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HPE Zerto In-Cloud Software for AWS

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Reviews from AWS customer

11 AWS reviews

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4-star reviews ( Show all reviews )

    reviewer2278521

Simple UI, quick disaster recovery, and responsive support

  • September 18, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it for disaster recovery. We do disaster recovery in the cloud as well. We also do routine testing of the disaster recovery functionalities.

How has it helped my organization?

We do disaster recovery in the cloud. Having DR in the cloud is absolutely fundamental. Backups are great, and disaster recovery is quick. If something is down, with the click of a button, we would be able to spin up multiple assets. Zerto allows us to do that.

We primarily have Azure, but we also have some integration with AWS. We found it pretty seamless. There are a couple of pain points every now and then with setting up policies and getting things to work as expected, but their support is very helpful for any of the cases that we run into. Whether it is running against RTO or having issues with certain VMs and certain workloads, we have been able to work through these issues and get it functioning as expected.

Zerto has been very helpful for RPOs. It definitely keeps us at our target recovery point. It is definitely the most important toolset for us to meet the RPOs.

Zerto definitely helps our engineers sleep better at night because we know that we can meet our RPO. We have an immediate button if we have to do a restore. Sometimes, we look in Zerto first rather than having to dig out of backup. That is probably Zerto's highest value-add.

It does near-synchronous replication. CDP has definitely come a long way. They were the first ones to do it, and they have definitely done it the best in my opinion. Other solutions that are out there are trying to emulate it, but in our stack, Zerto will always be the one on which we rely the most for continuous replication. For production workloads, this continuous replication is absolutely critical. We have a lot of SQL data and things that are constantly changing. It is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for Zerto to keep up with that much change rate, but with the tweaks that we have made, it has definitely been more possible. It is definitely something that is important to us, and for production apps, it is absolutely key.

What is most valuable?

There are a lot of features. The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want. If we want to select an entire cluster, we can do that, or we can group it by application, which is the best practice and what we do as an organization.

What needs improvement?

The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions. That might be on us, but that would be my main suggestion. There might be a way to tweak the settings. There is an option to exclude scratch disks or temp disks in SQL, and that helps, but we still struggle a little bit with the databases with high transaction volume for the VPGs to keep up. We have done a little bit of work with the monitoring features that they have in the portal to identify whether ZVM or something else is overloaded and then allocate more resources to it, but there can be a little bit more transparency. If there is something they can do along those lines, that would be awesome.

Deployment is an area that can be improved a little bit. Sometimes deploying new ZVMs and things can be a little confusing. Also, with the supportability matrix, there is a little bit of a gray area sometimes as to which version is supported. There is some opportunity there to improve transparency around versioning and what to use moving forward for all workloads.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for about five years between multiple organizations.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable. We have no issues. We do not have to worry that Zerto will go down. We shifted most of our on-prem into Azure, and it works flawlessly.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is definitely scalable. It just works. We can add more VMs. We can add more ZVMs to scale with the business needs.

We are using it mostly for the production workloads. We have a couple thousand VMs.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate them a nine out of ten. It is hard to get a ten out of ten. There is always more that you can do with support, but they are always very responsive. They helped us through multiple issues with different VPG replications. We have had some issues there, and they were always very good at guidance. They always have a solution and a lot of good documentation as well to reference before opening a case. That is helpful.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have only used Zerto in the past. That is the one I am the most familiar with and comfortable with. I can compare it to other backup tool sets that I have used in the past, but I know Zerto is not exactly a backup solution.

Its UI is very simple. I always find what I am looking for relatively easily. As they have evolved the web portal, it has only gotten better. The UI is definitely on point today.

What was our ROI?

I believe we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the exact number. We are definitely seeing a good return from what we have put into the Zerto product. Our business users said that it is very important to them to have disaster recovery and for us to be able to perform quarterly tests with all these different application stacks. We can show them what it is like to bring up a bubble environment and do full testing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

It was a little before I joined the company, so I cannot comment on the solutions they evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement. There could be a little bit more transparency around releases and what version to use. They have done some rebranding in the past such as ZRA and ZVM. There is some confusion there sometimes related to some of the internal terminology when you do not work on it every day, but overall, we are very happy with the product. It does what it is intended to do, and as a customer, that is all you can ask for.


    reviewer2266923

Easy to use, good documentation, and helpful for minimal downtime

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it for failing over our production servers in the event of an emergency so that we have minimal downtime to continue business operations.

We only use it for failover to on-prem. We do not use it for the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto was one of the first failover solutions that we implemented in the organization, so the benefits are pretty drastic. It is hard to compare it to any other solution out there because we do not have anything to baseline it on, but it certainly increases the confidence of our end users. We are able to react in the event there is an issue. The fact that we are not waiting for hours to restore operations is something that we find valuable.

We protect VMs in our environment with Zerto. We are very happy with the RPO results.

What is most valuable?

Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support.

What needs improvement?

We learned that we got a new account representative supporting our account. I found this out today. Apparently, this is something that they kicked off at the beginning of this year, but there has been a failure in communication in letting us know who is the proper channel for us to reach out to if we need assistance.

While going from the major version 9 to 10, they introduced a new requirement for ECE Licensing, which is not something that we knew about at the time of our last renewal. We purchased it for a couple of years, and as far as we knew, we were in support. It was only when we were in the middle of the upgrade and had set up the entire environment and tried to put it up, it asked for a license key that we did not have. We were told by the support team to reach out to our account manager. She has been a bit slow to respond. It just seemed like lip service. The timing kind of worked out because there was a conference as early as that. They have been trying to fix it and communicating about it. I am hopeful it will be resolved, but I just cannot say for sure how soon or how fast they can remediate it.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for about 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?

We have not had any issues increasing the number of VMs being protected as long as we have licenses. We have over 100 VMs.

How are customer service and support?

They are responsive, but when things need to be escalated, it is very unclear who is going to be the person to ensure that things are resolved. I would rate them a six out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in its deployment.

What was our ROI?

It is hard to say, but the value is there. At the end of the day, the benefits of having a failover solution outweigh the cost.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not participate in the evaluation of other similar solutions.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. We are interested in the technical abilities that it offers, but we would like to see an improvement on the support side.


    reviewer2266920

Great interface, easy to use, and simple to update

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case is disaster recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features include the ease of use and the usability of the user interface. Long-term, the solution has proven to be very resilient and stable. It meets our DR needs for VM environments.

The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. You have near real-time DR capabilities. In the years I've used it, we've had application-consistent profiles. To meet the recovery point and recovery time objectives, it helps to have that on hand.

It's affected our RPOs positively. It totally meets them via near-synchronous replication. That means the VM stays in a consistent state and is always available.

What needs improvement?

Zerto could improve its reporting capabilities. That's lacking. The alerting capabilities are lacking as well, partly due to the fact that there's no way to trim down the alert fatigue if there are failures within the application. It will send out alerts consistently instead of spreading the alert times every 30 minutes, hour, et cetera.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using Zerto at our organization over the past eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I cannot comment on scalability. We only have two Zerto instances installed, one in production and one in DR. We haven't had to scale out or to the cloud.

We are protecting upwards of 100 virtual machines.

How are customer service and support?

Zerto's support is good. They are responsive from an email perspective. I've never had to pick up the phone to call them for anything beyond our DR testing every year. In those cases, we do open a proactive ticket in the case that we run into issues with recovering virtual machines.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use any other solution previously. We chose Zerto since it was an application we inherited. It wasn't something I specifically chose, however, understanding the industry, we know that it is the top player in terms of software recoverability for virtual machines.

How was the initial setup?

I did not initially set up the solution; I inherited it. However, over the past eight years, we have gone through a number of upgrades, which for the most part have gone seamlessly. We did have a few issues in the past that support was able to fix in a timely fashion.

What was our ROI?

I'm unsure if the company has witnessed any ROI. We have not gone through any TCO analysis.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing is outside of my purview.

What other advice do I have?

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If the reporting and alerting functionality were better, I'd rate it ten out of ten.


    Girish Agarwal

Easy to use, quick to understand, and simple to set up

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.

What is most valuable?

It's easy to use. It wasn't too difficult to start with. With most vendors, initially, you have a learning curve or configurations. In this case, Zerto was quick to understand. The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple. The experience is comparatively good with Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication has not been used much. That said, it does help when talking about storage layers. The availability of the VMs is good. In terms of resiliency, there are a lot of benefits to it. Most have a recovery of 24 to 48 hours; Zerto has gotten recovery down to four hours.

We've done a POC with a DR to AWS. It was limited, however, it worked well and there was support. We didn't run into any challenges.

The effect on the RPOs has been excellent. It's been impacted greatly. Customers enjoy the shorter timeline to recovery. The customer confidence is high.

What needs improvement?

Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for almost five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is pretty stable. Sometimes there may be bugs, however, so far, I haven't personally found any bugs beyond the initial setup.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There is a wide range of scalability with different storage solutions.

We've deployed Zerto with 40 TB of storage layers.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used NetBackup and v-Motion. I'm familiar with Commvault and Veeam, which is also a fast solution.

When we used VMware V-motion or other methodologies, with Zeto, once you have your SAN hooked up well and your networking component set, then you failover to the recovery. With Zerto, the recovery times were less compared to what we witnessed with our previous traditional methods.

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in the initial deployment. My job was to get Zerto up from scratch and make sure the configuration, network, storage, et cetera were up and running. It's fairly simple. There's a learning process, however, once you know it, it gets easier.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I'm not involved in the licensing process.

What other advice do I have?

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.


    reviewer2266896

Easy to use, fast, and good near-synchronous replication

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.

What is most valuable?

The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution.

We've used Zerto for failing over and moving a lot of workloads from one location to another during v-center upgrades, during data center relocations, et cetera. We even had a case where we had a need to move over to our DR data center, however, in the middle of running there, our DR data center started having thermal issues, so we had to bring everything back. Zerto made that super easy.

Previously, we were using SRM. In the case of the thermal event, SRM would probably have taken, I'm guessing, an hour or two to do the failover. With Zerto, we were able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes, and it was roughly 150 or 200 VMs that we did in that time period.

The near-synchronous replication works. It's very quick. I like that I can fail something over and not lose any data. That's pretty important. We want to not lose data. As a healthcare organization, losing patient records would be a very bad thing.

It's important to have DR in the cloud right now. We're looking at leveraging AVS for our DR site for the sake of not having to run our own data center. Leveraging the cloud is super important. It will help us to get away from on-prem and not even have to deal with a co-location facility. The reliability will be important. There is also the impression that there is going to be money savings around that.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Overall, the RPOs have gotten better. Every aspect compared to where we were with SRM or prior to that, Zerto has improved. It's a lot easier to manage Zerto as it is hardware agnostic. It helps get things failed over and protected quickly. Every aspect has improved with Zerto.

What needs improvement?

Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better. We've been building out a lot of new V-centers lately, and new data centers. Whenever we create a VPG, we generally set some very specific settings. If there was a way to set a template or a blueprint, to say that if I'm replicating to a data center from here, these are always going to be my default settings. That would be ideal, instead of having to manually set everything every time.

There are a few issues we've had with Zerto where it doesn't behave the way we want it to. I'm being told it's by design. Therefore, it's not an issue per se, it's by design.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Zerto for three or four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've had no problems with the stability. There have been a few bugs along the way, however, Zerto has been very quick to work through them.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have 1500 to 1600 VMs protected with Zerto and most of our DR strategy is being built around Zerto.

I can't speak to scalability. We've been steady-state since we implemented it. It's been protected by the same workloads since then.

How are customer service and support?

Zerto support has gone downhill recently. When we first started, they were great. However, after the HP acquisition, the quality of support is not as good. The knowledge has dropped and the time to respond is slower. I seem to now get people who ask basic questions that I already answered when I opened the ticket.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, we were using SRM. SRM was a nightmare. Zeerto has been drastically better.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is expensive. However, I definitely see the value and my corporation sees the value.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did look at Veeam and were using SRM in the past and Zerto seems to be the most full-featured and the easiest to implement. It's also the most powerful overall. Veeam isn't even close to what Zerto can handle right now.

What other advice do I have?

We're mostly on-prem, however, we've started doing DR into AVS - Azure VMware Service.

I'd rate Zerto eight out of ten.


    reviewer2266881

Great for disaster recovery with good uptime and near-synchronous replication

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

We set up the environment and we're testing right now. We are able to do test recoveries and restalls. Once we have everything set up, we'll try a real failover test.

What is most valuable?

The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point. We have a policy that requires us to have, in case our primary goes down, a failover for our production environment to another site.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. You can set it to a second. It's important to our company. All of our applications are a part of our production. We need to have uptime. We have an SLA that meets uptime requirements and needs to stay up to maintain our company reputation.

We are also protecting our VMs.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. It's meeting our objectives.

What needs improvement?

The journal history is only up to 30 days. If it were longer, it would be better and I would have more flexibility.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for a little over a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is great. It is running well.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is not too bad. We upgraded our server and we were able to scale easily. We installed Zerto on our VMware with no problem. We have about 200 VMs and Zerto is protecting about just under 100 of them.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is an area I'm not too keen about. My experience is 50/50. Level one support doesn't seem very knowledgeable and I don't get the answers I want. That can delay us sometimes. Hopefully, they will improve.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in the initial deployment.

The process is not too bad. The process was pretty straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

The vendor provided implementation support.

What was our ROI?

We have noted an ROI. Compared to others, overall, it made sense to choose Zerto.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others. However, they have great features.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did test other solutions. The speed of recovery in comparison testing was great. That was the reason why we chose Zerto over our competitors.

We looked at Veeam Orchestrator and Veeam is not as complete in terms of DR.

The ease of use of Zerto and the interface are easier to understand and use.

What other advice do I have?

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's around version eight.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall.


    reviewer2266878

Simple and easy to understand with a clean interface

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime.

What is most valuable?

The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.

It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.

I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.

We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.

Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.

What needs improvement?

There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three or four months.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.

We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.

The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.

How are customer service and support?

We've never had to contact technical support.

How was the initial setup?

Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes.

What about the implementation team?

We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.

What was our ROI?

We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.

What other advice do I have?

The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.


    reviewer2266866

Reduces the recovery workflow to just a few minutes

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

How has it helped my organization?

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

What needs improvement?

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried.

How was the initial setup?

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

What was our ROI?

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.


    reviewer2266851

It provides quick insights into where your VMs are and whether they're replicating

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for disaster recovery as a service and site-to-site migrations.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the overview Zerto gives you, providing quick insights into where your VMs are and whether they're replicating. It's an easy interface to work with. Configuring Zerto to failover in Azure is pretty simple. The biggest challenge is moving from on-prem to the cloud, but that's not an issue with Zerto. The problem is the difference in hypervisors.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Zerto for about a year now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't faced any stability issues. The only problems I've had have been self-inflicted, so it's pretty good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto's scalability seems pretty robust. I've had a few larger VMs that have been a little troublesome in terms of the RTO, but they are also outside of best practices. There should be no issues with scalability if you're working within the defined parameters of what's acceptable.

How are customer service and support?

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I've used their support pretty extensively. I would say the majority of the experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. Their response times and issue resolutions are satisfactory.

One thing I would change about Zerto support is the fact that you sometimes can't find the answer you need online. Sometimes, Zerto reaches out with an answer to that particular issue, and it's in a document that the customers can't access without going through support. It doesn't feel like that information should be limited to internal use. I should be able to find that online without going through a support channel.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've also used Azure's native Azure Site Recovery solution, and there are definitely some benefits to using Zerto, such as the fact that it works at a hypervisor host level over individual VMs with agents. The performance is probably a little better in most cases.

Zerto is easier to use than ASR overall, but the setup is a little bit more involved. After the installation, the daily use is pretty simple compared to Azure. With Azure's native solution, there's a lot more that you must do repeatedly throughout the lifecycle of any virtual machine or system that you're trying to protect. Zerto is much simpler in that regard.

How was the initial setup?

The on-prem deployment is super easy and works well. Migrating from on-prem to the cloud involves a lot more steps and things you have to configure so that it can communicate into the cloud and build everything that it needs to. That takes more time. It probably requires twice as much time to deploy on the cloud.

What was our ROI?

We see the biggest ROI from Zerto's real-time test environment. If we want to do a proof of concept on a hundred servers, we can spin them up within a few hours and have them ready to start testing stuff with real data to see how that might look if we were to deploy that into production. It's an excellent, accurate test environment that we don't need to maintain.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zerto's pricing is competitive, given the benefits and ease of setting it up. It may seem more expensive upfront, but you're going to save that over the long term by spending less engineering time configuring, reconfiguring, etc.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Zerto nine out of ten.


    reviewer2266845

The recovery time is almost immediate

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto to back up our VMs to our disaster recovery site.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate.

What is most valuable?

The fast recovery speed is Zerto's most valuable feature. It gives us peace of mind to know that the VMs are replicated and are there if we ever have a disaster. We recently upgraded our license to include the cloud because we are considering migrating from our hosted data center to cloud-based DR. Zerto's near-synchronous replication has been excellent. We haven't had any issues during our testing. It has worked flawlessly, and we're very pleased.

What needs improvement?

It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used Zerto for five years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't done a lot of scaling. We initially purchased a number of licenses, and we've kinda stayed about that number for the whole time. We're currently protecting 175 VMs, which is a small fraction of our total environment.

How are customer service and support?

I rate Zerto customer service eight out of 10. It's been good. I haven't had to open any tickets with support, but we worked with our sales engineer to configure things, and it went well.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We've used backup providers before to do replication, but we've never had a solution that offered immediate recovery. We evaluated VMware SRM and some other backup providers, but none were quite on Zerto's level. The recovery speed doesn't compare to Zerto. Zerto is easy to use aside from the scripting aspect of things, but the other solutions aren't aren't any better in that regard.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is straightforward. We deploy an appliance, and it's up very quickly. The initial installation is done in a day, but it takes time to configure things exactly the way you want them, get the VMs protected, write scripts, etc.

What was our ROI?

It's hard to quantify the return, but we can do what we set out to. We're able to recover critical services in a DR site. We haven't had to use it, but we know it's there, and we've done testing that shows it works. Hopefully, we don't have to use it, but it's a good insurance policy.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.