I am actually a value-added reseller. I personally do not use Zerto. I have customers that use Zerto, and they use it as their cyber recovery. They have also used it to move VMs.

When exactly a company can expect the benefits of Zerto depends on the use case scenario. In the instances I have seen with my customer, it has been both near and immediate-term benefits. Since it is easier for them to use and they are able to work with it and get their workloads done, they also saw benefits from a budget standpoint down the road.

The most valuable features in Zerto are ease of use number one and the support that has come from the Zerto team. They have been very hands-on with 'we are here to help you, train you and teach you how to fish, so you can drive it yourself.'

For us, the impact that Zerto has had on the IT resiliency strategy is that we use it as a way to help our customers set up data recovery should something happen. What we appreciate about it is the snapshot and how much easier it is to access.

The near synchronous replication works very well. This is not my experience. It is my customer's experience. They have been very happy with it. They had a bunch of VMs they wanted to move since they wanted to migrate some stuff, and it worked very well for them. It actually helped them beat their timeline as it worked so well. They were going to have a very, very, very hefty renewal that they had to pay. And so it saved them lots of money. It worked quickly and they were able to meet their timeline.

It's helped with DR testing.

Better communication around pricing would be useful - particularly in light of the economic and tariff situation we have going on.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

We have not had any reports of instability in Zerto from clients. The use case I keep coming back to is our customer who used it to move a bunch of VMs. Once they got it up and deployed, they handily beat their schedule. At one point, they thought they were not going to get all the VMs moved and would have to do a renewal on part of them, however, the ease of use was so good with Zerto that they were able to migrate things much quicker.

Zerto's scalability has been good. One of the things that works for our customer set is what they call t-shirt sizing with extra small, small, medium, large, extra large and jumbo. Those are nice to have as a starting point to talk to a customer, however, then you can go in and tailor that specifically to the customer's needs.

I haven't had a need to contact Zerto's technical support.

I have used or sold alternatives to Zerto such as Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Zerto is the clear winner.

I find that the initial deployment of Zerto for a client is quite easy. The instances where we rolled it out at customers, the deployment has gone very smoothly. There seems to be something intuitive about Zerto that makes it easier for folks in a company to use.

There's not really any maintenance needed once deployed.

On average, four people are required for the deployment.

The pricing is competitive.

If I were to compare Zerto to its competitors, Zerto is the winner in data recovery.

I am not a technical person, so I cannot answer that from a technical standpoint regarding what Zerto does better or worse than its competitors. I can answer it from a customer ease of use perspective. The biggest thing we have heard is that it is easy to use and intuitive. The sales teams and technical resources that Zerto has are there to help answer questions and teach the customer how to use it in their environment, so they are able to do things after the Zerto resources are no longer there.

My clients have tried to protect the virtual machines in their environment. I have not seen any effects on RPOs or RTOs. I am an official reseller of Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto overall a nine.

My current use cases for Zerto involve the protection of data to ensure that any ransomware or threats will not impact our endpoints. I have used Zerto to help protect virtual machines in my environment. The majority of our infrastructure is virtual, while less than half is physical.

I've seen an impact on our RPOs and RTOs as our return to service has become much faster. We can return to business as quickly as possible.

Our DR testing has been reduced. We still do it once a year, but now it's more about checking off boxes because we know what to expect. We must ensure the certificates and all related items are good, examine the return times, RPOs, RTOs, and verify everything is still functioning properly.

Zerto has enabled the team to focus on engineering and spend less time developing APIs to work with custom solutions and security applications, positively impacting our IT resiliency strategy.

What I appreciate most about Zerto is that we can implement it via cloud now and on-premise. Mobility also stands out to me. The interface of Zerto is much easier to use.

Zerto could improve the product by lowering the cost.

I've been using Zerto for about three or four years, implementing it in various scenarios.

I have not noticed any crashing or instability with Zerto.

Zerto scales appropriately for my pretty big company.

I have not had an occasion to contact their technical support.

A few years ago, I used an alternative. I prefer Zerto over Veeam, which is why we switched from one to another. It's apples and oranges: Zerto has a much smoother interface and is much easier to use with better features.

It was pretty easy. I do not recall hitting too many roadblocks.

It took around three to four months total to fully set up Zerto, including network configuration, firewalls, and all other components.

Zerto requires basically no maintenance on my end now. It's managed by Zerto tech, so we don't have to test packages and similar tasks. They inform us of product updates, plan for them, and implement them as SaaS-approved changes.

Zerto is not overly expensive. It's worth what we're getting for it, but with tough times, a discount would be beneficial.

I have not yet encountered a situation where I needed to perform data recovery due to ransomware or other causes. I will knock on wood as we haven't had that kind of incident yet. Thanks to Zerto and some other systems we use on the back end, though never say never.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

We use Zerto primarily as a cloud provider to set up either ground-to-cloud or cloud-to-other cloud sites for disaster recovery.

We also use it as a migration tool to get people's virtual VMs from ground to cloud.

Another use case is to protect our virtual machines in our environment. We have our own internal IT, and we protect them with Zerto, but the vast majority, probably 98% or 99% or even more, of what we do is with customers since we're a cloud service provider. As a service provider, we're not classified as an MSP. We do resell Zerto to our clients.

What I appreciate about Zerto is the speed to recover. We have two ways that we migrate them into the cloud: one is with Zerto and one is with Acronis. Acronis is a bare-metal restorer that takes much longer to do the restore, depending on the size of the VM.

I appreciate that Zerto already has the disk synchronized to the cloud, and it just updates deltas every five seconds or so. Should there be an instance, such as a migration, or if the customer has been ransomed, or if they want to roll back for any reason, they can do it because we have their data in the cloud.

When I was an IT manager, our RPO and RTO were measured in hours or days; now it's measured in minutes, which is huge for disaster recovery.

The interface and ease of use of Zerto make it easy. We're getting into version 10 now. The version 10 update 4 took really long to deploy, and we had to back off and do update 2 because that seems to deploy much quicker.

Other than that, it's pretty easy to deploy and manage; we can set it up through Zerto Cloud and update it remotely.

I see the benefits of Zerto immediately after deploying it. As a former IT manager, when I saw what it did, it was a revelation, and I thought this is excellent for disaster recovery. Zerto's near synchronous replication is fantastic. It helps our RPO and RTO and is beneficial all around. In terms of RTO and RPO, Zerto improves them to seconds. It indicates right in the health of the VPG how many seconds the RPO or RTO is.

Our DR testing with Zerto is much quicker. We encourage our customers to do testing so they get familiar with recovery processes. We maintain a playbook and a method of procedure, and every test adds something new to the MOP, improving how quickly we can resolve any disaster.

Zerto has a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We do it for customers, making all the difference in the world. It's not just about me as an IT manager using Zerto; as a service provider, we host people's data in the cloud for disaster recovery, making instantaneous recovery possible that wouldn't be as quick otherwise.

In terms of improvement, Zerto does reasonably with support and responds quickly to help us. I don't know if there's anything they could do better, but we'd prefer Zerto to work with our open cloud product for disaster recovery and migrations. So far, they haven't made their product compatible with KVM, and we would appreciate seeing that.

I have been using Zerto in my career for four years.

I haven't seen much instability with Zerto; it seems pretty stable overall.

Zerto scales efficiently; we have hundreds of hosts, with production and disaster recovery environments. We set it up to replicate, such as from Grand Rapids to Indianapolis or Detroit, so it scales pretty efficiently.

Zerto's support is reasonably good. If they know I'm on the call with a customer, they usually join a Zoom session quickly to help resolve issues. Sometimes it's resolved quickly, while other times it may take two or three sessions, but they're generally pretty good.

I use alternatives to Zerto, as I'm a Veeam engineer certified in Veeam. We use Acronis and Cohesity, but in my opinion, there's nothing that works for disaster recovery quite like Zerto. The main differences between Zerto and Veeam are ease of use and convenience.

Veeam allows a restore of a server in a test environment while detecting any malware before connecting to the network, which I haven't seen in Zerto. Zerto just replicates what's there without evaluating for malware. Zerto is quick and easy to use while Veeam is more complicated but has more capabilities for backup. I haven't greatly used Veeam's continuous replication feature, but from my experience, Zerto is easier to set up and use, and it's less expensive as.

When I first deployed Zerto about four years ago, it took about 15 to 20 minutes to set up after the client had a Windows server ready. We'd give them the installer and set it up, then pair it with their hosts. After installing the VRAs and setting up the VPGs, once the first VPG is set up, we can do the rest without client involvement. Overall, the total time ranged from half an hour to 45 minutes, depending on how many they wanted to set up initially.

I'm a Professional Services Engineer, which means that I implement projects. When our salesman sells disaster recovery with Zerto to a client, I'm the one who sets it up, creates the VPGs, and ensures all the syncs work properly; the long-term maintenance is handled by another team.

Zerto has a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We do it for customers, making all the difference in the world.

Zerto is easier to set up and use, and it's less expensive.

We use alternatives such as Acronis and Cohesity.

The recovery process depends on the customer. Zerto is one of those things that we set up and monitor, but if the customer isn't monitoring their VMs, it can complicate things.

We had one customer who made a decision to protect only a few of their VMs and then got hacked, which wasn't Zerto's fault or ours; it was their decision.

However, for customers that have everything protected, we've had quite a few successful recoveries. There have been situations involving ransomware or data recovery situations when we used Zerto. I haven't personally been involved in one, but our company has had multiple incidents where we were able to recover without paying the ransom.

Zerto does require maintenance on our end. We register the client in the cloud, and if they move away from us, we unregister them and remove their tenant. We also have updates to do, including the Zerto virtual manager and the virtual replication appliances on the hosts. With hundreds of hosts and multiple data centers, we have a lot of work to do, which is why we have someone dedicated to updating Zerto.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 9.

I use Zerto for replications for my DR site.

It allows us to have effective backup and recovery.

It hasn't helped anything directly, however, it does give us peace of mind to have a backup we can rely on.

The ease of use, ease of setup, and the dashboard, which is quite user-friendly, are valuable features. Zerto is very impressive and much more resilient. It's very easy to learn. Within a day a user can get up to speed.

It makes us more resilient overall.

The near-synchronous replication is impressive. We have around seven-second RPO times. Our RPO used to be 24 hours. It's drastically reduced RPO.

We have our own data center that we replicate to, however, we're actually in the process of changing that to replicate to a cloud environment.

We've reduced downtime by 90%.

We've been able to reduce DR testing time by 75%.

The speed of recovery is 90% faster.

Zerto works great. The pricing could always be lower.

I have been using Zerto for probably about seven years.

The solution is very stable. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I'd rate scalability nine out of ten.

I use Veeam for backup and replication. With Veeam, I only had the 24-hour replications.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Implementation probably took just a couple of hours. We had two users involved in the setup, and we have it set up in two locations. There are two people who work directly with the solution. There is a bit of maintenance in terms of updating. They are pretty easy and quick.

I haven't saved any costs since I haven't had a disaster.

The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

It's way better than anything else on the market. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I would rate the solution to other users. It works very well.

We use Zerto at a very large public sector undertaking in India that manufactures power equipment.

It is being used for continuous data protection, replication, and recovery. We have a consolidated data center in Hyderabad, India, and we are replicating the data to another data center in Hyderabad. For replication and continuous data protection, we are using Zerto between both sites.

It simplifies management. The console provided by Zerto is very simple to use. With the click of a button, we can do the failover and failback.

It helps with business continuity. We can easily failover from one site to another and back. We are able to do most of the operations very easily.

It does asynchronous replication. When the data gets modified in the main data center, the modified data is immediately replicated to the other data centers. It helps to maintain minimum RPO in seconds and the RTO in minutes.

We have a number of virtual machines for databases, application servers, web servers, Internet servers, and proxy servers. We are using Zerto for the complete replication of these VMs to the other data center.

Our RPOs are in seconds, and our RTOs are in minutes. That is critical for the applications. Earlier, we were using another replication software from IBM. We did not get the same RPOs and RTOs. Zerto is helping us a lot in preventing data loss. The data loss is minimal. It is only in seconds. This is a very important feature of Zerto, where it maintains RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes.

In November 2024, we faced a ransomware attack. With the help of Zerto, we were able to identify the journal entry that was malicious. Zerto gave us an alert, and we were able to identify the clean copy by going backward. We went back a few seconds. It maintains journal entries every five seconds, so we were able to identify a good copy of the data. We were then able to do the failover. Because of Zerto, we had minimal data loss. We were able to identify a good copy of the data and do the failover to the main data center.

With Zerto, we have become more resilient and scalable. We were able to scale from a few VMs to about 250 VMs. Our scalability has improved a lot because of Zerto. The ransomware resilience feature has made us more resilient. We chose Zerto over VMware Site Recovery Manager because VMware Site Recovery Manager did not have the ransomware resilience feature. In November 2024, when we faced an attack, with the help of Zerto, we were able to recover within seconds with a minimum amount of downtime. We were up and running quickly.

The features I find most beneficial about Zerto include continuous data protection, easy configuration, and simplified management with a user-friendly interface. We were able to configure it easily for our needs. Continuous data protection between our two data centers is also valuable.

I also like its scalability and flexibility. We have scalability from a few virtual machines to more. We can increase the number of VMs according to our requirements. Zerto scales very easily with our increased number of VMs.

Zerto also provides ransomware safeguards. While doing the continuous data replication, Zerto creates journal entries. When the data gets transferred to the other site, Zerto checks whether the replicated data is malicious or clean. If it is a good copy, it makes a journal entry. If there is any malicious code, it immediately gives an alert. We are very happy with this ransomware protection feature of Zerto.

Its pricing could be better. Also, Zerto needs to improve its reporting capabilities and provide better dashboards. A number of times, I had to contact Zerto for more reports. They are very customer-friendly. They helped us and gave us some customized reports, but its reporting capabilities could be better.

I have been using the solution for about two years.

It has improved scalability significantly. I was able to scale from a few virtual machines to about two hundred fifty virtual machines.

The support team is very customer-friendly. When I raise a ticket, they respond quickly with minimal waiting time. I often get a call within half an hour. Their customer support is reliable and fast.

Previously, I used some other replication software from IBM but did not achieve the desired RPOs and RTOs. This led me to choose Zerto.

The deployment was very easy. With a few clicks, we were able to configure Zerto for both of our data centers in Hyderabad. It was very easy to configure. It has a very intuitive classical user interface. The configuration was done with minimal clicks.

In about one hour, we were up and running with the first replication. We were able to do the first replication within an hour from our main data center to our secondary data center in Hyderabad. It is efficient and reliable.

Its maintenance is being taken care of by Zerto.

I am the main database administrator, and two of my colleagues also participated. Three of us were involved.

Zerto is definitely more costly compared to its competitors, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager. It may not be suitable for small and medium-sized industries.

We considered VMware Site Recovery Manager but did not opt for it because it did not offer the ransomware resilience feature like Zerto.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. The software is exceptional in terms of continuous data protection, resilience, scalability, agility, and ransomware protection.

Our use case is disaster recovery replication.

We primarily use it for the automation orchestration for disaster recovery. We were looking for a solution that could do individual virtual machine replication failover and failback, and Zerto provided that.

We conduct DR tests biannually. With Zerto, our DR tests go much faster. Orchestration is much better. Previously, these events took two to four hours, and they are now down to under fifteen minutes. The speed of the DR test is better. Accuracy is better. Everything is faster all around. It has saved 15% to 25% of time.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Right now, our recovery is in seconds of several critical VMs. There is more than a 95% reduction in RPO and RTO time. It has been significant.

We also have more accuracy. There is about a 50% improvement. Human error has decreased by 50% as well. Things seem to be going a little bit better. We are working on more scripting and automation so that we get to the eventual goal of push-button. Right now, engineers have to push buttons within the Zerto console, but we are trying to work on full automation orchestration so that we can get it down to five minutes from fifteen minutes.

Zerto has saved downtime by 25%. From a quantification standpoint, there are 15% to 20% cost savings.

We are using anti-ransomware approaches on Zerto as well as data protection backup and primary storage, so at this time, Zerto has not saved time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes, but we are investigating use cases for anti-ransomware recovery.

Zerto is quite central to our IT resiliency strategy. Several of our big customers require it. DR is a service that we sell, so it is pretty important for us.

Many aspects of Zerto are valuable, such as the automation and orchestration features. The dashboarding shows recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, indicating seconds or minutes remaining, which is useful.

The ease of installation and use of virtual replication adapters on hosts is beneficial. The ability to simulate a disaster recovery failover commit and see what the results are going to be before we perform the commit is valuable.

Near-synchronous replication has some trade-offs. With near-synchronous replication, we get almost all the information up to date at the destination site, but the trade-off is that sometimes that could take a lot of CPU cycles, network bandwidth, and troubleshooting. A few versions back with Zerto, there were some bugs in the software that were causing constant replication back and forth that was driving a lot of network bandwidth utilization over the network, and we did not know why until we found out it was a bug. It depends on what your business or application really requires. If it requires near-synchronous, you have to enable that. However, if Zerto can make it easier or have a smaller footprint by sending larger payloads or having network compression, it will be a little bit easier. On wide area networks and local area networks, that would definitely be preferred.

We have had some issues running Linux virtual machines on the new version. There were some issues with virtual replication adapters on Cisco UCS hosts running VMware vCenter 8. There were several things we had to do with installation and getting the replication adapters to work. Integration with Keycloak for Active Directory authentication using new Linux VMs was challenging, but it is now functioning well.

I have been using the solution for more than three years personally, and the company has been using it for five or ten years.

I would rate the stability a solid nine or ten. There have not been many bugs. It has been running perfectly.

I would rate the scalability at about a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement, but that is also applicable to our side. We should slice and dice our databases into smaller chunks so that Zerto can get them replicated. Customers need to follow good engineering practices for optimal product use. It is not fully a Zerto problem; it is a shared responsibility.

It is being used at multiple locations. We are a small to medium-sized organization. We have two IT administrators working on it. We have about 200 to 500 users.

I would rate their technical support a ten out of ten. The team is really good, especially when we get someone from Ukraine. They have a very good Ukrainian support team. We sometimes request those guys specifically because they know the product in and out.

We have used other solutions, such as Commvault. We have used remote replication from other data protection backup vendors like Cohesity, which did not have a lot of automation. We tried using NetApp SnapCenter, but it did not have the level of automation that Zerto did. I find Zerto to be the fastest, easiest, and least complex solution compared to others.

I was not involved in the initial deployment. In terms of maintenance, it is not too bad. Getting everything migrated from the old version to the new version took some cycles and time. It just runs in the background with minimal upkeep.

I believe the return on investment is 15% to 25% because disaster recovery is a service that we sell to customers. We are able to do it quickly, efficiently, and accurately with replicable processes and resilience.

It is cost-efficient because we have perpetual licenses. We are a small to medium-sized business, so cost is a pretty big important factor. Being cost-efficient with perpetual licensing is a key factor.

I would recommend Zerto to others for high availability, scalability, near-real-time synchronous replication, ease of use, VM stability, and competitive pricing.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery between our private data centers.

Near-synchronous replication is the primary reason we chose Zerto, as nobody else is able to meet the same replication times. We have some special contracts, so Zerto is the only one that can meet those contractual requirements.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our RTOs. We have probably reduced our RTOs by 70% to 80%. Previously, we relied on manually replicated backups that we had to restore from, resulting in significant RTO compared to Zerto.

We use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in our environment. When it comes to recovery, if other solutions take five minutes, with Zerto, we can usually get them up in under a minute. Our RTOs are much quicker on Zerto. It is probably 20 seconds on Zerto versus an hour with others.

We have had multiple live disaster recovery events where Zerto saved us a lot of downtime. We have not had any ransomware situations, but it has saved us time in generalized data recovery.

Zerto has helped reduce DR testing. For the customers for whom we use Zerto for disaster recovery, we usually do DR testing once a month, and it takes us probably two minutes to run those DR tests. With other solutions that we use for our wider customer base, it takes us about two days to go through all of our DR testing.

Zerto has had a significant impact on our IT resiliency strategy. The tier-one customers that we use Zerto for have very strict requirements for their disaster recovery capabilities, and Zerto is able to meet those contractual obligations pretty easily.

We were able to realize its benefits immediately after the deployment.

The low SLA times are valuable. It is very easy to use with a straightforward user setup.

The biggest area for improvement is the technical support side. Although it has improved somewhat, after the HPE acquisition, it became apparent that level-one technical support was moved to groups unfamiliar with the Zerto product. As experienced users of Zerto, when we need to open a ticket, dealing with level-one technical support can be tough. We often need to escalate immediately due to our internal skill set surpassing level-one support capabilities. That is the biggest complaint we have with Zerto.

We have used it for roughly five years, possibly six years.

The solution is very stable, especially in the newest version. There were some challenging times shortly after the HPE acquisition, likely due to engineering changes. However, the newest version is incredibly stable, and we have no complaints.

We have not had to worry too much about scalability because we have a fairly limited implementation.

Once past level-one support, the experience improves because we then interact with people familiar with the product. I am assuming that the level-one support is generalized HPE technical support, and they are relying on Zerto Runbooks to be able to help us. They do not have a lot of familiarity with the product.

For the quality of support, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Before Zerto, we primarily used Veeam, but we needed faster RTOs for tier-one customers, who had contractual obligations for RPO and RTO. At that time, Zerto was the only solution that provided the necessary speed. The rest of the industry had not caught up. Currently, we use Cohesity for everything else, but for customers with stringent standards, we rely on Zerto.

Zerto is definitely easier to use from a GUI standpoint and is very straightforward for automation. It is a one-click solution for us to do our disaster recovery events.

Its initial deployment is very easy. We recently did a deployment of version 10 for our VMware 8 deployment. We completed it in a single day, taking approximately three or four hours.

It requires maintenance but it is very infrequent. We need to make manual changes to our Zerto environment maybe once a quarter.

Just one person handled the implementation.

I am not very involved with the pricing, but from my understanding, it is fairly expensive for us. This is why we limit its use to our tier-one customers. We have other disaster recovery solutions for our other customers due to the cost.

It is pretty straightforward. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

Primarily, I use it for disaster recovery. I like the Zerto RPO. I can perform short recovery and recovery time. That's the reason I go for Zerto.

The retention and the snapshot retention, which I am able to do every three seconds or every five seconds, are valuable. That is primarily what I like the most. The RPO I am looking at is five minutes. I need to bring things up, referring to recovery time. I need it every five seconds. In comparison in terms of ease of use, Zerto offers a much better user experience. It has basically reduced our disaster recovery time by at least fifty percent. In terms of IT resiliency, this provides a better SLA to the user. That's how it helps me.

The mission critical apps, like the ERP system or any casino software, are areas that I always hope to improve.

I have been working on Zerto for the past five years.

Primarily, medium enterprises use it. Most of my sites are customers using Zerto, and these are usually medium enterprises.

Some customers use different solutions. They use this data, Acronis, and another called Shadow Protect.

If I am talking about just deploying it, setting up the policy probably takes less than an hour. But the whole idea is that I do the backup depending on the size. If not deployment, then having the full Doctor replication takes time. So, if the replication will take a time slot, that's the consideration. Is it complex to deploy? It is quite straightforward as long as I plan it properly.

The ROI is primarily calculated based on downtime. It is all tied back to how mission critical the apps are. When an app is down, I assess the impact on production or the business. The ROI is justified based on the criticalness of the apps.

Primarily, it's VM only. It's more about recovery times and a feature called Zerto Khing, which allows you to group applications. You can do group Doctor, which is an advantage. From a technical perspective, Acronis is not meeting the RPO that I require. This is the primary reason for using it. Zerto is more expensive. In licensing, Zerto is probably double the price of Acronis. It works perfectly well, and I've been using Zerto for the past years. The overall product rating is nine out of ten. I rate the solution nine out of ten.

I initially started using it as a disaster recovery solution, and I am still using it as a cyber test recovery solution. I also began to use it as a migration tool for cloud, from on-premises to cloud.

The replication feature stands out. The way I can sync servers from on-premises to the cloud ensures the consistency of the VMs without hampering their state. This is a very beneficial feature. Once replication is initialized, the complete state of the server is replicated, known as the initial sync. Subsequently, the Bitmap sync occurs, capturing changes on the protected server in real-time and replicating them to the protected site as well. For example, my primary site in Austin, Texas, used to recover to Santa Clara. Recovery was previously tedious, taking a whole day for all servers to bring up and validate their consistency. With the deployment of Zerto, this has significantly improved.

In newer versions, the success rate compared to older versions is quite low. I have tried to implement Zerto version ten in my environment, but for some reason, multiple errors occur, forcing me to revert to the previous version. Despite the previous version being out of support, there is no alternative to getting the newer version working. For example, when a requirement arises to replicate one server located in a different vCenter to another site, I download the latest version and deploy it, but I face issues deploying the VRA agent on the ESX host. This keeps failing despite multiple cases raised with Zerto support, none resolved in a timely manner. By the time the issue is looked into, it is often too late for my requirements, leading me to abandon Zerto ten installation and revert to the earlier versions. Presently, there is an open case with Zerto support concerning Zerto ten deployment issues, yet no fix has been provided. Hopefully, a resolution will be found soon.

I have been using the solution for five to six years.

Initially, I had a few stability issues. While some remain unresolved despite submitting cases, I have found workarounds. These issues do exist, as random crashes occur. Understanding how it works, I avoid troubleshooting, which risks the replication servers. Instead, I promptly delete the malfunctioning elements and set them up again to resume replication, ensuring stability.

In terms of basic troubleshooting, they perform well. However, when engineering support is required, delays occur. One notable example is the challenges faced during total implementation. I have raised three to four cases, yet due to urgency and delays, they were not resolved on time. When more complex issues arise, support takes additional time, but they handle simpler issues within two to three days.

Earlier, I used Site Recovery Manager from VMware, which had errors and delays, and was not as flexible compared to Zerto. This prompted me to switch to Zerto. I am also using ASR, the Azure Site Recovery Manager, for cloud-to-cloud operations. Although recent features were introduced, I have not thoroughly explored them, leading to the adoption of ASR.

The setup process took around one month because I was unfamiliar with the product, necessitating some learning. I had daily calls with the account manager and managed to set it up to Zerto's standards within a month.

The deployment was a one-person job handled by two individuals, with me being the primary one. It was straightforward enough for a single person to manage.

I can give it nine out of ten.

Our systems are primarily Windows-based, but a big portion of the organization also runs on AS/400. About 40% of our systems are AS/400.

We use Zerto to replicate data from a primary data center to a secondary data center. In the previous incarnation, we used Zerto to replicate our secondary data center and also Azure because we were looking to start moving more and more things to Azure. We were considering Azure to have someplace where we could run some of our critical systems in the event we did not have much capacity in the secondary data center or it just made sense to leverage Azure for a particular application.

Zerto’s near-synchronous replication works very well. Most of the time, our systems are running about three seconds behind the primary, which is something most people are not going to complain about. It also has the ability to take you back to a point in time where everything is in sync. You can start from that point and maybe lose a couple of transactions as opposed to a typical backup environment where you could lose hundreds of transactions as a result of an outage. It can help revert systems to a specific point in time, providing continuity where data loss is minimal compared to traditional backup solutions.

We saw the benefits of Zerto right away. It gave us the confidence that if something happened, we would be able to restore our data. A notable benefit is the ability to conduct failover testing in a virtual environment. We can confirm operations without affecting external users. The software audits its processes, offering detailed reports.

Zerto has also continued to upgrade features, including Secure Vault and tools for immutability, enhancing ransomware protection, but a hardware change is required to fully benefit from Zerto's ransomware solutions. We have to go with their hardware versus what we are running. We can take advantage of some of the things that they do to help with ransomware, but we cannot get all the way there without switching the hardware.

We use Zerto to protect virtual machines. Our RPOs have moved. Prior to Zerto, and at different places, we have used other solutions such as Pure Storage or IBM replication solutions. Most of these solutions tend to have an RPO of minutes or more, whereas, with Zerto, we are looking at an RPO of less than ten seconds or something like that. That was one of the big differences we saw. It is also an integrated solution. You move the entire environment as opposed to some of the other environments where you connect to the storage, and then the storage is doing the replication. At the point at which something fails, you have to reconnect servers back up to the right hardware before you can get started in recovery. With Zerto, your recovery time goes down, and your RPO becomes much better.

The recovery time or RTO is much better with Zerto if you have the right bandwidth and other things. If you have an issue with latency or bandwidth, you may see those RTO numbers go up a little bit. Generally, RTOs are much better.

We have not seen Zerto reducing downtime in any situation. We have not necessarily seen an improvement there.

In terms of time savings in a data recovery situation, we went through a ransomware event at the last company. I have seen Zerto help from a ransomware perspective because one of the things that Zerto does is it maintains a whole bunch of snapshots as it goes along. In a ransomware situation, you can go back to the time before you were hit by the ransomware. You can go back in time and recover those servers. You can scan them to make sure they do not have whatever malware was installed for the ransomware, and then you can recover.

Zerto has had a huge impact on our resiliency strategy. It allows us to be able to leverage our secondary data center for a major event. It also frees us up to do more things in the local environment such as leveraging SQL Always On.

Zerto has not helped us to reduce overall DR testing. We would like to do more testing with Zerto, but some folks are very comfortable with just Zerto saying everything is okay. On the other hand, Zerto has been able to help us increase our testing where we could not do it before. That does not mean that we are satisfied with where it is. We would like to do more with it.

I appreciate the real-time nature of Zerto. It continuously copies data, maintains synchronization, and allows rapid recovery of key systems. In most situations, the recovery delay is approximately six seconds, minimizing data loss. It gives us the ability to recover without losing a bunch of data.

Additionally, it facilitates migration between environments. We are in a business that does a lot of acquisitions and divestitures. That can be tiring, but Zerto makes our path smooth because we can use it to replicate something to another location and then bring it up there.

When it comes to failover tests, we would like to be able to take that extra step to shut things down and see what it looks like at the other site versus just doing it in a virtual environment. That is one thing I would push back on them. I would like the ability to perform actual failovers more easily compared to our current process. In the event of an issue, we can switch and bring back servers smoothly, but when we do the tests, currently, Zerto's test failovers are virtual. We cannot get end users to come access those systems. I would like to be able to do a test where we failover and rebuild the network connections so that end-users can hit that center or server and test. Improving testing capabilities would be advantageous.

When it comes to deployment, one improvement could be being able to visually see virtual private groups and server names. Although the reporting is comprehensive, occasionally, people use long names that do not display fully on the monitoring page. Despite this minor issue, deployment has been easy, and we rarely need support.

I initially explored Zerto around 2018. That was when I first became aware of it and initiated a pilot project. It was not until around 2023 that I began working in an organization actively using it.

I have not observed any instability. Occasionally, systems might run out of space, which is a common issue in any setup. However, the software alerts us effectively, allowing prompt resolution. Overall, I have not seen any stability issues with the system.

I believe Zerto scales quite well. In our current environment, we manage around 200 servers, with licensing that supports up to 500. Scaling is largely about expanding compute and storage capacity. There are no significant barriers to scalability with Zerto.

They have support, but we do not tend to need support from them. They have a lot of good material online to learn about the product. For the most part, it just runs and does not complain about anything.

I have not personally contacted technical support. In my previous organization, other team members, one of the four or five colleagues, reached out to tech support.

I have used and explored several solutions, including Commvault and NetWorker. We have also used Rubrik, which effectively manages storage across data centers.

We constantly monitor available technologies to create strategies for using Zerto alongside others like Rubrik and NetWorker. We use Rubrik for certain things and NetWorker for other things, but without Zerto or any of the others, it would not work. Zerto's development aims to substitute some tools by enhancing functionality. They continue to work to add functionality that could then help us eliminate some of the other tools that we are using because we can get the same functionality out of Zerto.

It is extremely easy to deploy. The deployment is straightforward. Once the virtual replication appliances are connected to the environment, the system is ready to start. After licensing, replication begins.

In this particular organization, it was deployed before I got here. At the previous organization, it took a few weeks or a month. We had to set things up and wait for some storage. We then rolled it out. The actual rollout was something that was done overnight, and it was relatively easy to do.

The maintenance that it requires includes upgrades to the latest version of the software. There might be features that you want that are not available in the current version. Overall, the system just runs itself, but you may get an alert that says that this particular system has gone out of bounds of its RPO. You can go in to find out the problem. You might need to add space to the journaling system so that it can get back up again.

We had a team of probably four or five individuals handling the implementation.

We have always been able to get the pricing worked out. At this new company I am right now, we are doing well. We sometimes go through a third party to help us with pricing, but Zerto is fairly decently priced, especially when you consider some of the other solutions that are out there which could be very expensive.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.