Zerto DR (ZVM)

HPE Zerto Software 's ability to do near-real-time replication means that many of our clients use it to know that their data can be brought up in another jurisdiction in the event of a disaster. I live in the Bahamas, so we are in a hurricane zone. Many clients appreciate the level of security and comfort of knowing that if something happens to the building, the data center gets destroyed, or there is no power or internet available on the island, we could bring that environment up in a completely different data center and it will operate in the exact same manner as if they had it activated on-premise. That is one of the biggest use cases for us for clients. We also have clients that are interested in having a level of protection, as well as testing different applications and real-life situations that may have occurred. HPE Zerto Software  has a test environment that is just like the real environment, which gives them the comfort of being able to do a disaster recovery test during business hours without bringing down the entire environment.

HPE Zerto Software enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We use that as one of the ways that we hand the product off to the clients today. We provide them with a virtual data center for that environment to be backed up. The greatest part about HPE Zerto Software is that it is hypervisor-agnostic, which means any platform can be used, such as VMware, Hyper-V , or Azure . There are different options available for the HPE Zerto Software platform. Having the cloud-based option instead of having to have somebody with a physical workload is beneficial. Obviously there are places for persons to have a physical workload where it is completely dedicated and they are not interested in the public infrastructure, preferring more of a private deployment. However, for us, the majority of our customers are perfectly fine with using a cloud-based solution for their environment. They would get a virtual data center of their entire environment. It has been very effective for us and our clients, and it seems to be the faster way to get things going.

HPE Zerto Software's ability to do near-real-time replication means that many of our clients use it to know that their data can be brought up in another jurisdiction in the event of a disaster. I live in the Bahamas, so we are in a hurricane zone. Many clients appreciate the level of security and comfort of knowing that if something happens to the building, the data center gets destroyed, or there is no power or internet available on the island, we could bring that environment up in a completely different data center and it will operate in the exact same manner as if they had it activated on-premise. That is one of the biggest use cases for us for clients. We also have clients that are interested in having a level of protection, as well as testing different applications and real-life situations that may have occurred. HPE Zerto Software has a test environment that is just like the real environment, which gives them the comfort of being able to do a disaster recovery test during business hours without bringing down the entire environment.

One of the things that stands out for us with HPE Zerto Software is that it has a built-in tool for ransomware mitigation. It can actually let us know when somebody is trying to cryptically encrypt our data. HPE Zerto Software gives a tool that allows us to know that. Having immutable records or being able to go back just before an incident happened gives the customer the comfort of knowing that those files cannot be corrupted. We have restore points where we could go to that cannot be corrupted by ransomware or any attacks from a hacker because those are immutable.

Regarding user collaboration during the data migration process, it falls more or less on the IT side of things to ensure that the customer's experience is optimal. With HPE Zerto Software in a different environment, once things are set up correctly from a networking perspective, we can spin up almost anything in the environment to match what the customer's experience was inside their home environment. If they use a Cisco firewall or Palo Alto firewall, we could put a Palo Alto firewall in the disaster recovery site, which gives them the ability to use, for instance, VPN. If they connect via VPN, they can use that exact same VPN login information to get into their new environment that sits somewhere else. This cuts down the disruption time of how long it takes for someone to migrate a firewall physically, and we could kind of do a virtual option for that as well. HPE Zerto Software opens the door for more virtual options for clients who may not have the ability to do it physically.

As time goes on and new operating systems come out, HPE Zerto Software is releasing updates relatively often. What I find is that we are working in an environment where not every customer is updating every day to the latest version of, for instance, the latest hypervisor version or the latest operating system. The one thing that I would like to get improved is more legacy support for customers. Once we go past a certain version in HPE Zerto Software, it does not support certain versions. For us, many of our customer workloads are VMware based. VMware has a functionality where they do hardware versions and have their own sets of hardware versions. Many clients, once they update their environment, will update and create servers based on their brand new environment that is not necessarily supported by HPE Zerto Software right then. HPE Zerto Software, while being agnostic, will copy that data, but the hardware version for that new VM may not be supported. Because we use it in a cloud-based platform and we are doing multiple users, we cannot just upgrade one part of it because then it will affect all of these other customers. I am not sure what the right phrasing would be to describe what they need to do, but it would be more support of older systems as well as having a way to manage those persons that may be a little bit trigger-happy when it comes to updating, so we do not have to do updates across the whole entire board in order to just appease one client. We try our best to keep the client to the point where they do not do this type of thing, but we only could do so much.

I have been working with HPE Zerto Software for about the last eight years.

I have seen and been around certain applications such as Veeam. Veeam has a replication option, but I have never fully explored it. We bought into HPE Zerto Software, and it has always been HPE Zerto Software as our number one go-to for disaster recovery. I know that VMware has some built-in replication options as well, but we have really and truly stayed in the same lane of disaster recovery with HPE Zerto Software. We do not go too far away from that.

From a pricing perspective, HPE Zerto Software is expensive in comparison to other products on the market, but I think it is an easier sell because it works so well and it is so easy to set up a demo to show someone how well it works. For us, whereas pricing may have been a concern at first, we allow clients to see how it works, and they realize that they no longer question the price. They are literally just asking how they could get HPE Zerto Software to be their product. They look at the benefits of it.

I have seen and been around certain applications such as Veeam. Veeam has a replication option, but I have never fully explored it. We bought into HPE Zerto Software, and it has always been HPE Zerto Software as our number one go-to for disaster recovery. I know that VMware has some built-in replication options as well, but we have really and truly stayed in the same lane of disaster recovery with HPE Zerto Software. We do not go too far away from that.

HPE Zerto Software is one of the products we usually call the Ferrari of disaster recovery. It is a very refined product with many built-in fail-safes that allow us to control it. HPE Zerto Virtual Manager provides independent logins, and we can trigger disaster recovery directly from that tool. All of the data is being stored and being taken into a different environment. We do not have live to live replication, but we have near-real-time replication. Because we have near-real-time replication, we have a bit of a buffer in the event of an incident. Blocking and keeping out unwanted access is federated through our Active Directory environment so that only authorized users can have access to it. We could do independent access directly to it as well. There are many ways that we could safeguard against unwanted attacks. Because the data is stored in the way it is, we cannot necessarily go back and touch one of those checkpoints or do any attacks embedded in those checkpoints. HPE Zerto Software has a built-in tool and mechanism for letting us know if somebody is trying to do encryption. It constantly checks for encryption. Those are the ways we see how they protect us from unwanted attacks.

I use HPE Zerto Software to protect VMs. I consider anything that is set up for disaster recovery as a protection. When we use HPE Zerto Software for workloads, we use it internally as well. We use it to ensure that if something happens, we have the availability of bringing up the environment within seconds before a disaster occurs. That is how we protect our workloads by having the ability to pull that workload back up in the event of a failure.

Migrating data with HPE Zerto Software is not difficult at all. It is essentially the same way that we process things to set up for a disaster recovery solution for a client. It is the same way we use it to do the migration option. We are essentially copying all that data over. HPE Zerto Software does an initial sync, which is the initial copy of the entire environment over to the new site. Once that is completed, it does changes. Incremental changes are constantly being updated to that journal. Once we have done a gigantic move of data over and are doing those changes, we could actually say we are not ready to switch over yet, but we have the ability to make sure that when we do switch over and migrate, we have the latest version of whatever we are migrating to. This gives that customer the ability to not have to lose data because we had the initial backup and of course, business does not stop. We are always doing things, always making sales, and always saving files. It just helps with that whole experience for the client so that whenever they are ready, they could have almost the last time that someone saved the file available to them in this new location.

We have had an actual client that was hit by a ransomware attack on their local on-premise services, and we were able to restore to a version before that actual attack had happened. One of the things that we try to remember and push to clients is that our journal history does take up space. Every journal spot takes up a certain amount of data. We have to be mindful of when we are mapping out and figuring out the size of the environment that we are bringing over to ensure we have enough in there for a good bit of journal history so that if we do not realize we get hit from a ransomware attack until three days later, we want to be able to try and go back to before it happened. We want to make sure that we have enough journal history points so we could avoid having to be in that environment. The good thing about HPE Zerto Software is that it notifies us when that happens or if there is an encryption thing happening at that time. It will actually let us know. That is definitely one of the highlights for me as well. The encryption notification that something is happening in our environment helps cut down on the guessing game.

HPE Zerto Software saves hours because once we have been hit by a ransomware attack or some form of hack or anything like that, we are scrambling to find out how it happened, where it happened, and what all is affected. Having the ability to say our operations did not go down for two hours but went down for thirty minutes and we are back up and running is a selling point for the client. When they see that type of flexibility, it helps us sell HPE Zerto Software. We do not really have to do too much talking at that point. We are able to get that feedback from the clients and say we were able to be down for only a few hours or maybe a few minutes. When I say down, I mean in their personal on-premise infrastructure because they were unaware of what was happening. But once they found out what was happening, they were able to restore to a point, and the fact that they were up and running is what sets us apart or at least sets HPE Zerto Software apart from other applications. The ability to turn around so quickly is what saves us the most with HPE Zerto Software.

HPE Zerto Software helps to reduce the disaster recovery testing time for our clients. The testing function for disaster recovery within HPE Zerto Software changes the game for the majority of our clients because we could now do a full disaster recovery test in a test environment as if we were doing it in a real-life failover scenario. Because we could do that, we are not limited to only doing this on a weekend. We could do this in the middle of our operation day, and no one is affected. We could test programs, test applications, and test the way that they communicate with each other, ensuring that this happens, that this server comes up first. If we have a priority of how servers load up, we could test all of that. We realize that where back in the day people never did disaster recovery tests (they just had the software and it sat there), we find out that people are actually more functionally testing their disaster recovery. They are actually seeing what happens when they set up a new application because the disruption time is so low. Nothing really prepares you for a true disaster recovery test than an actual true live disaster recovery test. The fact that we could see what happens in a test environment as opposed to the live environment is valuable.

HPE Zerto Software has reduced the staff involved in the data recovery situations. I think it is like a double-edged sword, at least for when we are in IT. Usually we want something that is easy to manage, something that does not require a bunch of hands involved in order to have something done. HPE Zerto Software is that tool. However, because it is that tool, it could affect us as well. If test failover and failovers are that easy, then maybe we do not need six people inside the IT department. It is a really good product, and the ability to operate with that level of ease is remarkable. It is all GUI-based. The client just goes and logs into a portal and could see all of the VMs. Everything is laid out pretty simply. Once we give a client a walkthrough once, they have it and they kind of take it on themselves and do what they have to do. Because it is so easy, it is just clicks as opposed to a ton of work to get this level of disaster recovery done.

The biggest thing to consider is what your requirements are for disaster recovery. If your requirement for disaster recovery is to have little tolerance for loss, if you do not have the ability to say that if this happens, you really do not know where to turn, then HPE Zerto Software is the product for us. It has really fast replication and is really connected. Because it is agnostic, we could have more than one type of environment in it. It is definitely one of the best applications I have ever used. I really see this use case for everyone, but obviously not everyone could necessarily afford a product like HPE Zerto Software. Usually, medium to large enterprises would be the persons that would go forward for this type of application just because of costs. But other than that, I would recommend it for everyone if it was my decision. This review gives HPE Zerto Software a rating of nine out of ten.

The purpose was for cloud migration, as it's for cloud DR as a service. It's for DR purposes on the cloud and also on-prem to different sites. The main challenge is that I'm not working with one customer but I'm working with multiple customers. My role is I'm an architect that provides DR solutions and cloud solutions to the customers in Israel, but not only in Israel. Most of the use cases are for DR as a service. The challenge is to provide a disaster recovery solution for big organizations, and they are not limited to their on-prem sites.

The most liked feature in HPE Zerto Software  is that it uses CDP, Continuous Data Protection. It's a protocol that provides a very low RPO, which is Recovery Point Objective . This means how much data you lose when a disaster occurs. This is the main feature of the product. It's called CDP, and until two years ago, it was the only product able to provide that. Today, there are competitors, but they are not as mature as HPE.

The near-synchronous replication is the CDP I just mentioned. The near-zero replication is possible due to the CDP usage, and this is a game changer. DR in the cloud is much cheaper, and the ROI is absolutely in favor of cloud DR because we do not need to purchase any hardware. As a customer, I do not need to purchase hardware, rent a physical data center, or bring all my equipment to locate in the DR site.

It's not only in the cloud; it's DR as a service, which means that the recovery operations are performed by a dedicated team specializing in this area. Organizations don't need to have the expertise to manage and know HPE Zerto Software  platform because a dedicated team of the cloud provider is actually operating all the necessary steps to recover the systems. Comparing to a regular backup solution, it reduces downtime by 95%. The recovery time objective reduction comes from the fact that it's CDP. Additionally, HPE Zerto Software comes out of the box with an orchestration tool, which means you can automate the recovery process and don't need to perform tasks manually for the recovery operations. The recovery process with HPE Zerto Software is better compared to other DR solutions. However, it's equivalent for some products or methods.

There are few areas for improvement that are mostly technical. It has limited support mostly for VMware environments; they are trying to reduce support for Hyper-V  and now bring it back, but it's not working as easy with VMWARE. There is a problem where you need to perform a full sweep to back up and sync a VM from the beginning, which occurs in some scenrios. There are times you need to restart synchronization from the start, which is a heavy operation without clear reasoning, consuming a lot of resources.

I have been architecting soluitions with this product for four years.

I rate the stability of HPE Zerto Software at nine.

Scalability is rated at 10, but it is limited mostly to VMware.

The deployment, whether cloud or on-prem, is easy. The deployment process takes about one to four hours, specifically the deployment of the HPE Zerto Software footprint.

in DRaaS , maintenance is easy because it's cloud-based; everything happens behind the scenes for the customers and end users.

DR in the cloud is much cheaper, and the ROI is absolutely in favor of cloud DR because we do not need to purchase any hardware. As a customer, I do not need to purchase hardware, rent a physical data center, or bring all my equipment to locate in the DR site. Having it in the cloud is very beneficial for customers and organizations. It's not only in the cloud; it's DR as a service, which means that the recovery operations are performed by a dedicated team specializing in this area. Organizations don't need to have the expertise to manage and know HPE Zerto Software platform because a dedicated team of the cloud provider is actually operating all the necessary steps to recover the systems.

I would say the pricing is expensive, rated at 10.

For now, HPE Zerto Software is the best with CDP, although other vendors are catching up. In two years, it's not guaranteed they will be the leaders.

HPE Zerto Software is not the only recovery tool needed for ransomware recovery. It provides the ability to deploy systems for review and cleanup, it's beneficial to use it to reduce the time for bringing back the system for ransomware investigation. It reduces time by about 50% in a ransomware case. I absolutely recommend HPE Zerto Software, but my first advice is to ensure proper sizing and validate that applications are supported by a tool that supports CDP. There's a possibility that a VM, which is hosting an application, may not always be considered by HPE Zerto Software when copying VM data, so checking application support with CDP systems is crucial.

I use HPE Zerto Software  for planning disaster recovery and for provisioning the CIs, especially during the exercise phase. We use HPE Zerto Software  to protect VMs in our environment. Regarding HPE Zerto Software for disaster recovery, minor challenges exist, but it meets the requirement at approximately 80%. We do not look into HPE Zerto Software for incident downtimes; we only use it for crisis situations. HPE Zerto Software is saving time, especially with RTOs and RPOs being reduced for business-level applications, which has brought down recovery time. Most often, support issues are handled internally; if we require anything, we raise a case, and the operational team follows up.

One advantage of HPE Zerto Software is that it helps in provisioning, becomes easy, much faster, and it also stores historical information. It's good; I won't say it's excellent, but it's meeting some requirements, though for other requirements, I have to rely on other software as well.

There has been a significant impact from using HPE Zerto Software because our provisioning times have reduced drastically. The time to complete the exercises has come down, and we were able to identify and cross-check the RTO and RPO values as well. Using HPE Zerto Software has helped us in reducing the RTO and RPO values.

Overall, it still requires reliance on other software for manual work such as cross-checking and validations, which takes additional time, but the runbook execution is quicker. The 20% challenges relate to reliance on other software for cross-checking the logs. After implementation, the recovery times have improved by approximately 50% to 60%.

The main improvements needed are related to historical data comparison and analytics, and the challenges involve reliance on other software and cross-checking logs. If we could have an end-to-end DR solution in one environment, it would be much easier without relying on multiple tools. The biggest area for improvement in HPE Zerto Software is probably in historical data comparison and enhanced analytics. Future features should reduce reliance on cross-checking logs and other solutions.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for three years now.

I find HPE Zerto Software relatively stable.

HPE Zerto Software is also scalable.

I haven't checked the technical support part for HPE Zerto Software; I need to talk to my team about it. Most often, support issues are handled internally; if we require anything, we raise a case, and the operational team follows up.

Regarding ease of use and recovery speed, I recall IBM being used previously, but I wasn't there then, so I didn't get a chance to compare HPE Zerto Software with that. I think HPE Zerto Software was better compared to IBM, as the RTOs and RPOs are improving continuously, with the ability to execute exercises becoming quicker.

I haven't looked into options apart from HPE Zerto Software yet, but before the license renewal, we shall start that activity within six months. We typically refer to Gartner's quadrant to identify market leaders for comparison, focusing on the leaders part. There are no specific security examples that made me decide to switch solutions; my main concerns are around costing and compatibility with different environments.

Currently, our team has implemented another solution because HPE Zerto Software couldn't be expanded to that environment, so capability is a restricting factor. A unified solution would be a good bet for future comparisons.

HPE Zerto Software helps in provisioning, making it easy and faster, and it also stores historical information. It's good but not excellent, as it meets some requirements while requiring other software for additional functionalities. I use a solution for disaster recovery in the cloud, but that's specific to the cloud environment. I don't get into the pricing layer for HPE Zerto Software and haven't gathered much information from the vendor. I would rate HPE Zerto Software as 8 out of 10.

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software  is to move VMs from one place to another. We implemented HPE Zerto Software  to solve the challenge of moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud.

I would assess the ease of use of HPE Zerto Software as straightforward. It is easy to use, and the user interface is excellent. When using HPE Zerto Software for VM migrations from on-premises to the cloud, it provides valuable features and transfers them quickly, so users do not need to spend much time on it.

My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication are that it is seamless. Near-synchronous replication is important to my organization because it takes less time to migrate the workload, which is what we are looking for, along with it being faster and having no complexity, making the migration 100% successful.

HPE Zerto Software has improved our RPO and RTO. Earlier, our RPO and RTO were based on the application tier, but now they have been reduced significantly, so we appreciate this product.

I think HPE Zerto Software is excellent, and I don't see any issues with it, so I don't know if anything needs to be improved. I don't have any suggestions for additional features I would to see included in the next release of HPE Zerto Software.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for almost five years now.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as good, and I cannot say anything negative about it. I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software, as we have high availability.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization effectively, and I cannot complain about anything. We have expanded usage of HPE Zerto Software, and the process was smooth, as we have a descriptive runbook on how to use it, so the team uses it efficiently.

I evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as excellent, as whenever we have any issues, we reach out to customer support, and they provide the support we need.

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate customer service for HPE Zerto Software as nine because the response time is quick, and the technical knowledge of the associates is excellent.

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was not using another solution to address similar needs. Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, we were doing it manually, so there was no other product we evaluated.

HPE Zerto Software helped to reduce our organization's DR testing.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal with it, but from what I hear from my finance team, it's somewhat on the higher side. If licensing could be reduced, that would be beneficial.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is that they should try it first and evaluate it based on the feature set before making a decision, as I think they will appreciate HPE Zerto Software. I rate HPE Zerto Software 10 out of 10.

Currently, my main use case for HPE Zerto Software  is for failover. We have a site in Salt Lake City and another data center in Oregon. We fail over from this site to that site, verify, and fail things back. This is its main purpose as of today.

The feature of HPE Zerto Software  that I appreciate the most is the ability to pick and choose what to fail over and when to failover. It is really easy to build a new zone and add servers, as well as remove them.

An example of how the features of HPE Zerto Software have benefited my organization was when we lost a circuit. We have a primary circuit from Salt Lake over to Portland and a backup one that runs through several different sites. We actually lost the main one and had to failover. Because most of the servers are in Salt Lake City, we had to replicate those back over to Portland because that is where they make the money. I had a few minor hiccups, but it was not our fault. It was just bandwidth, but we now have a larger pipe. That was a happy accident when we discovered why it was not going any faster - we were maxed out.

I find HPE Zerto Software to be pretty intuitive as it is, and I have nothing to suggest for improvement.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for about four years now.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software at about 20. It just works.

HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization. The only issue I have ever encountered was when our developers grew busy and expanded their applications too quickly for licensing. That was resolved with a simple phone call. We received the new key by end of day after discussing how many additional licenses were needed.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as exceptional. They listen first, then ensure they understand the problem before providing multiple solution alternatives. Having been in computing for almost 35 years, they are one of probably two or three companies that truly listen first.

I was using another solution to address similar needs prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, but I am not sure what it was.

My experience with pricing, setup, costs, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software has been positive. The installers were knowledgeable and completed the installation correctly the first time. When we upgraded from VMware 6 to version 7, we needed to install a new agent. When it did not work initially, technical support quickly resolved the issue with specific instructions in just one call.

I have seen an ROI with HPE Zerto Software through faster recovery. We are getting closer to the five nines. Having the confidence that if something happens, our documented steps will work is invaluable.

I have personally used Veeam before selecting HPE Zerto Software, but having only been with the company for five years, I am not sure what solutions were used before that.

HPE Zerto Software is important to my organization because when performing replication, both systems remain functional during failover until the final switch. This results in virtually no downtime.

HPE Zerto Software has helped reduce downtime by at least 25% through faster recovery. For instance, if we lose an image, we can quickly recover it and power the VM back on, which is much better than retrieving a golden image that could take hours.

The solution has impacted my RTOs and RPOs significantly, saving me approximately two hours per day. It has also reduced our DR testing frequency from every other month to twice a year.

Regarding Cyber Vault solutions, the most important capability would be the ability to isolate a server immediately after a ransomware attack to investigate the incident.

My advice to other organizations considering HPE Zerto Software is to consider its ease of integration. It integrates seamlessly with various networks and works especially with HP infrastructure. The support from both HP and HPE Zerto Software teams is excellent.

I rate HPE Zerto Software 10 out of 10.