I use Zerto to store and protect my files. Whether I'm working on a project or just need to access old files, Zerto ensures everything is safe. This makes it very convenient, as I can easily access any information I need with just a single click.
Zerto DR (ZVM)
BYNETExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Helps our organization block threats, is user-friendly, and effective in storage
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto is effective at blocking unknown threats and attacks. We might consider using it on the business website as well, but it's important to understand how it might impact our operations. It helps with blocking threats, which is certainly valuable. So, in terms of its effectiveness, I'd say it's close to 99% guaranteed.
Zerto has helped our organization block threats, is user-friendly, is effective in storage, and inspires users.
Zerto's Cloud disaster recovery is impressive, and recovering most of our data can be relatively straightforward. However, it requires careful planning and understanding. Navigating the recovery site is crucial, so ensure we read and comprehend the instructions thoroughly before clicking anything. This way, we'll know which box to choose and where to click to achieve our desired outcome.
It is easy to migrate data using Zerto.
It helps reduce downtime.
It has helped reduce our disaster recovery time. Before Zerto, we needed ten people for disaster recovery and now with Zerto, we are down to three.
What is most valuable?
Zerto is truly inspiring. Sometimes, when I provide information and receive it back, it can be remarkably refreshing and motivate me to get the most out of it. There might be instances where I initially think something isn't applicable, but then I try it out and say "wow" as I realize I am getting something positive from it. it becomes quite inspiring and brings out my best creative potential. Witnessing these features makes me naturally want to explore and create more.
What needs improvement?
The performance was generally good, but occasional lag disrupted the flow, leaving room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for four months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
While Zerto is stable, it can sometimes be slow to retrieve the data we need.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is scalable.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to complete tasks manually, which consumed a lot of manpower, before adopting Zerto.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Zerto is affordable.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.
No matter what we choose to do, there will always be potential positives and negatives. When aiming for the best outcome, focus on visualizing success and avoid dwelling on negativity. However, even while striving for the positive, acknowledge that occasional setbacks like technology issues or unexpected problems might occur. Don't get discouraged in the present; trust that Zerto will ultimately lead to something beneficial and fulfilling.
Application-agnostic, easy to use, and helpful for improving RPO
What is our primary use case?
We are using it for disaster recovery of their Tier1 Critical SAP HANA systems and a few other workloads in the lanscape
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto provides near-synchronous replication, but more importantly, we can see the status at seven seconds, six seconds, five seconds, and four seconds when we log in to the Zerto console. I found that amazing. There is probably no other disaster recovery solution available in the market that is providing this functionality. It is great and definitely a huge plus point for Zerto.
We do get alerts if suspicious activity is detected on a VPG, but we did not get an actual case where there was ransomware or any other kind of attack and we had to prevent that. I have not come across that with either of my clients, but we do get alerts when Zerto finds something suspicious. We go in and look at it. In some instances, because the application was writing more files, Zerto marked it as suspicious, but we never had to do recovery for security reasons.
We use Zerto with AWS as the target. We do the failover of the on-premises VMware virtual machines to the AWS cloud. I do not deal with the implementation. I only do the administration of the tool, but whatever I did as part of AWS administration in Zerto, it was pretty seamless and straightforward. I did not get any issues there. The documentation is helpful in identifying any issues.
We have about 70 virtual machines that are being protected by using Zerto. Zerto has drastically improved our RPO. It was 15 minutes previously, whereas now, it is in seconds.
Zerto has not had much impact on our RTO. RPO has changed, but RTO has been the same for us.
Zerto has not helped to reduce downtime in any situation. We have only done tests. We have not done any actual production failover because there was no need. Similarly, Zerto has not saved us any recovery time because we never had a requirement to do a recovery since we implemented the tool. It is a pretty new environment for us, so we have not had time.
Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. It has remained the same for us.
What is most valuable?
The simplicity of use is valuable. It is easy. We just click Failover and do it. It is pretty straightforward. If someone wants to do a test failover, they log in to the console and do a test failover.
What needs improvement?
As a power user, I find the customization lacking. I feel it could be customized a little bit more, but Zerto is simple to use. It is easy to use. That is my main reason for using Zerto.
I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved.
The UI does crash a lot, and that is something that can be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
It has been about three years. I support multiple clients with multiple backup and disaster recovery products. I was a Storage and Backup engineer, but now, I am covering the solutions for the entire infrastructure. I work on Zerto for multiple clients. We have two clients who are using Zerto as a disaster recovery solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The UI does crash, but it does not affect the functionality of the software.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. There could be 10 machines or 100 machines. I did not find any issues. It is pretty scalable.
How are customer service and support?
There were some issues for which we had to get responses from them. They were pretty much on the point. There were no issues. The response time was a bit slow, but their support was pretty good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use Azure Site Recovery to protect all of the production instances, SAP databases, some file servers, and some basic application servers. We used to first replicate to Azure and then do a test failover and a production failover. It was a bit slow. The RPOs and RTOs were not that great, and the rate of change that Azure Site Recovery supported was not completely meeting the business requirements. The third part was that Azure Site Recovery was not application-agnostic. What we loved about Zerto was that it was application-agnostic. It did not matter to Zerto what was running behind the application. It will replicate everything across any cloud. That was our main point for going for Zerto.
Zerto was also much easier. Azure Site Recovery was a little bit hard to set up and maintain, but Zerto is pretty straightforward and easy.
I did not find much difference between Zerto and other solutions in terms of the speed of recovery. The RPO is great, but when we do a failover, it is basically the same as any other solution.
Zerto has not replaced our legacy backup solutions. Our legacy backup solution is in the same place. We are only using Zerto for DR.
How was the initial setup?
Our environment is hybrid. We are using Zerto to protect our on-prem as well as the cloud environment, but I was not involved in its deployment.
In terms of maintenance, I never had any requirements to maintain it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Evaluation was done by someone else in the organization.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. Simplicity is an advantage, but customization and reporting can be better.
Helpful for capacity planning, quick restoration, and security
What is our primary use case?
A lot of our focus area has been around capacity planning that includes virtual machine rightsizing and then construction for failover and resiliency-type models. The other area that is important to us is looking at data in motion, data at rest, and data in transit.
By implementing Zerto, we wanted to be able to go ahead and focus a lot on workload migration and disaster recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
I can quickly restore data by reverting anything with more or less a nightly backup. I can pretty much have the data through recovery checkpoints, and each of the checkpoints can only be around five seconds apart.
When I need to work a lot with VPGs, it has a lot of capabilities for that. Monitoring is also very important for us. We do work with Splunk, and I am looking a lot around for logs, metrics, and traces. The capabilities that I get are system throughput, and CPU and RAM input/output.
I have used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have pretty much followed a 3-2-1 strategy. We have three copies of production data and two backup copies. We have two different media and then one off-site copy. It has this offering there.
It's helping very much in terms of the malware. They have a ransomware protection capability.
I have used other solutions jointly with Zerto. What is happening is that they have a focus on isolating and locking with a cyber resiliency vault, and what I have been doing more or less around the vault is working with the Delinea Privileged Access Manager solution. So, some areas have intersections with other tools in our stack. I would love to continue seeing more use cases out of Zerto so that I do not have to defer this anywhere else.
It has enabled us to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I think of it as a cloud migration tool. Having DR in the cloud is very important for our organization. I use it with Microsoft Azure.
With Zerto, I have seen five-second near-synchronous replication, so there are thousands of checkpoints in one day, and then afterward, I can have a periodic backup. I can space it out between twelve-hour snapshots. We can have one to three checkpoints per day. I can recover to the state seconds before any sort of attack, and I can utilize Zerto's in-built orchestration and automation. I could easily fail over the entire site without any sort of disruption. Those are the things I see very much in terms of positives. There is a lot of information that it can gather with synchronous replication. The other thing is that I have seen other disaster and backup service offerings, and they very much focus on getting a container image installed or some sort of binary file and then deployment from there afterward.
I find it easy to migrate the data. Once somebody understands how Zerto works, particularly around areas for analytics and automation, with the reference architecture, they will be able to quickly deploy it.
I see a lot of visibility in terms of proactive management with SLA monitoring, run metrics, and other things. We are able to test infrastructure using live and personalized data. It, in turn, becomes very much of a team effort.
Zerto provides complete visibility in terms of storage and consumption data. We get to know the capacity and application volumes. I can also address compliance aspects, such as PCI DSS which is important for us as part of the RPO.
They have an intelligent, predictive infrastructure, so I can just pretty much determine the required compute storage and other server networking resources, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
It also saves recovery time. We pretty much monitor that information. In terms of time savings, we are able to ensure that we can set up a backup quickly, figure out the integration details with the use of APIs, and meet our requirements around client security. Afterward, there is the cost consideration. Better documentation on the restoration process would be helpful.
Ransomware is one area where we are using Zerto. If we were utilizing another solution, that might have only been AWS-specific, and we might have not gotten much assistance in proceeding with their public cloud vendor as a result. We might have to figure out what we can do around working with an XDR or another mode of ingesting that data for any vulnerabilities and how to focus on encryption thereafter. If we were to consider another vendor, some of them may not have support for Azure. They might be AWS-focused.
Zerto has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. We can create failover tests seamlessly, and we can do this routinely. We are able to save time and look at how we can discern between RTO and RPO.
Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Our team size is still roughly the same. We have not seen our headcount change as a result, but we do not need to hire external consultants to support a project.
If I wanted to focus on operational recovery, which may be recovering instances in the database with a 15-second data loss, there are systems administrators designed to take care of that. With Zerto's offering, someone can utilize the Zerto solution as opposed to depending on any sort of manual human intervention.
What is most valuable?
The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center.
Zerto has near-synchronous replication. I like it very much. They had an acquisition and are now a part of HPE. I see it very much as a robust solution.
What needs improvement?
A slight disadvantage of Zerto is that it requires the Windows Server operating system as the base OS. Over time, I would like to see more offerings in that regard. There should be more deployment options other than just the Windows operating system.
The implementation is very quick and painless, but it would be good to have more information that is not case-sensitive. In the server portal, some fields are case-sensitive. It took some time for me to understand initially.
If a VPG goes down and an application host is not responding, I want to have a little bit more flexibility to automatically point the recovery to other hosts. I would like to see a little bit more flexibility to automatically sustain two applications in their most optimal state. If the VPG is going down and any of the recovery hosts are in maintenance mode, there should be a way for maximum flexibility so that it can automatically utilize Zerto to point that recovery to other hosts.
I want some more information about how to work with bare metal drives. I have been doing some work in capacity planning for using MDM and FormFactor cable and then looking at system throughput, App latency, and a lot of scripts in Linux. I would like to have a little bit more information for anybody needing to work with bare metal drives.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for several years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not seen any service disruption that impacted us. If anything like that were to occur, they would communicate it ahead of time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. We have more than 20,000 endpoints.
How are customer service and support?
I do reach out to Zerto, and if there are any questions, we have a ticket in-house, so everyone is working on reviewing it at the same time. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. There are no negatives.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were not using a similar solution.
By bringing in Zerto, some legacy work has been discontinued. There is operational recovery, application migration, and application cloning. These are the three areas where Zerto has helped us.
How was the initial setup?
We have a cloud version. It is a public cloud.
Its initial deployment was straightforward. I have been trying to focus on capabilities and encryption and how a long-term retention repository works, at least looking at the data capture. Another thing is utilizing some information with APIs and cloud scaling. I have broken down a lot of my use cases, and we have Zerto on the public cloud. Based on that, I was able to figure out how to work with features like compute as well as storage.
Its implementation took about two to three months. In terms of maintenance, it requires maintenance. We focus a lot on metrics such as RTO and RPO monitoring. Somebody can also put it in maintenance mode operation.
What about the implementation team?
We had Zerto representatives, and we also had work done in-house.
I work with a team. Other colleagues are also involved in the effort. We have a team of around ten employees.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did look at a few other vendors' offerings, but we decided on Zerto. Our organization has a partnership with them, and the other thing was that there were a few industry events, and they were able to effectively make a pitch. Their demonstration was very effective. It was also something in which the client was interested in.
What other advice do I have?
To those looking to implement Zerto in their organization, I would advise creating use cases of their own and then trying to see how Zerto effectively helps them. A few areas where they can work are gathering information with the virtual machine rightsizing and being able to go ahead and create resiliency models. Afterward, they can look at compliance. For us, PCI DSS and locating the public cloud environment being used, which in our case was Microsoft Azure, were important. After they have created use cases on their own, they can come to Zerto and see how they are able to effectively handle it. If they are able to think through what they need, they can come up with specific questions and then get Zerto to effectively deliver.
I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.
Enhances resilience and data protection capabilities with real-time replication
What is our primary use case?
Implementing failover to a secondary data center is crucial for ensuring business continuity in the event of primary data center loss. This strategy involves automatically redirecting operations and services to the secondary data center when the primary one becomes unavailable. This not only minimizes downtime but also enhances overall system reliability.
The failover process requires robust synchronization mechanisms to ensure data consistency between the primary and secondary data centers. Regular testing and monitoring are essential to validate the effectiveness of the failover mechanism and identify and address any potential issues proactively.
In summary, failover to a secondary data center is a strategic measure to safeguard against disruptions, offering a resilient solution for maintaining seamless operations in dynamic and challenging environments.
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto has significantly enhanced our organization's resilience and data protection capabilities. Its real-time replication and failover features have played a pivotal role in minimizing downtime during unexpected events, ensuring business continuity.
The platform's automation and orchestration capabilities have streamlined our disaster recovery processes, reducing manual intervention and accelerating recovery times.
The point-in-time recovery options provided by Zerto have proven invaluable in mitigating the impact of data corruption or accidental deletions. This has bolstered our data integrity and provided a safety net against unforeseen data-related issues.
What is most valuable?
The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization. Conducting live failover tests allows us to validate the effectiveness of our disaster recovery setup in a controlled environment. This feature ensures that all components are in place and functioning as expected, providing confidence in our ability to respond to real-world disruptions.
Additionally, the ability to choose a specific point in time for recovery down to the seconds is crucial for data integrity. This granular control allows us to roll back to a precise moment, mitigating the impact of data corruption, accidental deletions, or other unforeseen issues. It adds a layer of precision to our recovery process, minimizing potential data loss and enhancing overall resilience.
What needs improvement?
The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers. Currently, the process is largely manual, and introducing automated failovers after a certain time threshold would enhance efficiency and responsiveness. Automated failovers can reduce the dependency on manual intervention, allowing for quicker and more proactive responses to disruptions. In the next release, the inclusion of scheduled or automated failovers would be a valuable addition. This feature would empower organizations to set predefined parameters and triggers for failovers, ensuring a timely and automated response to potential issues. It not only streamlines operations but also adds an extra layer of reliability to the overall disaster recovery strategy.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for six months.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not have a solution before.
How was the initial setup?
We had great help from the company in terms of setting up our environment.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented through a vendor; I'd rate the experience ten out of ten.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Anything is the worth the cost for virtually no downtime. Time is money.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options.
What other advice do I have?
It is a great solution overall, however, it could use some upgrades with automation.
Flexible with easy integration capabilities and good restoration ability
What is our primary use case?
We utilize the solution for our primary backup and recovery source. We use VMware for all of our servers.
With the ease of integrating with our complete virtual infrastructure, it is nice that we can replicate easily between our HQ and DR sites.
The flexibility in utilizing the test environment to allow production servers to be test restored with no interruption to the actual production server in use is really nice for quick and efficient testing.
I highly recommend it for companies using virtual infrastructure.
How has it helped my organization?
The product allows us to restore to any given point within 15-20 second increments, including just files and whole servers.
It allows us to efficiently test restore and restore files that were accidentally deleted within seconds of the deletion, giving the option to have the most up-to-date file restored with little to no data loss.
It also allows reporting on the results of the testing, which can be provided really easily for board reporting, as well as auditing. There are many great features for sure.
What is most valuable?
The LTR function has by far been the best feature to allow us to retain our backups for at least a year. Also, it allows us to have full monthly and weekly incremental backups for that year, which can be restored or even just files from that period. It has come in handy for those accidentally deleted files.
It also helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those.
What needs improvement?
We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months. Before the update to version 9, we could do this in the GUI. I am hoping that in version 10 (which is on the roadmap to be installed), this feature will return in the GUI to provide an easy way to lengthen our retention. The journaling can also be a problem at times. Also, I'm not sure why, however, retention processes randomly fail and have to be rerun periodically.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been utilizing this solution since 2017.
An effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities
What is our primary use case?
For one client, the use case was to facilitate data center migration, and for another client, it was for failover and failback of the data center for DR. We wanted to have controlled failover and failback of related applications for DR.
We have not used it for disaster recovery in the cloud. Everything has been on-prem so far.
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto helps in automating disaster recovery capabilities. It allows automation and orchestration of complex activities.
We have used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Zerto’s overall effect on our RPOs has been pretty good.
It has also been effective for our RTOs.
Zerto has helped to reduce downtime, specifically for failover and failback, but it is hard to qualify the time saved.
Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes because we have not been impacted by any such issue.
Zerto has helped to reduce the organization's DR testing. There is about 20% reduction.
It has also reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation, but I have not seen any reduction in the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.
What is most valuable?
Its ease of use and scalability are valuable.
I also find the near-synchronous replication to be valuable. It is extremely important for organizations.
What needs improvement?
There should be more comprehensive cyber recovery capabilities.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. It is deployed across multiple locations. There are roughly about 4,000 VMs.
We might use it to migrate to cloud solutions. It is to be decided.
How are customer service and support?
I have not reached out to them myself.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using SRM. We switched to Zerto for automation.
Zerto is highly effective in terms of ease of use as compared to other solutions. Zerto is also pretty effective in terms of its speed of recovery.
We can easily migrate data using the Zerto console.
Zerto has not yet replaced all of our legacy backup solutions but it will.
How was the initial setup?
Our setup is all on-premises. I was involved in its deployment to some degree. It was pretty straightforward to deploy.
It took about three months. It was an enterprise-wide solution.
What about the implementation team?
It was a combination of in-house staff and a third party. The third party was a VAR or value-added reseller.
It required just a handful of staff for deployment. It does not require any maintenance from our side.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is not a bad pricing model.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated other options on paper, not physically.
What other advice do I have?
Zerto is an effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities.
The biggest lesson that I have learned by using Zerto is the need for application involvement and defining protection groups.
Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.
A storage software vendor that specializes in enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) in virtual and cloud environments
What is our primary use case?
We implement Zerto as a part of a Disaster Recovery process for our valuable customers, in various environments. Most of them consist of two sites owned by the same customer, connected with campus or wan link, but both using VMware virtualization platform.
Recently we realized a dedicated infrastructure in our Datacenter, then started to propose to our customers DRaaS using those resources as a recovery site and including dedicated 24x7 support.
Few customers use the public cloud (Azure) as a recovery site: we could only implement and configure the solution or fully manage it because we are also a Microsoft Gold and Tier-1 partner.
We recently start to test Zerto in HPE VM Essentials environment, but not yet implemented to customers.
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto helps reduce downtime in a wide number of situations because it can bring up an entire environments of 40-50 VMs in minutes.
Zerto helps to save time in a data recovery situation too. Some customers experienced VM or database corruption: using the solution's checkpoint feature, the data recovery happened within five minutes or less. A normal restore would probably be two to eight hours depending on if we had to restore from disk/tape and need or not need to apply logs.
Zerto is great at DR testing. We can spin off critical VMs or an entire environment pretty quickly and have users test against this copy with no production environment impact.
Its overall impact on our RTO has been great. It took a few hours in a very complex environment. The customer was very impressed with Zerto when we started with the PoC and then put it in production. It is great.
Zerto effectively reduced customers downtime.
We have been enabled to automate tasks with Zerto. Staff can now be dedicated to other tasks.
What is most valuable?
A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site.
Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time.
Zerto is also a very easy product to use.
We started using it a two years ago for immutable data copies for a few customers on multiple repositories like HPE: it's simply works great.
Zerto's ability for blocking unknown threats and attacks is key in disaster recovery process. It's the technical solution where we implement all the critical data for the business. It is also part of the recovery plan for our customers.
We have some implementation of Zerto with the the disaster recovery site on cloud, using Azure. It's very useful: enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud, if the customer doesn't have a physical data center or simply prefer cloud solution.
We've also used Zerto few times to migrate an existing data center to a new one because the hardware under the machine was from a different brand. We used Zerto because the environment is quite complex and the migration using other tools did not fulfill the customers' needs. Zerto is still very good at data migration.
One of its best features Zerto is the ability to maintain the data of multiple VMs using Virtual Protection Group. We can aggregate multiple VMs in a workload for specific services. They are protected at the same time.
It's very easy to manage and monitor our DR plans with Zerto. It's very easy to learn and operate. It's easier than VMware.
What needs improvement?
Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this.
Version 10 include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: these features provdies a superior hybrid cloud security.
Reports could be useful for customers. I would like to have a report that shows the latency for every single internal VM: it would be useful for troubleshooting.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started to evaluate Zerto about five years ago, then we implemented it for our valuable customers who need affordable solutions in their disaster recovery processes.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Zerto is generally regarded as stable in diverse environments like VMware, Hyper-V, and cloud platforms. We haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers, especially with the new "appliance" mode. It just runs.
That said, we had very few occasional issues such as VM instability during extended tests or upgrade challenges, though HPE support often resolves them effectively.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is a very scalable solution. We can create as many protection groups as customers need for their environment even as they growth.
Our customers are mostly medium to small sized enterprises.
How are customer service and support?
We use Zerto Quick Start service for the first installations and we use it in very complex environments: great.
We are very satisfied. We had to use it at the beginning to understand the implementation process and what we needed to do.
They are quick and professional.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Veeam (B&R + DRO) and VMware (Replication + SRM), but they could not offer all the features included in Zerto.
We also sometimes still use VMware Disaster Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with VMware Backup and Recovery.
How was the initial setup?
The implementation is very straightforward. Must be considered security and lay out the network infrastructure to be more efficient.
But from the standpoint of installing and deploying the product, it's very simple.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model.
What other advice do I have?
My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish: with Zerto you could combine resilience, mobility, and protection into a single software-only solution. It's hardware and hypervisor agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, HP VM Essentials or Azure.
We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Datacenter and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests, and still keep customer's production environment up and running.
We introduced the immutable data copies feature, because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then this is still a bad situation. The ability to look at the data that is being replicated in real-time and scan it, in conjunction with immutable data, and putting that into a vault, would be a great benefit.
The 3-2-1 rule isn't so important for us when it comes to disaster recovery. We consider the backup process and then the disaster recovery process. We treat them as two different workloads that we could implement to our customers to solve different issues.
The majority of our customers use it in a hybrid environment, but they still prefer to use disaster recovery in their own data center, when they have one. In some cases, we provide disaster recovery as a service, where the disaster recovery site is in our data center.
Doing a proof of concept is still the best way to implement and sell Zerto. Customers are often skeptical about the features and performance we tell them about, but once they have a POC in their environment, they immediately understand the benefits and are happy to take our advice.
Provides near-synchronous replication, is easy to migrate data, and helps our users collaborate
What is our primary use case?
We use Zerto to verify the information being transferred from one data center to another.
How has it helped my organization?
When a site is down, we can continue to use the other site thanks to Zerto.
The near-synchronous replication is extremely valuable because it ensures we can continue working.
The move action between the app and data center is great and we can see the benefits in minutes.
Our RPOs are performing well thanks to Zerto.
Migrating data using Zerto is easy.
Zerto helps our users collaborate during data migration.
Our RTO using Zerto is good.
What is most valuable?
The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Zerto is extremely stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
I have used the technical support of Zerto several times and they are good.
How was the initial setup?
Though I wasn't part of the initial deployment, the procedure is relatively simple. Manager rollout is the first step, followed by CPG installation on VMs by the CPG teams and subsequent network configuration verification.
Four people are required for the deployment.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.
Zerto is a good solution for transferring data between centers.
Is easy to migrate data, helps reduce our recovery and staff time
What is our primary use case?
We use Zerto for disaster recovery and cloud migration.
How has it helped my organization?
The near-synchronous replication is valuable to our organization.
Zerto's immutable data copies three-two-one rule is great.
The ability to block ransomware attacks and help recover our servers is great.
Since we don't have a backup data center, Zerto's cloud disaster recovery is of the utmost importance.
The recovery point objective for our virtual machines is good. We haven't encountered any significant issues. However, there have been some delays due to the substantial volume of data being written to the SQL server.
Migrating data using Zerto is easy.
Our RTO went from three days to a few minutes after implementing Zerto.
In the event of a ransomware attack necessitating data recovery, Zerto would undoubtedly prove invaluable in expediting the process.
Zerto has helped reduce our recovery time from days to minutes.
Zerto has reduced the time our staff spends on data recovery by 25 percent.
What needs improvement?
The RPO for our SQL server has room for improvement.
On-premises to cloud migration lacks certain features, such as the ability to directly rename virtual machines. In the cloud, renaming resources often requires cumbersome workarounds like cloning and manual renaming.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Initially, we had stability issues with the older versions but now I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
The level one technical support is slow to respond and we usually need to escalate our issue to get a resolution.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Azure Site Recovery and switched to Zerto because it is more user-friendly with more features.
How was the initial setup?
While the initial deployment presented some challenges and took approximately two weeks to finalize, subsequent deployments have been significantly more streamlined.
What was our ROI?
In the event of a disaster, we will certainly see a return on investment.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.
Deploying Zerto in the cloud saves us costs on maintaining on-prem hardware.
Good GUI, easy setup, and fast recovery
What is our primary use case?
It was a pilot. We did a bake-off between Zerto and RP for VM, which was an EMC product. It was to fail over 130 Oracle databases.
We wanted to handle disaster recovery for our data center. Zerto was mainly a failover product. We did not use any security layering.
How has it helped my organization?
When we tested it, it had more functions than what we used it for, but it was a very good BCDR product. We liked the reliability and availability.
Zerto enables you to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, but we did not use that feature. We used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It was strong in that aspect. I would rate it an eight out of ten there.
Zerto's speed of recovery was comparable. There was no synchronous and asynchronous replication. If I had to give it a number, it would be a seven out of ten. It was the same as others. There was not much difference.
It was easy to migrate data. There was some initial configuration in syncing, but it was easy. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of migration.
Zerto’s ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration was good. I would rate it a seven out of ten in this aspect as well as in terms of its impact on RTOs.
Zerto helps reduce downtime in any situation. We can bring up a database in minutes. It probably takes five minutes for the final sync. The cost of downtime depends on the database. It may be 50,000 if you have call center people sitting around. Normally, most of our small outages like that ranged in the tens of thousands.
Zerto did save time in a data recovery situation. We did not have ransomware, but there were times we had database corruption where the users would corrupt the database, and the database would not start. It would do snapshotting. It was not necessarily ransomware, but it was testing upgrades or Oracle upgrades. The data recovery happened within five minutes, if not sooner. A normal restore would probably be four to eight hours if we had to restore from a tape and apply logs.
Zerto helps to reduce an organization's DR testing. You can spin off an extra database pretty quickly and have users test against the third or fourth copy. It saves one to three days of testing depending on test cycles. You could do sequential testing. I would probably measure it more in days than hours. All of that time can be used by a DBA to do something else.
Zerto reduces the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. One person could probably orchestrate it now versus one to three people.
It did not reduce the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management because we are pretty thin. We would not have gotten rid of anybody.
What is most valuable?
Zerto offered a very good front-end GUI for orchestration. The graphic interface was very good.
What needs improvement?
The replication layer can probably be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
We ran the pilot for about nine months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.
In terms of our environment, we had 130 databases, 35 prods, and 2 data centers. In terms of end users, in our call centers, we had probably 10,000 users who accessed the databases.
How are customer service and support?
They are good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used VMware SRM. We used Veritas clustering, which was a Veritas/Symantec product. We then went virtual, so we went from physical to virtual infrastructure, and we went from HP-UX to Red Hat infrastructure. Zerto was probably 50% easier than others.
Zerto has not replaced any backup solution.
How was the initial setup?
It is a private cloud deployment. It is all VMware vSphere.
Its initial setup was straightforward. It was not as complicated as any other product. It took two to three weeks.
In terms of the implementation strategy, we wanted to reduce our synchronous synchronization. We wanted a better RTO, so we went to an asynchronous replication on private network infrastructure for faster syncing. There were a few technical aspects, but we took our time to lay out the network infrastructure.
In terms of maintenance, you have to patch it and upgrade it. We have a team of four for backup and storage.
What about the implementation team?
Zerto helped us. They had very good staff. We got great support. I would rate them a seven out of ten.
We had two people working on that project, primary and secondary. We did use some of the networking team, maybe a half-person worth of time, because it is a little network intensive.
What was our ROI?
It is hard to measure an ROI. It is more like an insurance policy. You may or may not use your insurance policy, but it provides comfort to management. There may also be some soft cost.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It was a little higher. We were in a corporate agreement, and we had a software package that included RP for VM. It is easy to compare pricing when you are already in a corporate agreement. Zerto lost on the pricing scorecard.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Zerto and RP for VM, which was an EMC product. They were different in replication logic and how they did journaling.
In Zerto, the replication is done through vSphere, and they did not license that product, so at any point, they could have probably lost it. We licensed RP for VM. We felt more comfortable with an EMC replication product because it was Dell and VMware combined or merged. The replication in Zerto was good, but it was using VMware hypervisor replication.
What other advice do I have?
To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend doing an architectural design and implementing best practices. Involve your network team early and use Zerto's expertise.
I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.