My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are business continuity and disaster recovery.
The features of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most include its core function, where I can replicate near instantaneously, which guarantees that I have X RTO, Y RPO, and that actually works.
The core functionality is what's beautiful about it.
HPE Zerto Software Analytics enables me to see my entire global real estate from one SaaS portal—that's powerful. We are still less than a year into using HPE Zerto Software, currently in the deployment phase, with the plan to have a unified global deployment. It will be a cookie-cutter template for every single site, where based on the application's criticality, that type of provisioning is determined. HPE Zerto Software would automatically inherit the workload, protect it, and create a DR for it.
HPE Zerto Software also works based off of tags, in an automatic fashion, saving a lot of time for my engineers where they don't have to babysit a tool, as it automatically takes care of itself.
HPE Zerto Software's recovery speed to other disaster recovery solutions shows that it's superior. The native technology is stream-based replication, instantaneous replication, whereas the other technologies I've used in the past are purely snapshot-based, which impact the production. HPE Zerto Software is transparent, as the production is not impacted, and it's a live write to a destination.
My impression of HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication is that it's a great technology, and that's what we're really counting on for the DR teams.
We're still in the process of reducing our organization's DR testing. We anticipate that, since, it doesn't impact production, we should be able to test more frequently on the DR side.
An improvement I would like to see in HPE Zerto Software is the ability to start protecting bare-metal configurations, as today it only handles virtualized workloads. I would love to see some progress in bare-metal protection. Several bare-metal use cases also need similar RTO, RPO, and business criticality thinking, which would be fantastic if HPE Zerto Software ventures into the bare-metal space.
I have been using HPE Zerto Software for less than a year.
We haven't had any challenges so far, so it's pretty robust. There have been no downtime, crashes, or performance issues with HPE Zerto Software.
HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of my organization, as the licensing model is pretty good, and I'm happy with what I have, leveraging economies of scale through my team, making it positioned for us to match our scaling and buy more licenses as we grow.
I evaluate the customer service and technical support for HPE Zerto Software as satisfactory. We have a virtual TAM with a lot of experience in the space, and we have frequent meetings with the technology team, plus the customer support is also very responsive.
Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using another solution to address similar needs, specifically RecoverPoint for VMs and VMware Live Recovery, which I plan to replace. I'm also familiar with Rubrik.
The factors that led me to consider a change were the core architecture, where one solution utilized snapshot-based replication while another used stream-based replication, and HPE Zerto Software's approach is more effective than snapshot-based replication.
The way its architecture is formatted, deployment is fairly easy for us to get started. We can get set up and be production-ready very fast.
My experience with pricing, setup, costs, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software was pretty good and in line with what I expected.
Before HPE Zerto Software, I considered other solutions such as RecoverPoint for VMs, VMware Cloud on AWS with the VMLR tool, and a few other industry-standard options, mostly snapshot-based, and a few replication-based, but HPE Zerto Software was the better of all of them. What stood out with HPE Zerto Software is that when making a purchase, it's a combination of great technology and the price matching my expectations, so HPE Zerto Software fit the bill in both cases, which is why I went ahead and purchased it.
Regarding expanded usage of HPE Zerto Software, it's too soon to tell if we will, as we've been using it for less than a year.
I rate HPE Zerto Software overall as eight out of ten.
I won't advise other organizations since everyone has to evaluate their own footprints to understand what's the right fit for them.