Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto for server migrations between data centers during the role swap that we do. We use it from a recovery standpoint as well.

We currently do not have disaster recovery to the cloud. We go between our data centers. That is what Zerto helps us accomplish.

Zerto works very well. We have not had any faults while using it. We are a financial institution, so we have to make sure the systems we have are available with very minimal downtime.

It has helped out a lot in man-hours. It has saved us a lot of overnight work. We can literally change our production servers in a matter of minutes to hours. Rather than having to do this gradually or a couple of weeks in advance and have several teams and business partners involved, we can literally do it live on the same day.

Zerto is probably one of the faster ones in terms of recovery. You can just go into the console, and because it is always replicating over to the other side, it takes minutes.

Being able to do our recovery and being able to migrate between data centers during the role swap is valuable just because of the amount of time it takes. It takes 55 hours or so. Right now, we are doing this in a VDI environment. We are going to experiment with it as a proof of concept because we have a thousand machines that we have to move and do all the assignments. Zerto would lessen that down by a few hours, and then we can use some scripts to do everything on the Horizon's side. We have not done it yet, but we are hoping to reduce it down to about 3 hours instead of 55 hours. We will also be able to manage our host better and be in a better recovery state. If the host happens to go down, we can quickly recover.

It is very user-friendly. There is no wondering about what a feature does. It is easy to use.

If they already do not have it, they can have some APIs for the Horizon environment. Instead of having to use some scripts to get around, they can make it a lot more user-friendly for integration.

We have been using Zerto for two years.

It has been very stable. We have not had any issues while using it. When we need it to do its job, it is always dependable.

It scales very quickly. We can set up a whole new environment in an hour. We can get the server setup and all the VMs that are required for it to function in an hour or two.

I have not used their support. My peers had to use it. They seem very responsive and knowledgeable. 

The other DR tool that I have used is from Symantec. It was an old-school recovery tool. It was back in the day when it took a whole day to get things back up.

It was deployed before I joined the company.

Its price is fair. It is very cost-effective compared to the cost of the labor for your workers and associates. 

We selected Zerto over others primarily for the ability to replicate and help with our role swap. It cuts the downtime of the production systems by a large volume. This way, we can meet the deadline and not have that much client impact. In the financial side of banking, you do not want bad performance.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but it definitely makes your life a lot easier.

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.

It is mainly for disaster recovery of our public-facing website.

I oversee the infrastructure team. I'm the lead for the infrastructure. It is not one of the technologies that I've primarily managed. As an infrastructure lead, I have my hands on every project, and it is hard for me to just focus on one. Especially because it is more of a disaster-recovery type solution for us, as long as replication is going fine and there are no issues, we don't really go in and play with it much.

It does what it claims to do. I can't say whether it improves anything. It is just the fact that we want to make sure our public-facing website is up 24/7, and Zerto gives us the capability of doing that.

It hasn't reduced downtime because we haven't experienced any downtime yet. We've done annual testing to make sure that it is working properly. So far, so good.

The replication is valuable. We have two data centers, and it is replicating from our main data center to another data center. In the event that there is an issue with the first one, it just goes over, and we have the website up and running. It does an automatic build. It keeps our website up and running without interruption. It is constantly replicating. It has the most up-to-date information, at least until the main one goes down, and then it automatically brings up the other one. It is already pre-configured with the network and everything else. So, the website is up and running in seconds.

The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime.

Zerto is more of a set-and-forget-it type of solution. As long as the replication is continuous and there are no issues, I don't touch Zerto. We don't have a lot of workload that needs to be up. We just have our web server and our applications here. Those are two main servers that we get up and running in a disaster-recovery type situation. I can't give any area of improvement from a real-world experience because we haven't had that issue, but from testing, Zerto has been working great. 

It is not something that goes beyond what our use case is for. When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way. When I started working here, my predecessor who was managing Zerto had no documentation. So, I had to take over. No one else knew how to manage Zerto. So, there is just that type of learning process. That's why management wants to standardize on one solution so that it is easier to cross-train, but that's not Zerto's part. It just happens to be our environment and our management style. Zerto as a solution has been great for us.

I've been using it for about three years.

It has been stable for us. We had networking issues that caused the replication to break, but once we had that resolved, replication was seamless again. The
networking issues were on our side.

I don't have much input for its scalability because we only have a maximum of three servers that we need Zerto to bring up and get running as soon as possible, in the event that the main data center goes down.

It has been great. I've only requested support twice. The support engineer that worked with me has been great. I believe it was for the upgrade process, and he reached out to me and informed me that there was a new version that fixed a lot of the bugs from the previous version. He worked with me to get both data centers up to the latest version. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I haven't used any other one. Rubrik just happens to be coming out with a similar solution, and because we use Rubrik, management wants us to take a look at it and do a comparison between the two.

Aside from working with the network team to get all the networking pieces configured, it was pretty straightforward. Installing the agents on the servers and doing the initial replication took the longest time because we have close to a terabyte of data that has to be replicated from one data center to another, but other than that, it was pretty seamless.

It gives us peace of mind. It hasn't happened yet, but it does happen. Based on our annual testing, we are pretty much happy with what Zerto has done or can do.

Zerto is pretty reasonable. I haven't checked to see how much Rubrik is going to quote us for their solution. At least for us, the price doesn't play a big factor in the decision-making because it is a pretty small deployment for our use case.

We're currently evaluating Rubrik because we use that as our primary backup solution, and they just came out with a technology that's similar to Zerto. My managers, the executives, and I are in discussion on possibly looking at their solution and comparing it to Zerto to see which is the right fit for us.

In terms of ease of use, I haven't played with the Rubrik one yet just because they just announced it, but Zerto is pretty straightforward. I went in, and I did all the configuration myself within about 30, 40 minutes.

It is a great solution for what it does, but every company and every department has its own use cases. It is just a matter of evaluating different solutions that are available and picking the right one for your environment. For us, Zerto happens to be the right one.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10 just because it fits our needs for the solution and the environment we're in.

We mostly use it for disaster recovery purposes. We do a lot of migrations as well, e.g., VM from one site to another. We use Zerto for that, as we have hundreds of VMs that we protect as our main DR position using Zerto.

In general, our DR position is entirely based around Zerto. We use it for everything. We just have a couple things that we don't put on it. There are a couple of Oracle things that we replicate with different methods, but we pretty much do everything related to DR with Zerto.

We are not using it for backup. We are using it for continuous DR and replication between two on-prem sites. 

We have two data center sites with bidirectional replications. Each site protects the other site and we have our VPGs that go back and forth.

We perform more DR testing now because it is so easy. For example, what we are doing right now is baselines on our recovery time objectives, determining, "Okay, if we recover one VM, it takes this long. If we recover another VM this size, it is this long." Then, we recover 10, 100, and 800. That way, we get kind of a forecast, when we add VMs, about how that will affect our DR stance.

When we need to move a VM from one data center to another, it is replicated there. We don't need to do any snapshots of storage. We just make a VPG for it, do a move action, and it is just there. It works really well.

The test features have been really good for us. Our DR testing goes very quickly and easily now for all our stuff with Zerto. We have our priority recovery process, where we cover our databases for our app servers and web servers. All our teams pretty much get their VMs very quickly. The RPOs are very low. 

It is very easy to use. There are a lot of training materials online on the Zerto portal, which make it very simple to learn and use. You could go from not knowing how to use it to fully understanding all of it in a day. This can be done by using the Zerto University, getting your little certification and making your boss happy. It is pretty easy to set up VPG-wise.

You have a 24-hour journal. The amount of disasters and things that you can recover from using a 24-hour journal is huge, e.g., ransomware. We haven't had to do that yet, but the possibility is there. It is good to know that you can go back as far as you need.

I would like to see the app be more like the analytics site. Right now, when you go into the analytics, you need to zoom in real tight on your browser. You get a lot more from the analytics site than you do from the app. If they made those two more similar, it would be really useful for day-to-day monitoring of your stuff.

I don't like the evacuation process. The host evacuation process could be a little simpler too. It takes our maintenance a bit longer, when we are doing host maintenance, because we still need to evacuate the vRAs manually. I know they tried to make it more automatic, but it is not quite there yet.

I have been using it for at least three years in my job function.

We have had no problems with it. Stability-wise, I can only say positive things because we haven't had any real negatives with it.

It is very scalable. If you add a data center, then you just add a ZVM at that data center, link it up, and add your vRAs. After that, you are ready to start making VPGs. It is very simple to set up.

We don't have issues with scaling. If a vRA is getting a bit overloaded, it makes little vRAs. So, it kind of handles itself. We have our vRAs at the maximum size, as far as CPU and memory, that they can be. Our RPOs are really short, so we are doing pretty well for our size.

Zerto's support is always responsive. I have never had any problems with it. Our lead Zerto engineer does a lot more stuff than I do as far as with support. Typically, I will escalate to her. If there is an issue, then I defer to her. However, as far as my experience with support, I have experienced nothing but good things. The learning portal, myZerto portal, and analytics are very good. I don't have to use support very often, which is a good thing.

If I were to rate it, I would probably rate it as 10 out of 10. Every time that I have needed them, they have been responsive and quick. I haven't used them that much, but when I have, they have been very responsive.

Positive

We have used SRM, who is Zerto's main competitor. 

SRM was pretty quick. However, the speed of recovery with Zerto is so simple. It can failover, e.g., do whatever kind of failover you want it to do. You choose your VPGs, then you are off. It is really fast and simple. A lot of people could handle using it pretty easily.

I haven't found it to be hard. When you add a new host, you just go to set up and add a new host, then it builds a vRA. It is pretty easy to manage alerts. It will tell you exactly what is wrong, e.g., this doesn't have enough scratch disk, so you need to go update that. Or, this host is offline, e.g., you forgot to evacuate it, so then you need to take it out of Zerto. So, it will alert you to that stuff.

I have done my share of deploying vRAs. Though, our lead Zerto engineer handled most of that stuff from the initial setup.

We have definitely seen a return on investment. We can move any of our VMs from either of our data centers back and forth very easily, bringing them back and doing tests as frequently as we want. We will be doing two tests next week. At previous companies, we did one test a year. Now, we are doing different stacks, e.g., if we do 20, 100, or 700 VMS, then it will be this long. So, we can forecast additional workload and how much that will affect our DR position.

Zerto is definitely a lot easier to manage. My whole team knows how to use it, since it is very simple to use and intuitive. There are a couple people who use it and I am the secondary person. We have someone who basically lives in Zerto. She adds stuff on a daily basis and we are always on top of our updates. We are always looking at whatever new features come out. We try to maximize our journals. We are up to 24 hours on a lot of them. Our average RPO is eight seconds, and that is pretty good since we have 1,500 VMs and 280-plus VPGs. We have a pretty big on-prem environment. So, the good thing about it is the frequency and ease of testing because Zerto is very simple to use. DR has enough problems to deal with and Zerto makes things a lot easier.

We have looked at Veeam and SRM. We examined the marketplace, Gartner, etc. This product that management chose, and we are pretty happy with it.

Give it a try. Move some VMs back and forth to see how easy it is to use. The one-to-many is pretty good. We have two sites, so it is not a very big deal for us to do that, but it is very useful. 

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10. I love Zerto's CDP solution. It is really easy to use. It does everything that we need it to do and scales easily.

Our use cases are disaster recovery and long-term retention against ransomware.

Zerto was part of our technology transformation initiative about five years ago, not only to protect our customers' intellectual property that we create for them, but also to protect our organization as a whole.

In a way, it has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation since we are contracted with insurance companies to help us recover. This solution allows us to be more self-sufficient, using our existing staff to recover.

Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year.

If something happens, and we are out and about, I would like to be able to interface with it on our mobile phones. That would be great.

I have been using it for about five years.

Their technical support is really good. They do quarterly tests to make sure everything is working and spot on. Our Zerto engineer is local, so we work with him quite often just to make sure everything is working.

I would rate the technical support as 11 out of 10.

Positive

It replaced Veeam. Zerto is a lot easier.

Prior to Zerto, when we were looking at our traditional disaster recovery, we were looking at 30 days plus.

We have been able to reduce our RPO and RTO to a matter of seconds to minutes versus what our technology committee established as our metrics, which was 30 minutes versus a few days.

Knock on wood, we have never had downtime. However, it has given us better peace of mind.

I would rate Zerto as 11 out of 10.

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

We use Zerto for real-time replication of our systems, company-wide. The main reason is disaster recovery failover.

We use the long-term retention functionality, although it is not deployed system-wide. We have a lot of critical systems backed up, such as our file servers. We utilize it to hold things for up to a year and we send our long-term retention to ExaGrid appliances.

When we need to failback or move workloads, this solution has decreased the time it takes and the number of people involved. The entire process is, realistically, a one-person job. We usually have an application specialist involved just to validate the health of the server. Whether it's an SQL server or application server, we have somebody that runs integrity checks on it. That said, the entire process is very painless and easily handled by one person.

I estimate that this product saves us hours in comparison to products like Veeam. Veeam would take several hours of time to fail something over. 

Our company fell victim to a ransomware attack that affected between 50 and 60 servers. Until we knew for sure that the entire situation was remediated and that we weren't going to spread the infection, we restored the servers in an offline manner, which only took a matter of minutes to complete. Then, we pushed all of that data into Teams and OneDrive directly for people to start accessing it.

From the SQL server perspective, we failed those servers over, running health checks such as anti-virus scans, just to make sure that the failed over instance didn't contain the same situations. Thankfully, they did not. We probably saved ourselves several days worth of work in the grand scheme of things. In total, it potentially would have taken weeks to resolve using a different solution.

I wouldn't necessarily say that using Zerto has meant that we can reduce the number of staff in a recovery operation. However, I think it's probably mitigated the need to hire more people. Essentially, as we've continued to grow, we've avoided adding headcount to our team. Using Veeam as my problem child to compare against, if we were using it, it would have required a lot more management from us. It would have cost us more time to recover and manage those jobs, including the management of the ExaGrid appliances, as well as the VRAs, which are basically proxies.

Definitely, there is a huge saving in time using Zerto and although we didn't reduce any headcount or repurpose anything, we've definitely mitigated at least two people from the hiring perspective.

Zerto saved us considerable downtime when we experienced the ransomware attack. It may be hard to substantiate that just on the one situation but we saved at least a couple of million dollars.

The most valuable feature is the continuous recovery with the five-second checkpoint interval. Just having those checkpoints prior to when a situation arises, we're able to get the transactional data that occurred right before the server failed. That has been a blessing for us, as we are able to provide a snapshot with no more than five seconds of data loss. This means that we don't have to recreate minutes or hours worth of data for an industry that includes fulfillment, shipping, warehousing, et cetera.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. It does a very good job keeping up with the system and it creates five-second interval checkpoints. This has been helpful when it comes to needing to fail something over, getting that last moment in time that was in a usable state.

This product is impressively easy to use. It's dummy-proof, once it's set up.

The long-term recovery is a little bit weak in its granularity. Veeam is definitely superior in that aspect, as it's able to provide a granular view of files and databases, et cetera. However, it just kind of depends on what a business' recovery strategy is.

From our business perspective, it's really not impactful to us because our recovery strategy is not based on individual files. But, I could definitely see it being a challenge if there is a very large instance of individual files, as a subset, that need to be recovered. I think that if somebody has terabytes of data then Zerto will recover it faster but navigating through the file explorer to get to files is not as easy with Zerto.

One thing I don't like about the product, and I know this is where their claim to fame is, but whenever I have a VPG that has multiple virtual machines in it, and one virtual machine falls behind, it'll pause replication on everything else in that job until the one server catches up. The goal is to keep symmetric replication processing going, so the strategy makes sense, but for our business model, that doesn't really work and it has created a challenge where I have to manage each VM individually. It means that instead of having one job that would cover multiple servers, I just have one job to one server, which allows me to manage them individually.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

From a company perspective, a few years ago, I would have said that it is very stable. It is a solution that is thriving and growing. At this time, however, HP is in the process of acquiring them. While I had assumed that was their long-term plan, I didn't quite anticipate HP being the one to pick them up. As such, I am a little bit worried about what will change in the long term.

Scalability-wise, it's a very painless product. As we continue to grow out our virtual environment, Zerto is able to, in a very nimble fashion, scale with us with very little effort or overhead involved.

I'm covering approximately 400 VMs currently, which is approximately 360 terabytes worth of data. That is between two separate data centers.

Rating the Zerto technical support is a little bit tough because I've had some experiences that were truly 10 of 10, but then I've had one or two experiences where it was definitely a two or a three out of 10. It really depends on who I've gotten on the phone and their level of, A, comfort with their own system, and B, comfort helping the customer.

Some people have said this isn't within their scope of work, where others have said, "No, let's absolutely do this." In that regard, it's been a little hit and miss, but it's usually been a decent quality in the end.

Overall, I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

I have worked with Veeam in the past and although I prefer Zerto, there are some advantages to using Veeam. For example, long-term recovery offers more features.

In-house, we had also used the Unitrends product, as well as a SAN-to-SAN replication using an old HPE LeftHand array.

The main reasons that we switched to Zerto were the management ability, as well as its ability to provide continuous replication. Veeam was a very cumbersome product to manage. There were a lot of instances to monitor and manage from a proxy perspective, whereas Zerto's VRAs are relatively transparent in their configuration and deployment. These are painless and I don't have to continually monitor them. I don't have to update them since they're not like standalone Windows instances. It's very low management for us.

Of course, continuous replication is critical because Veeam, even though when we had owned the product, it claimed 15-minute intervals were doable, it never seemed to actually keep up with those 15-minute snapshot intervals.

One final reason that we migrated from Veeam is that they were utilizing VM snapshots at the time. I know that they've moved away from that approach now, but it was very painful for our environment at the time. The VMware snapshots were causing some of our legacy and proprietary applications to fail.

The initial setup is very simple.

Our implementation strategy involved setting it up for our two data centers. We have a primary and secondary data center, and Zerto keeps track of all of the VMs at the primary site and replicates them to the other site.

In the future, we plan on looking into the on-premises to cloud replication. On-premises to Azure direct is on our roadmap.

I completed the setup myself without support or anybody else involved in the deployment.

It took approximately an hour to deploy.

I handle all of the administration and maintenance. As the senior manager of infrastructure, I oversee our work and server group. I have also retained private ownership over the disaster recovery plan and failover plan.

We have probably not seen a return on investment from using Zerto. We don't really have lots of situations where we have to use it and can substantiate any kind of financial claim to it.

I do not like the current pricing model because the product has been divided into different components and they are charging for them individually. I understand why they did it, but don't like the model. 

Our situation is somewhat peculiar because when we bought into it, we owned everything. Later on down the road, they split the licensing model, so you had to pay extra for the LTR and extra for the multi-site replication. However, since we were using LTR prior to that license model change, they have allowed us to retain the LTR functionality at our existing licensing level, but not have the multi-site replication.

We have not evaluated other options in quite a long time. We very briefly evaluated Rubrik. 

When we first decided to implement Zerto, it wasn't very important that it provides both backup and DR in one platform. In fact, realistically, even now, while we have it and we used it on a limited scope, I'm not sure that it's needed.

With respect to our legacy solutions, I'd say that the cost of replacing them with Zerto is net neutral in the end.

My advice to anybody who is considering Zerto is that it's an awesome product and it won't steer them wrong. That said, there are some issues such as the licensing model and the situations where VPGs falling behind suspends the replication. Overall, it is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's on-prem only, and we're replicating part of production data centers to the DR location. We use it 100 percent for DR. Zerto, as a product, has a lot of capabilities, but we're only using it to replicate servers for disaster recovery, on-prem.

Providing DR for the entire organization is a big improvement, compared to the previous way we did DR. With the old DR tool we identified the systems that we wanted to protect and we installed agents and installed a server in the remote location and pretty much treated every physical and virtual server the same way. That tool was agent-based and required installation and maintenance of a server on the remote site. Now, the effort involved is a fraction of what it was before. We just click the VMs that we want to protect and they are protected.

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in DR.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. With our old solution, something that took 10 to 15 minutes of outage, required one reboot, which took less than a minute, with Zerto. That amount of downtime would have cost our company a couple of thousand dollars.

Zerto's support for different hypervisors is a valuable feature because we have a mixed bag. We have VMware and we have Hyper-V. For us, that was extremely critical when we made the decision. We wanted a single tool that is able to replicate all our virtual servers. At this point, I think the only tool on the market that can do that on-premise is Zerto.

It does a great job of continuous data protection. That's why we're using it for DR. It has the journal, the recovery points. It's doing its job. It's a good tool.

It's extremely easy to use with a very intuitive interface. You can set up a VPG (virtual protected group) and add VMs to it in a couple of clicks. Everything is in a single dashboard and you can do everything from there. If you need some granular information, you click the Analytics and get your RPO or RTO and how much data you would lose if you do a DR at this point in time. 

They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement.

Another area of improvement is support for clusters. They have very limited support for Microsoft clustering.

Also, integration with VMware could be improved. For example, when a VM is created in vCenter, it would be helpful to be able to identify the VM, by tags or any other means, as needing DR protection. And then Zerto should be able to automatically add the VM to a VPG. 

There is definitely room for improvement. But what they have implemented so far, works pretty well.

I have been using Zerto for about five years.

It's pretty stable. 

We're always one version behind. The current version is 8.5 and we're running 8. We always wait until at least Update 1 before we upgrade. So when v9 is out, we'll probably upgrade to 8.5, Update 1, or whatever the current update is. Because we are a little bit behind and we're running on a very stable, mature version, we rarely experience issues.

We're running thousands of hosts. Scalability is not a problem.

We plan to keep the product. It's doing a good job.

Our experience with their technical support has been good. But keep in mind that we have a pretty high-level, Premium Support agreement with Zerto. We have a dedicated technical account manager from Zerto, and he has direct access to the developers.

We used Double-Take DR which treated all the physical and virtual servers exactly the same way with agents. Zerto replaced it.

We switched because it is a little bit inefficient to treat all the virtual machines as separate physical servers, because on the DR site you need to install them, you need to configure them. You need to put the agents on both sites and configure the replication relationship. It's very complex. And whenever you need to patch or do some maintenance on the target site, it's double the work because you patch the source and you patch the target—you have a live server at the remote site. With Zerto, as soon as I patch the VM at the source, the updates are replicated to the target immediately.

Zerto's ease of use is very good compared with other similar solutions for replication.

The initial setup of Zerto is quite simple. You build a SQL instance. You build a Windows VM and install the ZVM on it. You integrate it with vCenter and then, from the ZVM, you make sure your firewall ports are open and you push the VRAs down.

Deployment takes a couple of hours, for a relatively big environment. It would typically require 30 minutes of DBA time, an hour or two of Windows engineering time, and another person from VMware for another hour.

It doesn't require any staff for day-to-day maintenance. It's used by our operations team, which is close to 100 people; those are people who have access to it.

It's quite easy and straightforward. We do it with internal labor.

The way we use it there is no return on investment. You can think of Zerto as an insurance policy. We use it to protect our business, but we actually hope that we'll never put it into action.

It's not the cheapest tool, it's expensive. But it's doing a good job.

We pay the standard license, maintenance every year, and we pay for our technical account manager, which is pretty much Professional Services, with our Premium Support.

We looked at other solutions. We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides. 

We also compared Zerto with our previous disaster recovery solution, which was called Double-Take DR.

Zerto is much better. It is not a cheap solution. The fact that we decided to buy it when we already had all the licenses for VMware, bundled in our ELA with VMware, should tell you how big of a difference there was.

My advice would be that when you need a tool to bet your business on, as a last resort, make sure you evaluate all the options, test them, and don't be cheap.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zerto is that a third-party company can do a better job of protecting the workloads than the vendor. It does a better job than VMware and Microsoft together.

In terms of using the solution for long-term retention, we're evaluating Zerto's offering. It's a new feature. We already have an established backup system, using Symantec. In a couple of years, when we need to refresh Symantec, we might consider it. But at this point we don't use it and we aren't considering it.

We use the Veritas NetBackup solution. They split from Symantec so Veritas is separate, but it was a Symantec solution for backup. We don't use Veeam, we don't use Cohesity, we don't use Rubrik. The only potential is to replace our Veritas/Symantec backup product, in the future, with Zerto Long Term Retention.

If we have a DR situation, we are not planning to fail back. It's not part of our DR strategy. If we need to fail-over a production data center, it means that this data center has been destroyed, it's a smoking hole in the grass. We will be running continuously from the DR data center, which is a full-scale data center.

I would rate Zerto at nine out of 10. There are new features that they're working on, which will be nice to have. That's why I won't rate it a 10, but overall it's a really good, stable, easy-to-use product.