One of the features I appreciate the most about the HPE Zerto Software is the simplicity of the replication, which allows the RPO to be in seconds rather than hours, which is what we were used to. The data loss is never substantial, not reaching minutes or hours.
The way HPE Zerto Software improves our RTOs and RPOs is by being by far the simplest we've used. Prior to HPE Zerto Software, our RTOs were in the hours. We've brought that down to an average of about ten seconds. The RTOs, since we're talking about having to bring a standby site, are in the minutes. We just make the DNS change here and there and we're back online, whereas previously it would require restoring backups to get the data. It's a big difference, going from hours down to minutes and seconds.
It's very easy to use. I have had to oversee rollbacks of infrastructure. We're training all of our IT organization, and I found it very easy. I would say it's getting easier.
This solution has helped to reduce downtime in situations, and we've definitely avoided or minimized downtime. I couldn't put a dollar value to describe that. In our internal operations, there's no financial impact if our entire operation goes offline for a day. However, there's internal staffing that we're paying to do nothing. We have contractors we're paying by the hour to sit idle. It reduces a lot of wasted man-hours.
My impressions of HPE Zerto Software's Near-Sync Replication are that it minimizes the loss of data. This solution has saved time and data for recovery situations due to ransomware or other causes, allowing us to go back from hours of data loss to just ten minutes. About five minutes of that was deciding whether to proceed.
With another solution that we used, it would have taken hours to recover. The previous solutions we used were all backup and recovery, requiring us to build new infrastructure, then restore the backups to that infrastructure. This solution has helped reduce our organization's DR testing significantly, making a lot of our testing now just business testing.
We perform a full DR test at the end of the year. It's made the DR testing a shorter exercise. We can test the entire environment in a weekend, failing it all over to the DR site, testing it, and failing it all back again. Prior to HPE Zerto Software, we could never successfully execute a full DR test in a weekend.