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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 )

    Paul Mickenbecker

We have centralized and simplified our DR processes, and DR in Azure has enabled us to consolidate DCs

  • June 26, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

In my previous company, I used it for disaster recovery. We protected our critical workloads in another data center where we would replicate our primary workloads.

In my current company, we're in the middle of a data center consolidation project and we're using Zerto in two ways. First, we're migrating the workloads we had in one data center to another, about 250 servers. It took us about three months to complete the migration. We had to schedule all of our moves and work with the business to validate that the services were fine and accessible, once they were moved to the other data center. We've completed the migration and a data center has been shut down, and we're working on building disaster recovery for our primary workloads in Azure.

How has it helped my organization?

The main benefit is that we are centralizing our disaster recovery solution. Before, we were doing replication for some services and RecoverPoint for other services. We had a mix of tools for disaster recovery and we're trying to simplify that process with a product we can use for both. We're even contemplating using Zerto for backups as well, because we use other tools for that. But the main focus is having a specific tool, Zerto, that we can use to achieve our disaster recovery goals for on-prem services.

We also have a big push to move our DR solutions into Azure as a result of a decision from our upper levels to use Azure as our primary solution for building applications. That has allowed us to reduce costs and consolidate from three data centers to one, with our disaster recovery solution in Azure. Our focus on one tool has made it simple. We're still working through that process. Whereas the failover solutions in Azure are somewhat the same as any other data center, building out the rules and requirements for firewalls is a little more complex. We have some third-party vendors that are helping us design and build out our security into Azure.

Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery, your recovery point can be 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, our recovery point objectives are in the seconds. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto. We don't have to run incremental backups every half hour or 15 minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well. It's essentially just a shutdown and reboot of a VM.

Near-synchronous replication is incredibly important for us because we have transactional applications that work on financial and transactional databases. The fewer the number of transactions that are potentially lost, the better it is for our organization. It means we don't have to go through rebuilding those transactions. It limits the amount of data that we could possibly lose in a disaster recovery situation, amounting to just a few seconds' worth.

The near-synchronous replication with Zerto has enabled us to reduce our RPOs to two seconds instead of hours and, sometimes, days.

And Zerto really improves RTOs for moving applications. You're not waiting for restores to happen. In some cases, if you have large amounts of data on the order of hundreds of terabytes, it could literally take you a week to recover certain applications, especially if you're pulling the data down from Azure or offsite storage. Zerto greatly improves the amount of time that it takes to recover. And you don't have to do one at a time. You can move over a large chunk of servers at once and get those recoveries running and mounting in your disaster recovery environment. It's a lot quicker than running a restore from a restore product.

In addition, the solution reduces the amount of downtime we have in applications during migration. We had a large number of servers, including some critical production applications. But we didn't have to find windows where we could have those systems interrupted for a short period of time. A few minutes of downtime, compared to having the application down for hours, helped move our migration project along. We moved about 250 servers in a three-month period, and we didn't have any issues with any of the applications related to data or the like. We had two instances where there was an issue related to licensing but they were our only issues when moving these applications.

What is most valuable?

The auto-connect feature is valuable because we can set the amount of time that we delay before committing a move from one location to another, giving application teams time to validate that the move went well and everything is working before we commit those changes. That gives us the ability to roll back to the same point we were at before we shut things down, if needed.

Another nice aspect of the product is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. And once or twice a year, we'll do a live test that is more like what would happen if we lost a data center.

Zerto is also a very easy product to use. Although I've used it before in other environments, we introduced it to some engineers on our team and, after a couple of hours of training to go through the product, it's fairly intuitive. It's not something that takes a five-day training course to understand. You just drive through the checkboxes to build a protection group and that's pretty easy to do. You don't really have to understand coding or the like. It's GUI-driven, so it's fairly easy for an engineer to create protection groups.

What needs improvement?

You can use Zerto as a backup product, but in the discussions that I have had with them about the product, they don't really sell or talk about that feature as much. So I would be interested in improvements related to using it as a backup. If I could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where I need to recover something, that would be helpful. It has some of that functionality, but it's not something they promote a lot. They should point out the benefits of using Zerto as a backup and recovery product instead of just a DR product.

With Cohesity, we keep a limited amount of backups, about 14 days. That way, we can recover an individual server within the same site or we can restore data or databases that we need, in a non-DR way. We use it for typical day-to-day backup and restore. If we could use Zerto in a similar fashion for everyday backup and recovery scenarios, that would be another area where we could consolidate into a single application.

For how long have I used the solution?

At my old company, I used it for several years, and at the company I'm now at we've been using it for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been rock-solid. I haven't had any issues with any of the builds or the virtual managers. It just runs.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's really scalable. You can create as many protection groups as you need, and a lot more than we have in our environment.

We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload.

How are customer service and support?

Our experience with their tech support has been good. I have never called them with an issue that they couldn't resolve fairly quickly.

I did call them a few times on some migrations that we were doing off-hours where certain aspects of the migration didn't work, particularly on the reverse protection. I always got a callback within 30 minutes and most of the time it was quicker. The support has always been great.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

One of the main issues was handling large data migrations. It wasn't feasible to do a big-bang move where we could move everything at one time, so we needed to schedule moves. We were able to at least replicate the information and work through a schedule for the migrations quickly. One of the major things we were trying to adjust was having to schedule the migrations and working with the team to validate that everything was functional. We were also looking to minimize the amount of time that that service would be offline during migration.

In addition, we use a combination of tools. We were doing replication with RecoverPoint, and straight backup and restore with Cohesity. While we still use Cohesity, we did get rid of RecoverPoint and we don't use VMware Site Recovery Manager because we're not recovering from VMware to VMware anymore. Cohesity does certain things and Zerto does certain things very well.

How was the initial setup?

The implementation of the migration was very straightforward. The implementation of disaster recovery into Azure was a little more complex. In part, that was because of the way our company built our Azure subscription and the rules we have in place for installation and dividing things and networks within Azure.

But from the standpoint of installing and deploying the product, it's very simple.

What about the implementation team?

We did it in-house, but we did have a Zerto engineer run through the installation into Azure with us because we did run into some issues related to permissions in Azure and some of the custom roles that are defined. We also worked with an engineer from Azure to help us, mainly around the identity portion in Azure.

On our side, it was just me and one of our other engineers involved.

What was our ROI?

We have seen ROI on the migration project which didn't require a whole bunch of people involved. We rotated two people who were able to facilitate the migrations when we scheduled them in the evenings. Sometimes, we would do up to six or seven migrations in an evening.

The main thing that held us up a little in that project was the validation process required by the business. If we had been able to just run through it, we probably would have completed it a lot more quickly.

Still, we didn't require a lot of resources to do it. It was just one engineer to handle a migration and the applications teams to validate. We didn't have to go outside the company to hire services to help us with the migration. That was helpful from a cost perspective.

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

Pricing is one area where there could be 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. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting.

Others in our organization have raised the issue of how it's licensed, where you need one for every VM you're protecting.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at RecoverPoint and Site Recovery Manager in VMware, but they just didn't fit the type of scenario that we were looking to set up with replication and recovery into Azure. We couldn't really find too many tools that were doing it in a way that was not too intrusive. There are ways you can migrate things into Azure and run them, but there's a technical process that you have to go through to make it happen.

We were looking for a solution where we wouldn't have to flip all the switches for Azure. We wanted something straightforward that was much simpler to use. Zerto was really the only tool that we could find to do it. Others that we looked at briefly just didn't do what we wanted to do, so we didn't spend too much time on them.

Recovery with Zerto is a little more straightforward compared to other solutions, and the amount of time it takes is fairly short. You can recover with Cohesity fairly quickly, but there are a bunch of other things that you need to do, depending on how the recovery is done. If you're mounting a new virtual machine from a snapshot, which would give you a fairly quick recovery, you would still have to re-synchronize that data to keep it as a replication, and that takes some time.

Zerto is just a more straightforward solution. You're getting pretty much the same server restored in under a minute, which is the time it takes to reboot, sync, and bring it back online. Other tasks you have to do, when bringing something up in another data center, like re-IP the machine, can be automated in the Zerto replication. It makes things easier.

What other advice do I have?

My advice is to look at what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for a migration tool, this is a great migration tool that will help you move workloads between data centers. It's agnostic as to whether you're using VMware, Microsoft, or Azure.

And you have to look at whether you're moving a large amount of data or a large number of servers. Think about how much downtime your business can afford for moving those applications. If you're looking for something that can move an application with minimal downtime, this may be a solution for you. Or if you're moving large amounts of data, but you don't want to be down for the whole time you're restoring or moving, a synchronous product like this may be a solution for you.

We have built a disaster recovery landing zone in our Azure environment and we built an isolated environment so we could do non-intrusive failover tests into Azure, and still keep our production environment up and running. We've tested certain workloads failing over into Azure, including a standard Windows or Linux box, and specific things like SQL Server, Oracle, et cetera. It has been going well so far and we're at the point where we're defining our protection groups and security in Azure for all of our critical workloads.

We have not yet used the immutable data copies feature, but I was just at a conference and had some meetings with Zerto, some of the product professionals and engineers, and that is something that we are strongly looking into. That's because of the issue of cyberattacks and because even backup systems could become corrupted and then you're still in a bad situation. Putting the data into an immutable repository is something that we are definitely looking into. Especially in the industry that we are in, cybersecurity is a big issue.

We have also not used it for blocking threats and attacks. But the ability, in conjunction with immutable data and putting that into a vault, to look at the data that is being replicated in real time and scan it, would be a great benefit. We do use some of the best-in-class tools for that kind of protection, but this would just be another layer to help with that. It's an interesting feature and another tool that would add a layer to our cyber protection.

Zerto hasn't reduced the number of staff involved in backup and DR management. We have a pretty lean team. We try to cross-train our employees on the different products that we use. But Zerto did help to simplify the process because we can get people trained on it. They can assist in covering for other people in the group when they're out. The training only takes a couple of hours to go through the tutorials.


    reviewer1850547

Continuous replication gives us more checkpoints, improving our RPOs

  • June 26, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it for disaster recovery. We were looking for faster recovery time objectives. Our primary use case is protecting virtual machines in our environment.

How has it helped my organization?

It's improved our testing frequency, and that has definitely helped.

And the effect on our RPOs has been very good because of the continuous replication; you get more checkpoints. Compared to other disaster recovery solutions that we've used, it's much more efficient when it comes to recovery. It's much more resilient and provides a better experience. It's a better product than the traditional backup and recovery methods we were using.

Zerto has also helped reduce downtime in some situations. We can recover systems in minutes, versus hours. There has been a significant improvement in our RTOs.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce our DR testing on the order of hours and days.

What is most valuable?

The ease of use is one of the most valuable features when it comes to making changes and configuring. It's very easy to set up and configure. It's a great product.

Another very important feature, because I work in a very high-transaction environment, is the near-synchronous replication, and it works well.

What needs improvement?

They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scalable. I plan to increase our usage of the solution.

How are customer service and support?

I have not contacted their tech support.

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

We were using typical backup recovery from tape or disk. Zerto is far easier to use, simpler, more efficient and reliable, and more effective than traditional disaster recovery tools.

It has not replaced all of our backup solutions. It's another tool to prevent a disaster.

How was the initial setup?

Our deployment is on a private cloud. We have compute, storage, and network that we replicate to. The initial deployment of Zerto was straightforward. It took less than 30 days to get it fully operational.

We used it in our test environment first and, once we validated that everything was functional, we included our production environment.

The maintenance involves keeping the versions up to date and there are agents that have to be updated as well.

What about the implementation team?

We had a managed service provider set it up and deploy it. On our side there were one or two people involved.

What was our ROI?

I can't quantify the ROI because we haven't used it in a disaster. It's more of a cost-avoidance solution, protecting the organization.

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

The pricing is very reasonable. There are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Symantec, Veritas, CommVault, and Rubrik.

What other advice do I have?

Have clear requirements on what your RTO/RPO requirements are, and which applications will be involved. You need to have clear business requirements and align Zerto with your business continuity plan.

Zerto is very innovative and they're constantly making improvements. It took some time to realize some of the benefits but it's been a great journey.


    Steve McFate

Helped us streamline our DR testing and notably reduce associated downtime

  • June 23, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto as our disaster recovery solution for our servers in the multiple data centers we have. It allows us to replicate our servers from one data center to another and perform disaster recovery testing to ensure compliance with our organization's DR requirements.

Our organization wanted a solution for replication, whether for VMs or Azure sites, and the ability to migrate servers or VPGs in case of a disaster or for testing purposes. And we wanted something reliable.

How has it helped my organization?

We're migrating out of one of our older data centers currently, and sending them to either Azure or one of our two VM data centers. We've been working on getting all the servers out of the old data center for a year. Being able to migrate those servers, with the help of the service teams, is one of the best features. Instead of having to do them one at a time, we can build a VPG. That is especially helpful with some of these really large VPGs. We did one a couple of months ago that was 36 terabytes. We were able to migrate that entire VPG at one time, watch it replicate once it was there, and then do the reverse replication. That process has been amazing.

We use Zerto to protect VMs and our RPOs are very solid. The RPO is a little slower for Azure, but that was expected and it was covered in the documentation that Zerto provided. But the RPOs from one VM center to another are solid. The same is true for our RTOs. We have no complaints in that regard at all.

And it will definitely help reduce downtime if we have to migrate from one data center to another due to a disaster (which we have not had to do so far). Downtime would cost us a lot, no doubt. We have not had any major disasters as of yet or problems with spyware or ransomware. But we have had instances where a server was corrupted in one data center and because it was backed up with Zerto, we were able to fail over to the secondary site and get the VPG back up very quickly. From the time that the decision was made that we needed to fail over, it took around 30 minutes. It was very quick, especially compared to trying to troubleshoot and rebuild. Our patients weren't affected.

The platform has also helped us to streamline our DR testing. We're able to do our annual test as quickly as possible, whether it's a failover rollback or a system move. It has made that process much much quicker and a lot less painful.

I've only been in this position for a year, but from what I've heard, DR testing was not a pleasant experience prior to moving to Zerto. They were always having failures and then would have to set up another downtime and test again. With a lot of our applications, those that are tier-ones, we're having to do the DR test at 1 AM or 2 AM. Nobody wants to have to do a four-hour downtime test multiple times.

And not having long downtimes for DR has helped a lot. Our customers and service teams know that we have to do these tests once a year to stay compliant. We plan for a four-hour downtime every time we do a DR test. Very rarely do we need four hours. We block out that time just in case there are issues we didn't expect but we're usually done in under two hours, including failing over, doing the testing, rolling back, and testing again. I don't know if you can actually put a number on not having downtime, in terms of the impact on the service teams, nurses, or patients.

Right now, our DR team is just me and my boss. At one point, there were three people on the team. It says a lot about Zerto when it can be used with a minimal staff for DR. Prior to moving to Zerto, the team had four members. So it was double what it is now.

What is most valuable?

The replication works really well. We perform multiple tests a month and annual tests for our tier-one and many of our tier-two apps. We need to make sure we can quickly and reliably migrate VPGs to the backup data center in a disaster scenario. Migrating systems as a failover rollback or a system move are two of the functions that I like the most.

It's also very simple to use. For example, when we need to move data so that our users can keep collaborating with one another, using Zerto is very simple. Putting the servers into maintenance mode and either moving or testing them for our teams, has worked very well. We have found very few hiccups with any part of the solution, especially with the new version that they released recently.

The near-synchronous replication-also works really well. When you move or have just built a VPG, watching it step through things is great. It's a well-made product. Near-synchronous replication is very important, making sure that it's done properly and that it's complete.

We have Azure data centers. When migrating out of our older data center, if we find that Azure is the best place for those new servers, we have been migrating them there and doing the DR test at the same time. I haven't found any problems with migration to the cloud. For our applications that will work in Azure, Zerto's disaster recovery in the cloud has worked really well.

What needs improvement?

I turned in a ticket a while back when I found a glitch within Zerto. When building out a VPG and doing the machine types within Azure, they were not coming across correctly. It would say it had a CPU and memory of a specific type, but it was not accurate. When I sent that ticket in, the support manager said that it hadn't been found before, but that my report was accurate and that it was a bug, and that they were working on it.

But I've been very pleased with the updates that they put out and the service. I don't have a lot of negative things to say about Zerto.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been in this position for a little over a year and have been using Zerto during that time.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've never seen it go down. It has been stable and easy to use, which are some of the main reasons we're still with them. We haven't had any large bugs with it. The software seems to be well-tested before new updates go out.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have it deployed across three on-prem data centers in two different states, plus the two different Azure sites that are also out of state.

We've added a couple of new data centers since I've been in my position and adding them to our Zerto interface was not very difficult. The scalability is good.

How are customer service and support?

Whenever I have had any issues, I have contacted support and they have been knowledgeable. Getting a hold of Zerto's support has been easy. In general, compared to all the other applications that I've ever supported in my career, Zerto has been one of the easiest to contact and actually get help with. I've worked with some vendors that were really difficult to work with.

Overall, Zerto's technical support has been fantastic. When I've had issues, submitting a ticket online is fast. In all but maybe one instance, I had a callback within just a couple of hours. Their support has been awesome.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

Our organization migrated away from a couple of other solutions prior to my starting this position. But the disaster recovery manager that I work for has said multiple times that Zerto is the easiest solution and has the most robust features compared to whatever they were using prior.

I know our organization still uses Veeam, but they do so in tandem with Zerto.

What was our ROI?

There is an annual cost for Zerto, but that is something that our director level works through. Our organization, St. Luke's, goes through all vendor contracts looking for the best value. The fact that we have been using Zerto for a few years says that the value must be there compared to other vendors.

Not having to take down our tier-one system for an extended period of time for DR testing is invaluable. You can't put a dollar value on the impact on a patient's life. We need our systems to stay up constantly because they are what keep people alive.

What other advice do I have?

In terms of maintenance of Zerto, we do our monthly reboots of the servers so that they stay up to date with the Microsoft patching. And anytime that Zerto has updates to their software, we make sure that we stay compliant with that. And once every year or 18 months, we update the cert on the servers.

My advice is to look for a product that is easy to use and easy to learn and allows for scalability and DR testing that works well.


    reviewer2191422

Runs behind the firewall to help block unknown threats and attacks

  • May 23, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for disaster recovery purposes. We do not use Zerto for backups, only for the redundancy of the data center.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto uses a rapid user interface that is user-friendly. Zerto's Near Synchronous Replication is helpful for our 12,000 servers.

Zerto runs behind the firewall to help block unknown threats and attacks.

The solution has improved our RTO and we rarely experience any issues during failovers. We use Zerto on-premises and Azure for the cloud. We have a very good RTO whenever we have a failover from Zerto to the cloud.

Zerto reduced our downtime by approximately 15 percent by increasing our recovery speed. Zerto also helped our organization's disaster recovery testing by reducing the time it takes to bring up virtual machines on the DR side to 15 minutes.

Because Zerto's GUI is user-friendly, it is easy to execute a failover, so we require 1/3 of the employees to perform the task during recovery situations.

What is most valuable?

Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover.

What needs improvement?

Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved. When we have a VPG, we typically have multiple VMs and more than ten terabytes of data. This can cause long failover times due to data limitations, and sometimes the VPG can become full.

The technical support response time could also be improved. We often have to follow up multiple times to get a response, and when we do get a response, it is not always from the correct person who can handle our case.

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 stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto is scalable. We have around 3,000 people that use Zerto in our organization. Zerto is deployed in multiple environments and multiple databases in two countries.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support's response time is slow.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

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

Zerto is more cost-effective than Azure.

What other advice do I have?

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

We wanted a solution that would help us reduce our recovery time objective, and Zerto does just that.

We use VPGs to maintain data consistency in our environment. We do this by placing multiple servers in a single VPG, which belongs to the same application or database.

Zerto can recover data quickly when the data size is under ten terabytes. However, recovery can be slow for data sizes that exceed ten terabytes.

The distance of our data transfers will affect the RTO. Data transfers within one region will be quicker than those across multiple regions.

We also use Azure Cloud and are currently migrating Zerto to the cloud. Both use a GUI interface and both have good failover tests.

I recommend Zerto but it does have data limitations when using a single VPG.


    reviewer2180742

Helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication

  • May 10, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

Currently, we use Zerto to replicate our production visual systems at our disaster recovery site in Germany. This allows us to easily meet our RTO and RPO.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto is easy to use. Zerto is the leading disaster recovery solution.

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

Zerto has helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication. Previously, we used to hire other providers for these services, but now we have everything in one system, saving us around 30 percent. For example, we used to have to keep a copy of our data on Veeam Backup, but now we can store it all in Zerto. This saved us time and money, and it has also made our IT infrastructure more reliable.

With Zerto, we are meeting our RPO better. Previously, it took us 20 minutes and now it is five seconds.

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

In our simulations, we observed a reduction in downtime when using Zerto.

Our recovery time with Zerto is excellent in data recovery situations, such as those caused by ransomware. We can save around five hours compared to other solutions.

Zerto reduced the number of people involved in our data recovery by 30 percent.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation.

What needs improvement?

File management can be improved. Zimbra is the only platform that allows for file replication.

The technical support has room for improvement.

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 a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is average. We have had some cases where we were not as comfortable with the outcomes as we were with other solutions.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We previously used a custom solution, but we switched to Zerto to unify our systems and improve visibility.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple. We were able to deploy one FPE every two weeks. One person was involved in the deployment.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto, which saved us 30 percent of our costs and improved our disaster recovery time.

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

The price is reasonable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate other solutions because we were confident that Zerto was the best, as indicated by the Gartner chart.

What other advice do I have?

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is deployed to replicate our on-premises and virtual infrastructure data between our two offices in Germany and Italy.

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

I recommend that new users take advantage of Zerto's flexible license program to buy one or two licenses and try them out before fully committing.


    Abdellateef Hasan

Easy to use with a straightforward interface and menus, and provides excellent analytics, reporting, and monitoring

  • February 27, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory.

How has it helped my organization?

Before Zerto, we used another solution that caused database crashes and did not offer certainty regarding disaster recovery. Zerto is more configurable and stable.

A DR site reduces downtime, especially with full VM backup and online synchronization. Zerto accomplishes this without affecting network efficiency, as synchronization occurs at specific intervals.

What is most valuable?

Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent.

Compared to other solutions, the speed of recovery with Zerto is faster. Our last backup solution, Data Protector, was very slow, but Zerto is rapid even in file retrieval.

The solution helped reduce our organization's DR testing; it's hard to say precisely how much, but Zerto does faster DR testing than other products.

What needs improvement?

Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster.

The platform measures the right speed of storage devices and gives an alert on the VPG if there is latency, but the nature of the alert suggests the solution isn't meeting the SLA. However, this shouldn't affect the health status of the backup. It should provide an express report that we should enhance our hardware rather than express latency as a threat to the backup capability.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using the solution for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is acceptable, we experienced an issue once, but the backup time is speedy.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution's architecture supports business owners to expand their disaster recovery capabilities as their infrastructure grows. Additionally, Zerto's ability to integrate with various cloud platforms and on-premises environments further enhances its scalability, offering a flexible and robust solution for organizations with evolving needs.

How are customer service and support?

Customer support is one of Zerto's best aspects; the support is excellent, and we can quickly get through to them. I rate them ten out of ten. The support staff are very kind and always solve a problem. I feel secure knowing I have access to such good support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We previously used Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is easier to use and more straightforward to configure.

Zerto replaced our legacy backup solution, Data Protector. This not only saved on the cost of the old product but also provided more stability and security to our company. We now have a new backup methodology, and it's a significant upgrade.

How was the initial setup?

I carried out the initial setup with support from Zerto, which was very straightforward.

The only requirement for maintenance is monitoring the solution and updating versions.

What about the implementation team?

I have 20 years of experience in IT, so I was well-positioned to carry out the deployment myself, with the assistance of Zerto support.

What was our ROI?

We have seen an ROI with Zerto.

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

The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated many other options but found Zerto the best, especially for our HPE environment. It's the most stable and straightforward tool, and even those with limited experience can operate it.

What other advice do I have?

I rate the solution eight out of ten.

I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable.

We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly.

I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.