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.
Zerto DR (ZVM)
BYNETExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Moves VMs seamlessly with a user-friendly interface and reliable replication for swift cloud migrations
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HPE Zerto Software for almost five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
HPE Zerto Software helped to reduce our organization's DR testing.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Ensured compliance and effective failover with seamless disaster recovery testing
What is our primary use case?
Our main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are primarily to provide our customers with their DR solutions and to facilitate migrations, either from on-prem to the cloud or data center to data center migrations.
What is most valuable?
The feature of HPE Zerto Software I prefer the most is the test feature, which allows you to test an environment in a bubble without having to affect production.
It allows you to test your DR strategy without having to actually do a full DR test. These features have benefited our organization by allowing the customers to really be able to write out their runbook, test it, and make sure that they're meeting compliance, whether that's every six months or a year test.
My impressions of HPE Zerto's near-synchronous replication are that it's an amazing feature that customers love. Even though it's set at five minutes, it's actually typically lower than that for most environments, and customers love the ability to have failover capabilities within seconds.
The ease of use for the solution is pretty straightforward.
What made us stick with HPE Zerto is that it is just a fantastic product and was a great product to add to HPE's portfolio. The solution has helped to reduce downtime in situations; it gave us the ability to roll back a bad change that was made. It was days' worth of changes that had been made. That amount of downtime would probably have cost the organization tens of thousands of dollars.
HPE Zerto Software has impacted our RTOs and RPOs effectively in a positive way where other solutions take longer; the board is happy with the speed for us to be back online.
The solution has definitely helped reduce our DR testing and automate it, although I do not know those numbers off the top of my head.
What needs improvement?
With the current updates primarily on the Azure side of it, documentation could be improved. That's not necessarily Zerto's problem since Azure is constantly changing things; Zerto will put something out, but Azure then will change it, and sometimes it's hard to follow that documentation.
HPE Zerto Software can be improved by keeping up on top of the Azure changes happening there, trying to smooth that process out, because there are many steps that you have to take in Azure, and that's not necessarily HPE's fault, it's just how Azure functions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with Zerto for more than ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and reliability of HPE Zerto have been great; I haven't really faced any major challenges, and when we have, support has been really great at helping.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of our organization as a great scalable solution; the only concern I have for really large organizations would be the cost. However, you have to start looking at the soft metrics that CFOs don't necessarily take into account.
How are customer service and support?
Every time I've had to talk to support, whether it's been pre-HPE or during HPE's acquisition, the technical and customer support has been pretty good at resolving any issues that have come up. I really appreciate the stateside support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to adopting HPE Zerto, we were using different solutions. Looking at recovery solutions for the capabilities, RecoverPoint was there, which is what Zerto was based on. We considered the capabilities they offered versus solutions such as Veeam.
How was the initial setup?
In an on-prem environment, when it was the Windows deployment, it was pretty easy to deploy. Now, once it went over to Linux, it's still been pretty easy on the on-prem side. Once you start getting involved with the public clouds, it gets a little clunky. Again, I don't fall down totally on the HPE side. It's the public cloud that may be at issue.
What was our ROI?
Customers have definitely seen a return on investment from HPE Zerto Software. They can automate their DR testing, test it more often, and in a worst-case scenario, they could have a help desk person literally hit a button to help them come back over or come up in the cloud or in another site if they need to.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with the pricing, licensing cost, or setup cost has been such that I don't have to deal with the pricing side of it. The setup, primarily in the Azure space, has been a little clunky, and I don't necessarily fault HPE for that.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before selecting HPE Zerto, we considered other solutions such as RecoverPoint. They would look at Veeam, even though Veeam's not in the same category, but it was something that people would use as a recovery solution.
What other advice do I have?
For the capabilities and what it does today, I rate HPE Zerto Software a ten out of ten, and it's a market leader in that category.
Fast RPO and RTOs, gives us the flexibility and offers disaster recovery as a service
What is our primary use case?
A lot of use cases involve how we effectively manage our DR and make sure there's not a lot of manual effort. On the business side, we proved the solution worked and showed the analytics on the DR report afterward. Those are the requirements.
How has it helped my organization?
At one of the banks I worked for, we used it for our merger and acquisition to replicate a legacy application that was no longer supported. Rather than try to rebuild it, which would have taken days or weeks, we could use Zerto to replicate it to our data center and join it to our domain. That was one of the biggest use cases we have had.
Another use case is for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and to migrate service to a public cloud.
Zerto's near-synchronous replication is great. Not a lot of solutions can do that, and most organizations don't know that Zerto can do it. Once you have that near-sync capability, you can see how much more you can recover and be more resilient.
At the end of the day, we're trying to protect our data and not put the company at risk, whether it's from a cyber attack or just any sort of DLP data loss.
In financial services, data is paramount: protecting it, making sure you don't lose it, and integrating it. Having that near-sync ability is useful to any organization.
Zerto helps protect VMs in our environment. It really increased how many points in time we can recover, and not only the time to do it but where we want to do it too.
Generally, we choose a point in time because they're simulated tests and controlled. In the event of a true disaster, I'm sure I'd utilize one of the closer points to have more recent data, but it's good to have that option. Luckily, I haven't had to use that option.
It's night and day. With other solutions, you're locked into specific RPOs and RTOs based on how that solution works. Zerto gives us the flexibility to choose which we want to use and recover effectively.
What is most valuable?
The main valuable features are the fast RPO and RTOs we could achieve and the analytics behind that.
In my role these days, I have to make sure I can prove to the executive team as well as the business lines why we chose this solution and how it can help us.
One of the projects we're working on is DRaaS service. Once that's implemented, we'll test that solution. The whole premise of using Zerto is to replicate one-to-many and then test that scenario.
What needs improvement?
Zerto should continue adding new features. When I used it at the other bank, it wasn't good with replicating VDIs and automation. They've made a little more advancements in automation and scripting since then.
At one point, it was custom, requiring professional services. Now, Zerto has more built into its engine that will help with the failover of virtual desktops.
For how long have I used the solution?
I was an early adopter. I worked for a managed service provider in New York City back in 2009 and was introduced to Zerto near the end of 2010, early 2011. That's when we started implementing it for our clients. I've been bringing Zerto wherever I go ever since.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability is great. Sometimes you have network blips, and you can be out of sync, but it'll catch up eventually. There are very minor issues, if any.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is very scalable. For example, there's a tertiary site that we're building for the DRaaS service.
We just go to initiate the one-to-many and replicate up there. It's easy.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and support are responsive initially, and then they help you solve your problem. There was only one time with the custom scripting for the VDI that they wouldn't help because it was custom, and they wanted more money for that. They incorporated that into their solution a few years later.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In the past, I have used a different solution. I've worked with SRM, Double-Take (which is terrible), and BMC Recovery Point. Ever since I got hooked on Zerto around 2011, it's been pretty much Zerto.
How was the initial setup?
The installation itself is very easy. Any problems I've run into, either when I was managing it or doing the installation myself, support has helped every step of the way and has been very easy to work with.
It's on Expedient's cloud, which might be AWS. I'm not sure. I just know we're doing it through a third party.
What was our ROI?
A lot of the ROI is with engineering hours. If it took eight hours of overtime to pay one or two engineers to do a DR test, now we can do it in one hour.
We can factor in how many DR tests you do and calculate the cost savings. That alone is a good ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is pretty fair. It increases with the number of VMs you have. When we had about 600 VMs at my last bank, we did an enterprise licensing agreement that helped cut down the cost. It required signing on long-term, but it was the most effective.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate it a ten out of ten. I've used this solution for so long and have seen it mature. It's just easy. In IT, especially in a managerial role, we want things to work. We don't want it to be complex. If it serves the business goals of data resiliency, then that's all I need.
Definitely do a proof of concept (POC) and make sure it fits your use cases. On paper, it will, but every company is different. Sometimes, for some reason, it won't work. Or not that it won't work, it just doesn't fit what the business is trying to achieve. So do the POC and see for yourself if it works.