We're a managed services provider that uses Zerto primarily for disaster recovery as a service. We offer Zerto as a DR option for our clients. Our customers in the Bahamas need a DR option outside of the hurricane belt, so we have workloads throughout the world to ensure our customers have somewhere to restore from.

Currently, we run Zerto in a vCloud environment. All of the services are brought up in a vCloud environment. It saves us from having to constantly buy equipment. The vCloud environment enables us to spin up an environment as needed instead of having unnecessary hardware sitting there using resources.

We haven't had any major disasters that required us to use Zerto, but we perform two or three live failover tests with clients. Everyone seems to be pretty happy with the product and the turnaround time.

It's all about client satisfaction. They may not understand the underlying tech architecture, but they want to know how fast we can bring the environment back up. We can achieve fast restorations and restore sections if needed instead of the entire environment. It's been a great experience for us and our customers.

The RTO/RPO times are fast. The speed is probably the biggest selling point for us. It's not live replication, where you have two sites up at the same time, but our customers like the fact that they can restore within seconds.

It takes them nearly to the last point of connectivity, so it's seamless and easy to operate. It's easy to operate, and customers feel that they have a level of control. With some platforms, most things need to be done by the provider, but customers have a management platform in their environment. They can run tests without our direct involvement.

Another advantage is the ease of use. You can click through instead of typing in the code. It's all already scripted down to the network adjustments within the VMs and the timed delays for servers that need to come up in sequence. Overall, it's a good package for us to use. We started using it in about 2018 and haven't looked back.

We have an issue with the management platform because we don't always upgrade to the latest version, whereas the customers tend to constantly upgrade. Sometimes, we lose connectivity because something isn't supported.

For example, we have VMware version 7 update 3. This morning, a customer upgraded it without informing us. It's their responsibility to notify us because our environment is large, and we don't update every time a new version comes out. It's somewhat of a pain.

In addition to data, the other thing would be the hardware versions for VMware. I finally found a proper support matrix, but we ran into a few problems in the early stages. I don't know how to address this, but maybe when the version is going to update, the client could get a prompt saying that the cloud location is not on that same version. It would be a more efficient way to tell them instead of trying to figure it out.

It would also be nice if you could update without having to download a new installation file for Zerto Virtual Manager. Within the app, it could prompt you to install and perform the installation from within the application. Generally, it's relatively easy to use, but it gets a little complex when customers have special network requirements and need to customize how long they want the save points to be retained. We need to work with the storage team on the backend to see what makes the most sense for the client.

I have used Zerto for about five years.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I haven't had any serious issues aside from the problem with version differences between a client's environment and ours. That is just a matter of striking a balance with the clients. An IT environment can't update too frequently because you don't want a change to break something. Unfortunately, you can't stop the customer.

Support has been good about helping us troubleshoot those issues. It's easy to run a diagnostic tool and get the file. It's difficult to pull down a diagnostic file in some solutions because you need to do it via a command line. With this, it's just a couple of options you select. You run a diagnostic, save the file, and send it.

I work on the cloud management side, so it was already deployed. I wasn't involved in deploying the cloud portion. However, I installed all of the virtual management for customers and set up the environment for them. That part of it was easy. It was a click-through thing. Most of the time, we'll guide the customer through the process, so they can see it as well. We show them the step-by-step process of performing the updates.

Zerto is like a Ferrari. It's very fast but not the cheapest solution. You're paying a high price for quality and the assurance that you will have the environment up and steady.

There are tradeoffs, too. Our clients spend money on licensing but save on equipment. The customers could either buy a bunch of equipment or pay for Zerto licenses. That's where we come in. We provide you with a cloud solution that doesn't cost all this money upfront. The prices could always be better, but we don't complain so much about it because the savings come from other places.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10. A lot of people are trying to convince us to look at VMware backups instead, but I don't see the urgency because Zerto works for us. I don't see anything on the market that can restore in seconds as opposed to minutes or hours. For us to switch, we would need something that beats Zerto. Right now, nothing beats it.

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

We needed to meet the requirements of the client, and, previous to this solution, we would not have been able to meet the distance. That's why we implemented it.

The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The near synchronous authentication is great. It's critical for our organization.

We haven't had to use Zerto for blocking threats, however, we like that we have it as an option.

We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud or the AWS platform. It can do it. We just don't opt to use it that way.

We've used the solution to protect virtual machines.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Our RPOs are eight seconds. It blows past RPOs out of the water. It's great.

The speed of recovery is excellent. We've only had to test it and never used it in production. That said, it works better than anything we've used previously.

It's easy to migrate data.

Its ability to keep users collaborating during a data migration is good. It goes very quickly, so it's not a disruption.

The impact on our RTOs is great. It far exceeds what we've needed it to do.

It will save us time in a data recovery situation.

It's helped us reduce our DR testing. It has gone from hours to minutes under Zerto.

It enables us to make better use of our staff. We have reduced the number of staff involved in overall DR management.

Their data backup and restore have some ways to go. We looked at replacing our traditional backup system with Zerto and found it was lacking about a year ago. We have Commvault, which is very customizable and feature-rich in comparison. Their offering needs to be more robust.

I have used the solution for close to six years.

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it.

The scalability is very good. It can scale out to quite a lot of VMs.

I've contacted technical support once or twice. It was for integration and customization and they've been great.

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very straightforward. It took about a day to set up. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The only maintenance is the annual upgrade. It's pretty much set and forget.

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

It's hard to quantify the ROI.

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

We did look into VMware. It didn't meet our requirements.

The solution has not replaced any of our legacy backup systems.

It hasn't helped us to reduce downtime, as we haven't had any yet.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The only issue is that someone would move the VMs involved around. If you have a global team, make sure they understand the strategy and everyone is on the same page so that issues like that don't arise. We had silos on our side and once we dealt with that, we were fine.

We are using it to back up and replicate our critical infrastructure to allow us to replicate back when we are in a disaster recovery situation or a test.

When we were in a disaster recovery (DR) test, we could not pull back the data in a timely manner. Zerto allows us to pull the data back in a timely manner. We also can create better RTOs and RPOs. We wanted an RTO of fifteen minutes and we've managed that.

To be able to replicate back to production is the most useful aspect of the product. It allows us to do a disaster recovery test and recover within eight hours. I couldn't do that before.

I'm also working with near-synchronous replication. It's very important to be able to keep my production and replication in sync.

I like the idea of Zertos being able to block unknown threats and attacks. In fact, one of my machines had a little encryption on it, and it detected that encryption, and I had to go look at it. It was nothing, in that instance, however, it was a neat feature. We could see that it was definitely looking for encryption and malware on our side.

Our disaster recovery testing is a lot easier and is much better with this product. Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems. We're now down to five minutes, well below our original 15-minute RTO goal.

Instead of being up all night, trying to get data back, I would no longer need to stay up all night. I've saved about four hours.

The product is easy to use.

I haven't noted any areas of improvement just yet.

I'd like to see a way to do a one-stop shutdown of replication so I know I'm not missing data and can do my DR test.

I'd like to get better recovery point objectives and get more data back from our DR site faster.

The pricing could be a little bit lower.

I've been using the solution for about two months now.

The solution is stable. I have never had any issues.

I have not tried to scale the solution.

I have the solution for multiple locations in one department.

I've had two cases resolved via technical support. They helped me resolve issues I had with the installation. It did take me a few tries to resolve the issues.

We have used Veeam in the past. It's pretty good for certain things. However, it was hard to get continuous replication. Zerto is much easier to get that constant replication that we need. In terms of speed, for Veeam, it's about an hour right now across our secondary data center. It's not as fast. We moved to Zerto to get more data back from our DR site faster.

I was involved in the initial setup. The initial setup is easy. Veeam had an easier setup, however, once we got Zerto going, it was easier to scale up and test. It's easier to manage in the long run.

The deployment had a bit of complexity. The problem we had was that the VRAs would not install and we had to turn off some security features. The ESXi server was not well documented.

We set it up in multiple locations in one department.

It took us about three weeks to deploy the solution.

The maintenance is simple. I handle the maintenance myself.

We handled the initial setup in-house internally. I managed the process completely by myself.

It's just been a few months. We have yet to see a return on investment.

Zerto is a bit more expensive compared to Acronis or Veeam. That said, for us, the pricing was still reasonable. That said, we couldn't do all of our machines.

We also evaluated Nutanix and Acronis.

We chose Zerto since it has very good integration with HPE servers. It's also an industry standard. Many people are using it.

I've never used its immutable copies features. I've just discovered the feature and need to look more into it.

I didn't use the cloud while using this solution. I have used the solution to help me protect VMs in my environment.

I haven't had to migrate data just yet. The solution has yet to help us reduce downtime. It also has yet to help us save time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We haven't had an incident as of yet. While it's saved time, we haven't been able to test all of our machines and all of our servers yet.

At this point, the solution has not reduced the staff involved in data recovery.

This product augmented what we have in terms of legacy backup solutions. It did not replace anything.

My advice to others is to use Zerto for critical servers and things that need to be watched carefully for malware and encryption.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the product solely for disaster recovery.

The solution has helped with zero data loss from a transactional perspective. We have about forty servers in there today and they all serve a core function for our business. With Zerto, it's a matter of just being able to achieve zero data loss in minutes in terms of recovery time. That's amazing, and it really enables our business from a disaster recovery perspective.

The key benefit for us, and why we transitioned to Zerto years ago was really the recovery time. We went from hours to days on some of these applications, to minutes.

I like the granularity of the checkpoints. That's been extremely beneficial for us in testing. The near synchronous replication of Zerto is great. Knowing that it's within seconds or minutes allows us to achieve our goals from an RPO perspective.

I like the live failovers.

It's also a very easy-to-use product and very easy to administer from just a time perspective.

We're able to stand up our DR site within an hour if we need to.

We've been able to use it to do kind VM migrations from site to site in the past. Just it doing it behind the scenes allowed us to dramatically reduce any downtime for private cloud to a private cloud or even on-premise to private cloud migrations.

When handling migrations, it's fairly intuitive. There's a progress bar with percentages. Sometimes the timing fluctuates based on bandwidth. However, it's going completely in the background. It doesn't interfere with anything. When you are live, you can cut over with minimal downtime.

It's improved our RTOs. It's dramatically improved RTOs compared to what we had before.

We've had multiple unplanned failovers and the solution worked as expected. It's probably saved us 24 hours per instance.

The product has reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery situations. Before the solution, we had two or three different mechanisms for different types of systems in different applications. Now it's just one click, one interface, and one administrator.

When we do failover and failback, it doesn't maintain some of the settings that it should and I don't really understand why that happens. Quite regularly, anytime we do a failover or a fallback, we have to confirm all the settings for each VM. That takes a little bit of time. There is some power shell for that, so we've been able to automate that or at least optimize that. That said, that's my only complaint. Maybe that's a VMware limitation. I'm not sure.

We've been a customer of Zerto for several years. We started using it around 2017 or 2018.

The stability is good. Of course, from a maintenance perspective, sometimes with the failover, we have to re-sync or set up the settings again for whatever reason. I'm not sure if that is a limitation of the product or a limitation of VMware.

We have six or seven users that use the solution, and typically just two or three administrators.

We've scaled in that we have increased our VM count or VPG count. However, if we had thousands of VMs, I'd question the RTO or RPO capabilities at that point. However, ours is fairly small, under 40 VMs, and it has worked well for us.

Technical support has been great. In our last DR failover, we needed to put in an urgent ticket and we got a very prompt response on that. Based on my interactions with them, by far they have the best support.

We did use other solutions before, however, they were not as comprehensive as Zerto. We moved to Zerto so we could get our RTO and RPO down to minutes. Just being able to do everything with one administrator makes it much easier than before since we were doing some things from backups.

From a desk disaster recovery perspective, Zerto has replaced all legacy backups. From an administration and time perspective, we're definitely seeing some savings there.

The initial deployment was not very straightforward. We were able to deploy in a matter of hours. The foundational aspects of Zerto are pretty easy, however, managing VRAs and getting the replication going can be a bit more work.

For the initial deployment, we only needed a single administrator.

The solution definitely requires maintenance, just to keep everything up to date. However, it's very intuitive and everything happens very quickly, based on how many VRAs you have. We have three administrators capable of managing Zerto as needed.

We have three sites, either on private cloud or on-premises. They are all VMware-based.

Initially, a consultant assisted us with the base installation.

We have not calculated the ROI of the solution.

I was a little disappointed this year with the pricing, especially being a legacy customer of Zerto.

They changed the licensing structure as a result of the HP acquisition. We had a significant increase that was not very well communicated to us and wasn't planned for us and it hit us pretty hard. From a budgeting standpoint, we only got notified a couple of months before, however, we were already in our calendar year. We couldn't plan for it properly due to the timing. It was frustrating for us. The costs were up significantly for us this year. That is definitely something we will be mindful of and keep an eye on going forward. We may need to find an alternative if the costs keep increasing.

We did explore other solutions, such as VMware and other competitors. However, the ease of use and ease of implementation were good selling points and became a key deciding factor for us.

We have not used the immutable data copies as of yet.

In terms of dealing with threats or attacks, I've read a lot of the white papers, however, we haven't really had to have a need or a use case for that at this point. We're aware of that functionality, however, we haven't had a need to really utilize that, thankfully.

It took us a while to realize the benefits of the product. The initial phase for us was to cover about twenty different servers, which had interdependencies within the application. It was quite difficult. It took us about a year and a half to fully utilize our application or our initial phase of productivity. That said, that wasn't a Zerto limitation. That was the fact that we were changing IP addresses between our sites, so it was more of an application configuration delay. Zerto was ready to go on day one, basically.

We don't use Zerto to support disaster recovery on AWS. We're strictly on-premises hypervisors. We use virtual machines.

We haven't used Zerto's data recovery testing functionality.

I'd advise new users to utilize the failover testing. You really have to make sure the application functions. Within our use case, for example, we have very interdependent applications. Each piece requires lots of communication, lots of databases, lots of other application transactions that are interdependent, and lots of integrations within our application. Utilizing the failover testing was critical for us.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Zerto to replicate our gold systems. Gold systems refer to those that require recovery in a disaster recovery environment within 24 hours, with a maximum allowable data loss of one hour. Therefore, the Recovery Time Objective is 24 hours, and the Recovery Point Objective is one hour.

I would rate Zerto's ease of use a nine out of ten. The setup of virtual appliances required for data replication is straightforward and effortless. Some of the automation and tooling, such as changing IP addresses or running scripts after a disaster recovery process, is also very user-friendly and simple to configure.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is commendable. Usually, the data is only a couple of minutes behind. Hence, we are not employing synchronous replication, but asynchronous replication proves to be sufficient for our needs. It does not appear to deviate too far out of sync or fall too far behind, thereby effectively maintaining up-to-date data. Near synchronous replication holds significant importance as these systems are our critical business assets.

Zerto has helped us improve our organization by enabling disaster recovery both on-premises and in the cloud. We are transitioning towards cloud-based recovery. Our previous solution, before Zerto, only allowed us to replicate data in our on-premises data center, preventing us from migrating to the cloud. Zerto has unblocked us, allowing us to leverage cloud-based recovery now. We were able to realize the benefits within three to four months. The implementation was relatively quick and completed within a couple of months. Everything tested well.

Zerto enables us to perform disaster recovery in the cloud instead of a physical data center, and this is the reason we made the switch to Zerto.

Having the capability to perform disaster recovery in the cloud is of utmost importance to our organization. We are implementing disaster recovery in the cloud to facilitate the shutdown of one of our data centers.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment.

The speed of recovery using Zerto is good. The automation really helps make the recovery quick and easy.

Zerto's overall impact on our recovery time objectives is positive. It is fulfilling exactly what we needed it to do, making it a valuable tool. Additionally, it proves to be fairly cost-effective and easy to set up and use.

Although we have not experienced an actual disaster, Zerto has been instrumental in aiding our disaster recovery testing. Every year, we conduct a DR test to recover systems, conduct assessments, and validate our processes, and for this purpose, we have utilized Zerto. The results have been outstanding, as Zerto has saved us approximately 500 hours of time annually.

Zerto has automated the recovery process by utilizing those playbooks and re-IPing. This has significantly contributed to the reduction of DR testing efforts.

50 percent of the time that Zerto has saved has been allocated to value-added tasks.

Zerto can replicate data rapidly and cost-effectively. We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud. We use Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, and Zerto can recover data from both of these platforms. Therefore, it is not limited to a specific cloud provider like the Azure Site Recovery Manager.

Zerto has good role-based access controls. For cloud recovery, it allows replication over the Internet instead of private networking, which is really nice.

I would like Zerto to enhance the continuous backup aspect. If Zerto could replace Veeam from a backup perspective, that would be highly beneficial. Currently, we use Veeam for backup and Zerto for disaster recovery. It would be ideal if we could consolidate both functions into a single product rather than using two separate ones.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

I would rate Zerto's stability an eight out of ten. We encountered a problem once, but it was resolved.

I would rate Zerto's scalability a nine out of ten.

We previously used EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point. The reason we replaced them is that they utilized sand-based replication, which couldn't be used to replicate data to public clouds. As there are no sands in the public cloud.

Zerto's ease of use, when compared to EMC's Site Recovery Manager and Recover Point, is slightly better. For instance, during the setup process, we didn't require expertise in storage area networks, unlike our previous products. Therefore, it takes fewer skilled resources to set up, configure, and start using Zerto.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment took two months. We identified the core machines that we were previously replicating and gradually migrated applications one set at a time. An application could consist of two servers or even five servers. We can perform these migrations in waves.

For the deployment, we had two engineers, one support person, and one architect.

The Zerto team assisted with the implementation.

We have seen a return on investment.

Zerto is slightly expensive, but we do see the value in it.

We evaluated Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Among them, Zerto had the best feature set for near real-time asynchronous replication.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The speed of the RPO using Zerto is the same as our previous solution. We haven't lost anything, but we haven't gained much from an RPO perspective either. We had good technology; it was just limited by the cloud because there hasn't been any significant change.

We use Veeam as our backup product to perform some of the point-in-time recoveries.

We have only around six end users who log in to the console in total. Zerto is deployed in our primary data center and is also replicating to a secondary data center where it is deployed.

We have people who monitor whether the synchronization is proceeding well, but there is very little day-to-day overhead in terms of maintenance.

Zerto is a solid industry-recognized quality product.

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery replication side to side.

We were running VMware Site Recovery Manager and it ran well. It was a great solution compared to what we had before. We didn't have disaster recovery issues. We were just doing our test. It ran superbly. Zerto improved the amount of time it took to failover and address any issues. We went from failing over in about three or four hours during the test to it taking one hour. It was very fast.

It's in a single department in a single company. Luckily, we don't really have to support much of our field force. We have approximately 4,000 agents who are in eleven states, but we don't have to go out into the states. We're on in one building and it's one business unit. We manage the failovers but it's just one group management.

Approximately four users use the solution.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of management. It's very easy to manage. My team grew and a team member took over my role for Zerto support. He was able to pick the ball up and run with it. It was very easy for him to pick it up and go forward. I haven't had to do a lot of management of the product.

Our RTO is between four to ten seconds to our site, which is about a hundred and fifty miles north of my location. We bought dedicated lines and we've been very happy with Zerto's performance.

Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do.

The near-synchronous replication Zerto offers is exceptional. Our pipe is 10 GB and we haven't overloaded that connection. We are very satisfied with it.

During our test last year, we moved systems around for users to test with. We had some misconfigurations in the journal sizes, they just weren't big enough. There was logging left on some SQL servers. Our DR test lasted for three days. We had a dedicated group come in and test. We failed back to production and then put it in the test phase again. We did it all within thirty minutes, and it worked very quickly. We were very satisfied.

Zerto has had a major impact on our RTOs. We've been feeling the impact for a while. It's steady here. It's exceptional. SRM dwarfed as far as our targets for RTOs.

Zerto has reduced our DR testing. It reduced the amount of time we have to test because it's so easy to failover. We've been very pleased with that. It's even given us the option of where we might be able to test more often anytime. We would like to get to a place where we test it once a month where we would allow some business units to test, and then do another business unit the next month.

It used to take us a week for the failover process and testing. The testing has been majorly reduced to where it now takes a day. It took a day to failover, to get everything lined up and running, and it never worked. We never were able to officially have a successful DR test. SRM fixed that and then Zerto took it to the next level. It improved drastically. This has freed up staff to work on other tasks. It used to be that we needed a room full of people for the test where we now need two.

I don't feel like we're a big enough customer to warrant being called every week or every month but it would be good to get a little bit more contact with a salesperson or engineer group. Our account executive is very good. He's done a great job, but it was hard for him to tie down an engineer. It was a little bit of a strain to get somebody lined up to show us what version 10 was about. Once we got it, it was perfect. It would be nice if it could be easier to do that.

They have VPGs and VRAs. The management of that when trying to do a VMware upgrade can get a little finicky. You have to bring nodes or hosts up and down where the VRAs are running on the hosts. Sometimes the VRAs won't come back up or they may not respond. So when you're done doing your work, it could be that you have fifteen servers that are not replicating. So you'll have to stop, delete, manually remove what you need to do, recreate the VRA, and that's easy enough but you have to go through and do that, and then resync. That's part of IT. They are a little finicky.

Version 9.7 has been a little easier to work with, and it integrates with VMware a lot easier. It shuts down the VRAs. The VRAs are finicky about how they get shut down.

I have been using Zerto for six years.

We've been very satisfied with the stability of it.

It is scalable.

Support has been pretty good and responsive. I would rate them a nine out of ten. They're good.

Sometimes getting in touch with somebody is hard. We're not that big of a customer though.

It's been easy for new users to pick up and it was pretty easy for multiple people to work within the UI.

I was indirectly involved with the setup. It didn't take very long, it was like doing an upgrade.

You just build the servers and the proxy up, install the VRA, and then one by one had them sync.

Seven months ago we had to do a complete resync which took about four to five days. It was straightforward. There is a lot of documentation on Zerto's support site. My advice would be to get the documentation off their site. Open a ticket for support at the same time.

We have seen ROI in terms of resources and time. For our overall management of the system, it doesn't require too many resources. The upgrades are not too bad. You may have to dedicate a staff member to do it for a couple of days. I didn't have a lot of experience with it and the two upgrades I did were simple.

In terms of time, it has saved us north of 30%. It cut down on a lot of manpower. There has been a reduction in our management pattern from other prior solutions.

You pay to play and it's not cheap but it's worth it.

We know we have the capabilities to do disaster recovery in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center. We're replicating about 150 miles north of us. That's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years for us. We're making a pivot to where we know we're going to have to go that way with some of the cloud solutions.

We have not had to use it for data recovery due to ransomware. We have gone through the industrial hardening of our environment. We have been rated as very mature as far as our security stands. We have actually had some counterparts that experienced some issues and they didn't have anything in place, and it was very bad for them. Luckily, we have not had to use it in that capacity. We feel really good about its capability from the testing we've done. We know we can use it for malicious attack response.

We have tested it to help protect VMs in our environment and we have found that it will work for that. We got decent results with testing and I was very impressed.

In terms of it reducing our overall backup and disaster recovery management, it hasn't. We needed two staff members for the last two solutions we used. This year we will need three because I will also be involved with Zerto.

Zerto has replaced our DR and replication legacy solution. We're using Veeam for our backups but Zerto has replaced everything replication-wise. It saved costs to manage them by 20%.

My advice would be to do a POC for its concept and everything you get. Get it. Do it. It's a good product. I have friends that work with other companies that provide similar services and one of their engineers told me that you can't beat Zerto.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We utilized Zerto to facilitate the migration of servers within a data center from one location to another and employed it for disaster recovery purposes.

Zerto is user-friendly. The feedback I received from my team during the migration was that it was effortless to use. I wasn't directly involved in the implementation, but I participated in the decision-making process for purchasing and analyzing Zerto. However, the feedback I received from our team indicated that it was quite straightforward to use.

The benefit to our company was the ease of moving our servers using Zerto, which saved us a lot of time. I would like to emphasize that during the data center migration, it saved us a significant amount of time. Additionally, during the disaster recovery tests, when we actually used it, it worked exceptionally well. Zerto provides us with peace of mind. In the event of an incident, the ability to recover our data effectively also grants us peace of mind.

We utilized Zerto to transition from one cloud to another, ensuring that all of our operations and applications are now in the cloud. Having disaster recovery in the cloud is an important necessity for business continuity.

We use Zerto to help protect our virtual machines.

Zerto has helped reduce our disaster recovery testing.

With Zerto, we would not require additional staff or hire a third party to assist with disaster recovery.

Using Zerto for the migration was incredibly valuable, enabling us to save tremendous amounts of time. Thankfully, we have never had to utilize the disaster recovery feature. However, if the need arose, Zerto would be instrumental in preserving our business.

Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

Scalability is really good. We deployed it fairly quickly across our environment.

The technical support is responsive and helpful.

The feedback I received from our team was that the majority of the deployment went smoothly, but there were some technical aspects that were not covered in the deployment documentation, which they had to figure out.

The deployment required two people at times, but the majority of it was completed by one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto has saved time during our data center migration, and we are utilizing it for our disaster recovery. However, we have not yet calculated the return on investment for it.

Zerto previously had a perplexing licensing structure, but they have since resolved it by implementing a unified license.

We evaluated Veeam Backup and Replication before choosing Zerto. Zerto offers live recording, allowing us to rewind to the exact moment when the incident occurred. At the time of our selection, Zerto was the only company with this capability.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

For organizations planning to implement Zerto in-house, I recommend reviewing all the setup documentation beforehand.

We currently utilize Zerto as our disaster recovery solution. With Zerto, we replicate production virtual machines to our DR site. This approach enables us to recover and bring everything back online in a disaster swiftly. Our recovery point objective can be as low as five seconds, depending on the replication point. By journaling, we can also role back to the earliest journal period available. Currently, we keep VM journals for 30 days.

Additionally, we employ Zerto for scaling purposes and for conducting upgrade testing. This entails spinning up VMs in an isolated environment, allowing us to perform various tests. For example, a few years ago, we tested the upgrade of our active directory domain controllers. By validating processes within this environment, we can ensure their smooth execution in production. These are the two primary use cases for Zerto in our organization.

Zerto is very user-friendly. We can select the VMs by installing a small agent specifically designed for the host. This agent identifies all the VMs. Zerto integrates smoothly with VMware, which is our primary core platform. I believe it also functions well with other hypervisors, although I am only familiar with VMware. Therefore, the integration with vSphere simplifies the process of creating groups, runbooks, and other components necessary for building our disaster recovery environment.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication performs admirably. Many times when I check, we are only about five seconds behind in terms of production time. Of course, this does depend on network performance. There have been instances where the delay exceeded five seconds due to network blips or other issues. However, for the most part, we consistently remain within a five-second range of our production environment.

As a manufacturer, a significant portion of our operations relies on timely execution in order to ensure efficient production and timely delivery of our products. We closely coordinate with external partners and customers to minimize downtime and maintain a seamless real-time production process, which is crucial for us.

The ability to conduct faster disaster recovery testing and the potential for quicker recovery in the event of a disaster have been greatly improved. Before using Zerto, our approach involved log shipping and manual recovery, which meant that the best we could do was recover the previous backup from the previous night, assuming the backup was successful. This process would take hours or even days. However, with Zerto's automation, we can now recover within seconds—five, ten, or twenty seconds from the point of the outage. We can bring systems back online automatically and at a significantly faster pace than our previous manual approach allowed.

Zerto has significantly improved our recovery time objectives compared to what they used to be. Previously, we would have to restore from backups from the previous night and manually configure systems. Therefore, the recovery time objective has likely decreased from days to approximately an hour, or perhaps even less. It's challenging to determine the precise timeframe in a real disaster scenario since we conduct disaster recovery testing. However, it is undoubtedly much better than it was before, although pinpointing the exact time of an actual disaster is somewhat different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing from several days of preparation to just a single day.

Zerto is easy to configure and manage. The ability to quickly bring up VMs within a test environment allows us to test our disaster recovery functions and ensures that they would function just as well in an actual disaster scenario. This enables us to swiftly recover in the event of a disaster.

Zerto could be easier to configure when we need to perform data testing and establish network connectivity outside of the isolated environment. We encounter situations where there is a desire to test a printer during disaster recovery testing. However, due to the presence of an isolated environment, doing so can result in complex configurations. It can be made to work but requires some other adaptations like using Citrix VDI sessions that are dual homed within vCenter to accomplish those tasks.

Zerto has been improved on how it works with VMware Life Cycle Manager, but there can still be issues. Also, it seems that with the release of VMware VCF 9.X, full compatibility can only be achieved with a fresh deployment and configuration with VAIO.

I have been using Zerto for over ten years.

Zerto is highly stable. It is rare to encounter any issues with it. Typically, any problems that arise are due to changes made on our end that may have inadvertently affected it. However, Zerto remains an exceptionally stable product.

To the best of my knowledge, Zerto can scale to the extent that we require. I am not aware of any limitations, as we have not encountered any thus far.

The technical support is generally very prompt in responding, and highly knowledgeable, and they will continue working with us until the problem is resolved.

We previously used Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and completely replaced it with Zerto.

Zerto is much easier to use compared to RecoverPoint. Previously, with RecoverPoint, we could only program-specific logs, and the VMs we wanted to replicate had to remain on those logs. If we moved the data off those logs, replication would be lost. However, Zerto keeps track of the VM regardless of its location, making it superior to RecoverPoint in terms of configuration and management.

Zerto is a more cost-effective product than Dell RecoverPoint.

The initial setup is straightforward. We need a virtual machine, install it, push it through, and configure it to communicate with the host for deployment. I mean, it's a very straightforward process. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The human resources necessary to perform a disaster recovery test are undoubtedly available. It is more economical than RecoverPoint. Now, it has been many years, and I am uncertain about the cost disparity. However, on the whole, there is a decrease in various aspects regarding the product's cost and the number of work hours needed for disaster recovery testing which is a clear return on investment.

The pricing is straightforward. We are on an enterprise licensing model, and it is based on a per-VM basis. We have the option to purchase them in blocks. This approach is quite cost-effective as we do not replicate our development and testing environments. We only replicate the production environment. Therefore, we are not paying for the entire setup, but only for what we are actually replicating.

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Currently, we have a separate product that we use for backup, which has immutability features. However, we do not currently employ Zerto for immutability purposes.

We have considered using the cloud for disaster recovery, but currently, we maintain the same hardware at both locations. However, since we conduct all of our firmware testing and upgrades on our disaster recovery site first, we have decided to keep our own disaster recovery site instead of attempting to do it in the cloud.

We could easily transfer data to the disaster recovery system. One of Zerto's functions is to replicate data from virtual machines or migrate entire virtual machines, although we haven't utilized it for that purpose.

The only maintenance required is typically software updates. Whenever a new version is released, we must go through the process of upgrading Zerto. Other than that, unless there are any issues, it generally operates smoothly.

We just need to ensure that we know the number of virtual machines we would be replicating so that we can obtain the correct licensing. Otherwise, we will have to backtrack. If we underestimate, we will need to provide additional licensing. It is important to determine this information upfront, as well as the bandwidth between our site and the replication location, as it also affects our recovery objectives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

It's very stable.

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

I have not contacted their tech support.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.