for disaster recovery. While VCDM and VMware are managed by our cloud provider, we maintain 5 additional technologies with a team of 8 people.

We experienced a brief on-premises outage. Fortunately, we were able to recover quickly using Zerto. The software triggered an alert, notifying our monitoring team. These features proved to be very helpful. Additionally, we were able to promptly contact our clients and explain the situation. They responded quickly and effectively, minimizing the impact on their end. Our clients were pleased with the response.

I recommend Zerto to others.

I used Zerto in my last company for disaster recovery. It was a hospital, and now, I work for a bank where we use it for both disaster recovery and migration. We are doing a major migration.

Currently, we are doing disaster recovery only on-prem, but down the road, we will also go to the cloud. We are planning to go to Azure, but we do not know what we will actually use at that time.

We can recover a VM at any point. It probably takes five minutes, which is very important for us because if I lose my active node, I will have my production up in a couple of minutes.

We did reduce the migration time. I do not have a number, but it is better than VMware SRM. We are a big VMware shop, and we have now started buying HPE.

In terms of Zerto's effect on our RPO, I do not have the numbers because I am an implementation engineer, but the numbers should be good.

The migration and ease of use are valuable. It is easy to set up and easy to flip. We just need to click on Move. It can Re-IP at the same time. This is something very useful for us. Disaster recovery is also valuable. 

Its user interface is good. I have no complaints. The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA.

So far, we have not seen any issue. We will know more down the road as we use it more and more, but right now, we are okay.

It is very scalable. That is why we did not go for Veeam. We went for Zerto.

Our environment is very big. I work for a large bank. 

I have not yet called their support. I did not have to call them.

We switched from VMware SRM to Zerto. VMware SRM is good, but if I do not do error-level replication and I do only vSphere replication, it is not good. The vSphere replication is not as good as the Zerto replication. Zerto is faster. It takes less time.

I did not do the implementation, but my team deployed it. Because I have used it before, my guess is that it is not complicated to deploy.

We have seen an ROI. If I do a vSphere replication from vCenter to vCenter, and of course, we can do long-distance vCenter migration these days, it would not be as good as Zerto replication.

There is a lot of confusion with Zerto licensing. They have a migration license and a replication license. They should simplify the licensing process. 

The migration license costs a lot of money, and it is only on a one-time basis. If you use that license, it ties to that VM. I might re-migrate that VM in the next five to ten years. It is another environment, but my license is stuck there. 

The replication license is fine, and I have no issue with its pricing model, but they should simplify the migration license. It should not be tied to a VM. They can reduce the price because a lot of people do not buy it because of the price. A long time ago, Double-Take Software used to do what Zerto is doing now. It is another replication software.

I was not in that group, but they did test Veeam. I also used Veeam in my last job. I am not sure if I am qualified to compare, but Veeam seems to be for a small to medium company, whereas Zerto is an enterprise software.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten because we do not yet know everything.