Zerto Overview
Zerto is the #2 ranked solution in our list of top Cloud Backup tools. It is most often compared to Veeam Backup & Replication: Zerto vs Veeam Backup & Replication
What is Zerto?
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by eliminating the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, backup and cloud are managed. At enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted by over 6,000 customers globally and is powering resiliency offerings for Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS, SunGard AS and more than 350 cloud services providers.
Zerto is also known as Zerto Virtual Replication.
Zerto Buyer's Guide
Download the Zerto Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: December 2020
Zerto Customers
Tencate, Spirit Airlines, Woodforest National Bank, UW Health
Zerto Video
Pricing Advice
What users are saying about Zerto pricing:
- "It's very equitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per core as far as what we're backing up. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we're backing up and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all."
- "There is a one-time cost for maintenance and support. We have a three-year contract that we will have to renew when those three years come up. There is also licensing on top of that for whatever product you are using it for."
- "I'd like to see better tiering for Zerto's pricing. We do multi-tier VMs. I don't think I should be paying a penalty and price for a tier-three VM where I don't need a really tight SLA like I do for a tier-one."
- "If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense."
- "Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it."
Zerto Reviews
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David Riberdy
Enterprise Data Management Supervisor at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company
Instead of one mass disaster recovery exercise, we're easily able to perform up to 12 in the year
What is our primary use case?
We use it for disaster recovery and to migrate machines from one location to another.Pros and Cons
- "In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy."
- "The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be."
What other advice do I have?
My advice would be to do the proof of concept. They're very willing to help you with the installation. Do a proof of concept. If you're not amazed by it, I would be surprised. Everybody that we've ever talked to about this and have done a test of it says, "I can't believe it's just that easy." I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.
Don Cargill
Senior Server Storage Engineer at MAPFRE Insurance
Reduced the number of people onsite during a disaster recovery drill
What is our primary use case?
We do a semiannual disaster recovery test, usually one in January and another in September, where we fail our entire company over to our Arizona DR facility. We run the business out of Arizona location for the day. In order to be able to do that, the Zerto application allows us to migrate 58 machines over to that location and allows us to run our business from that location for the course of the day.Pros and Cons
- "Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it."
- "The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue."
What other advice do I have?
Don't hesitate. Go out and do it now. Don't wait two years like we did. Push harder in order to be able to get the solution in place, especially since we know it will work better for you. Don't just take, "No," for an answer from senior management. The application is phenomenal. They continually add new things, more plugins, and modifications to the way things work. It just gets better as they go. We don't plan to use the solution for long-term retention at this time, but we are looking at going into a hybrid cloud solution in the near future which we may be using long-term retention for to…
Learn what your peers think about Zerto. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2020.
456,249 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1464378
Senior VMware Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved to fail back or move workloads
What is our primary use case?
We use it for disaster recovery. We use it for some testing. And we use it for hot backups on databases.Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution."
- "The solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features."
- "Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it."
What other advice do I have?
Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use. What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication…reviewer1456953
Systems Architect - Cloud at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We are able to show, at a customer-level of granularity, what a customer's RPO was at any point, in real time
What is our primary use case?
Our use case is 100 percent disaster recovery between two different geographies. We have a very large private cloud offering. We've got about 1,200 customers and almost 10,000 VMs that are under Zerto protection. Every one of those virtual machines needs to be replicated from Waltham to Chicago, from the East Coast of the U.S. to the central U.S. Likewise, we have a European business with the exact same flow, although it's much smaller as far as number of VMs; it might be a couple of hundred. That implementation is going from Berlin to Amsterdam. We've got one-way protection in two different… more »Pros and Cons
- "Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection."
- "The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware."
- "The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale... We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going."
What other advice do I have?
Zerto can do what it says it can do. It can absolutely provide sub-second recovery point objectives, but with a couple of caveats. The caveats tend to apply to large companies like mine, and by "large" I mean if you have over 2,000 to 3,000 virtual machines, versus a small to medium-sized company that maybe has 50 to 500. Once you cross that barrier, you're getting into a larger environment that you're trying to replicate with Zerto. A couple things can break down. Zerto's product doesn't control the path between your source production data and the destination you're trying to send it to…
DanTurner
CIO at Per Mar Security Services
The ability to spin things up near-instantaneously enables us to guarantee our uptime
What is our primary use case?
We're backing up VMs with it. Our company has about 200 VMs and we're using Zerto on 30 of them in the main line of business applications. We're using it to replicate all that data over to our DR site so we can do our testing and reporting against that. Within those 30 servers we've broken out into three different SLAs on which ones get spun up first. We have it all scripted with monthly plans to fail over, spin it up, actually use it over there, spin it down, bring it back into production, etc.Pros and Cons
- "We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great."
- "One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet."
What other advice do I have?
Take a hard look at it. Don't pass it by, don't be scared off by the price. Definitely take them up on the proof of concept. Have the team come in and do that. You'll be pleasantly surprised. They talk about technology that can just actually do what it promises. I've been doing this for over 20 years and sometimes you get jaded by the fact that people over-promise and under-deliver. Zerto was definitely on the opposite end of that spectrum. The solution went in so easily that I had to do a double-take when my guys were telling me, "Hey, it's already up and running." I said, "It can't be done…
Franklin
Enterprise Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
We know that in the event of a disaster, we can easily recover our state of being in a rather quick amount of time
What is our primary use case?
We use Zerto for DR purposes, we replicate what's critical to continue business. We replicate it from our headquarters to another state, a DR site. If something happens to the headquarters where we are located we could run the continued business from the DR site with Zerto.Pros and Cons
- "Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. For replication purposes, it's definitely better than Veeam. Veeam doesn't do as good a job as Zerto does when it comes to replication. The other alternative would be to just have backups somewhere. But even with backups, you lose a lot of time because you have to set it all up. With Zerto, you failover, you just click a couple of buttons and you run from the other location."
- "The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere."
What other advice do I have?
We don't know what we're going to do for long-term retention. We use it for DR purposes only. But we are still looking at the long-term retention and what to do with it. I would say if you're looking for true DR protection with minimal recovery time, then Zerto is probably going to be the one. If the objective is minimum time to recover, then this is the product you need to buy. If you want to spend time trying to set up again in a disaster, then there are a lot of things out there and for ransomware too. We have about a five-minute window where once data is compromised beyond five minutes…
Evan Davis
Technology Infrastructure Manager at County of Grey
If we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before
What is our primary use case?
We needed Zerto in order to provide a disaster recovery solution for the entire organization. We use it to replicate some resources on-prem and for quick recovery. We also use Azure to replicate for disaster. If we ever have a catastrophic failure or attack at our main headquarters, we could failover and run our resources in Azure. We don't use Zerto for backup, we use Veeam. Once the new long-term retention features are added to Zerto, then we will investigate using it for that and possibly dropping Veeam.Pros and Cons
- "There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
- "Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement."
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend doing the free proof of concept exercise with Zerto pre-sales engineers and work with them to discuss your environment and then review their recommendations on implementation. From time to time do the free training. I highly recommend doing that. Get your hands on this software and try it out first before doing the production implementation. The biggest lesson I have learned is that disaster recovery doesn't have to be hard. I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. I don't rate many things ten, but Zerto offered me exactly what they're upfront with, what it will do, and it's…
Dain Baltierra
Senior IT Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Can be implemented and used in an emergency situation anywhere
What is our primary use case?
We use it for DR as well as migration. We have four data centers and migrate workloads between them. We don't use it for backup.Pros and Cons
- "The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field."
- "The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it."
What other advice do I have?
Most people assume catastrophic failures have a long-term data impact. However, with Zerto, it doesn't have to be that way. If you spend the money to protect everything, you are going to get that low data recovery time. Whereas, if you are cheap and don't buy Zerto, it's going to be hours to days of data loss. With Zerto, it is in the minutes. Thus, how valuable is your data? That is where the cost justification comes in. If you are thinking about implementing this type of solution: * How important is your data? * Would your company go bankrupt if you were unable to do what your company does…See 24 more Zerto Reviews
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