External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
We use Zerto for disaster recovery automation for our most critical, highest priority, and time-sensitive failovers.
I understand that Zerto can enable disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but that's not the use case that we have here.
We primarily use Zerto as a disaster recovery product, but we haven't had a disaster. It hasn't allowed us to minimize downtime. However, it helped us avoid the need for downtime during testing scenarios.
Zerto helps to protect virtual machines in our environment, and that is our primary use case. Zerto provides the most aggressive RPO in the industry, and it really is one of the only products that can give you near real-time recovery.
We use VMware as a hypervisor platform to run all of our virtual workloads. Zerto is the replication service that I use to automate the failovers between my environments without having to have expertise in bringing application replication up, like a SQL cluster would require or an Exchange cluster would require, because the entire VM comes over. It helps us to reduce our overall VM footprint because we don't have to run resources in two different data centers. We can just shift them between the two using Zerto.
The ability to test a failover non-disruptively with Zerto is valuable, as it doesn't create any downtime for the business.
Near-synchronous replication works effectively, and it's important for our databases because that's going to give us the least amount of data loss on the failover.
I run a very dense VM-to-host ratio in my environment. Whenever maintenance is being performed on a host, all the VMs on that host have to be powered down and/or moved off to complete that maintenance cycle. It is frustrating when the protection of VMs doesn't get relocated to another host before the replication appliance powers down. It sometimes works great, but if the host has a lot of VMs on it, there may not always be enough time to relocate all of the VMs from a protection group standpoint to other hosts before the replication appliance that Zerto uses to manage that powers itself down. In such a case, you are breaking replication for the duration of that maintenance, and that can cause some support issues when you bring it back online, where you have to go in and manually recover it. I know they added improvements over the years. It's not as bad as it used to be, but at times, I still end up breaking replication when I do maintenance on my hosts.
I've been using Zerto in my career for about six years.
I've never had any stability issues with Zerto, as the management console has always been reliable, though there are occasional web timeouts. You just have to refresh your browser session to log back in if there's a stale browser window open or something like that, but it has always been easy to log in. I never had to open a support case to use the product. It has been more along the lines of a configuration change or replication. It is very reliable.
Zerto is quite scalable, as they added functionality where if you need to attach more disks and storage, it spins up additional replication appliances automatically. It doesn't require anything from the user to manage those. It happens automatically. I've been able to scale up as needed, with hundreds of VMs without any issues.
I've contacted Zerto's technical support. I've always had a good support experience with Zerto. The engineers are knowledgeable and respond quickly. When I open a ticket, I usually get a call within an hour or two. It's definitely good and better than other vendors that I've worked with.
I was previously using the VMware Site Recovery Manager, but it was very difficult to keep it functioning. We could not rely on that kind of uncertainty for a disaster recovery product. We needed something that's just going to work and not require a lot of assistance to keep it running, whether it's compatibility or upgrades. We needed something that was going to run when needed. Zerto is very reliable. It has definitely been a very stable product for me.
Zerto is the fastest among the solutions I have used. It usually takes less than five minutes to have a full recovery of the VM.
The initial setup with Zerto was easy. I did a proof of concept and got it running within the same day. Deploying it into production was again a very quick experience. The time required depends on how much of the initial configuration you want to do for the VMs you want to protect.
It was just me handling the setup and implementation of Zerto.
I ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove to the business that it was worth the investment. We started with 15 VMs so that I could show the product does what it needs to do, but ultimately, we needed to protect all of our SQL workloads, so we quickly scaled up from there.
It's cost-prohibitive for non-critical workloads, so we wouldn't put development servers or any non-business-critical systems in there because we wouldn't need the aggressive RPO and RTO that Zerto gives us for those types of workloads. I accomplished those failovers through other replication technologies.
Overall, I would give Zerto a ten out of ten.
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.
Our use cases right now are primarily for creating spot backup snapshots and things like that for recovery.
The near synchronous replication works very effectively. We do appreciate it as it's comparable to other vendors in that space.
Zerto has helped to reduce downtime in situations when we roll out a change and the change needs to be rolled back. Zerto has been excellent at being able to recover that prior server before the change, so it has helped significantly in those areas.
Zerto has helped us to reduce the overall DR testing. Zerto saved us close to 90% on DR testing compared to traditional backups and restores. We were able to utilize that time for anything else we wanted to. We needed the time desperately, so it was a big benefit to us.
Zerto has had an impact on our IT resiliency strategy. It has improved our IT resiliency considerably; going from traditional backups to having backups with Zerto in addition was a lifesaver.
We use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in our environment pretty much exclusively. Compared to what we were doing with traditional backups, our RTO and RPO have improved by 90%.
What I appreciate the most about the product is its simplicity. It's very easy to use for my staff.
Expanding the product to compete more fully with products such as Veeam would be a big benefit in the market.
I have been using Zerto for about three years.
We have not seen any instability.
Zerto's scalability is adequate for us. It could expand a bit more to compete with those larger products that are a little bit more scalable. We're not a big enough enterprise to test it. We haven't taken it to the point where we feel the scalability is a problem, but I suspect it probably would be; that's just a suspicion, not anything that I have concrete evidence for.
We have not had to contact the technical support or customer support.
I have personally used alternatives to Zerto, including Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, and several other solutions. Zerto competes effectively in the snapshot area for DR and synchronous replication. I've also used the Pure Storage system, which does asynchronous replication. It combines effectively with other products such as Zerto, Veeam, and so on, so I've used quite a few of them in the past.
Veeam is a more comprehensive backup software for an enterprise. Zerto gets most of the way there and would work for a smaller enterprise effectively, but for a larger enterprise, Veeam has capabilities that are beyond Zerto at this point. Veeam is an example of a more complete product.
Commvault also has a more complete product, even though it's not entirely as good. Zerto is progressing; they have a great start and a great product, but they probably need to expand it to compete more fully with those larger enterprise backup systems.
Its deployment is easy. We had it fully onboard and tested in about two weeks.
After the deployment, Zerto doesn't require much maintenance at our end. You have to administer it similarly to any other system, but it's pretty low maintenance.
We put a team on it so that everybody learned together. We put a three-man team on it from a group of seniors who would be responsible for disaster recovery anyway.
It was pretty appropriate. It was not too cheap, not too expensive. It was just about right.
I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten.
The near-synchronous replication feature is very important to us. In the event of a total disaster, we would be able to maintain our presence in the cloud where all of our critical infrastructure will be moved from our on-premises to the cloud.
The RTOs and RPOs are both extremely good; we are talking about minutes versus hours and days to practically have a restore done. It is really helpful for us that we know exactly what the RPO times are, and all of those features allow us to do this.
Zerto has had an impact on our IT resiliency strategy. We are a small company; I am basically the CTO, the CSO, and I do desktop stuff. Having this very easy interface and reduced time to do things allows me to focus on other things that I need to focus on. It has me more at ease knowing that it will work the way it is supposed to, and if I need it, it is going to be there.
Zerto helped to reduce downtime to minutes. We have 90% less recovery times. I can go in there and see exactly what those times are to completely spin up the infrastructure.
I appreciate most that we can do quick failover tests without actually going to live failover, which is very helpful because we have to do SOC audits, and they want to see that we do test this. It is extremely easy to test to show whether or not these things boot up in a test environment, which they do.
Zerto is easy to use. There is a dashboard we log in to, and it shows us everything we need in one dashboard.
There can be a bit more logging. It seems a bit harder to find logs for test restores and all that. If they had a way to email the results of a test restore, that would be excellent.
We have been using Zerto for a good two years.
It is very stable.
Scalability is good. We have to pay for more scalability, and we would have to reach out to them if we were to scale up or scale down.
It was good. It took a little bit longer than I would have thought, but they were able to resolve my problem pretty quickly.
It was fairly easy. They sent some documentation, and I worked with the deployment team. It took a little bit; there was a learning curve since this is something I have never used before, but they did help with the initial setup and questions I had.
It was just me.
Zerto has reduced our organization's DR testing. Before, it was a huge cost. It was several thousand dollars to do a DR test, whereas now, I click a button.
Pricing is kind of expensive, but for what we get, it is probably worth it. I know they just had a huge price increase due to the VMware stuff getting expensive, which added about a thousand dollars a month to our bill.
I would absolutely recommend Zerto. If you need a good DR solution, I would say go with Zerto. There are a lot of other options that are cheaper, but you are not going to get the functionality that we have.
I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.
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.
We use it for disaster recovery purposes. Since Zerto offers a near recovery point objective recovery, we utilize it to validate our servers from one location to another.
By implementing Zerto, we wanted to ensure that in the event of a disaster or ransomware, we are able to recover and not lose any significant amount of data.
Zerto is very easy to use. Installation is about half an hour, and then it starts protecting the data and VMs. It is not very cumbersome. The UI is built very well. It is fairly self-explanatory. To be able to stand up a product you have never seen in half an hour and get it functioning and protecting speaks to how good the UI and workflow are.
Zerto has near-synchronous replication. As a change is made on site A, it gets copied across the network to site B. We are five or six seconds behind production. If I have a heavily used system and I use traditional backups, I could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 23 hours behind. With Zerto, I am single-digit seconds behind. That works well for us.
Our disaster recovery test, which used to span an entire week, now takes two days. We used to recover our servers in the first two or three days with a backup product and then test for two days before tearing it all down. Now, we spend half a day on new servers and ensuring things work with networking, etc. We test the next day, and we are done in two days. Across the entire company, we are able to save significant man-hours by shortening the test from a week to two days. We are now doing smaller tests once a month and larger tests once a year.
Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by 60% to 70%. We are also able to do more disaster recovery testing. Previously, we were doing it once a year, whereas now, we are doing smaller tests once a month and our large tests once a year.
In recovery point objectives, we are single-digit seconds behind. In terms of RTOs, I can recover 350 VMs in 30 minutes. It takes less than several seconds to restore a single VM. From days to 30 minutes for 350 compared to 100 VMs is an incredible time-saving in terms of RTOs and RPOs for us.
I find it easy to use, and the UI is really easy to navigate. We reduced our time with backups from days to less than half an hour for the same data service.
The best aspect of Zerto is being able to test any day, any time. It provides a quick look to ensure everything is functioning correctly from site A to site B.
I would like to see different reporting options than what is currently available. I would like to be able to grab different data points that do not currently exist in the reporting system.
I would also like to see more of a runbook or playbook for using Zerto. If I have 350 objects that I am protecting, I would like Zerto to be able to fire them up in one order, rather than having to manually bring them up in a sequence.
I have used the solution for at least six years.
It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.
The servers and VMs that we are protecting are across different business units. We have three people who are the administrators of the solution. 120 people were the testers, but there are only three full-time admins for it.
I would definitely rate them a nine out of ten.
I was using BMC Avamar Virtual Edition, which is really a BRS kind of product versus a disaster recovery product.
It is very easy to deploy. For us, the initial setup takes about half an hour.
In terms of maintenance, the most that we ever had to do with Zerto was install a patch. When there is a new patch, we give it a couple of months to make sure there are no other issues that pop up, but it is normal patching. We do not have to babysit it. We log in and get it done, and it just does what it is supposed to do.
Determining ROI is tough. In terms of man-hours, in the last disaster test, we had 120 users in the system. If we did that over a week, it would be 120 times 5 days. With 10-hour days, that is 6,000 man-hours. We now do it in 8-hour days or 1,920 hours. We are talking about a 4,080-hour difference between the old and new ways of doing things.
We feel it is pretty cost-efficient. For the amount of protection that we get for Zerto, we feel that it is at an excellent price point, especially compared to some of the other vendors that were just backup solutions. For all that it does, we feel that the price is good.
We dabbled in RecoverPoint a long time ago. At that time, RecoverPoint was specifically for physical machines and not virtual machines. The complexities with RecoverPoint and SRM, and having to manage two or three different products, made Zerto much more attractive. I am changing IP addresses, doing recovery, and replication all in Zerto. It is an all-in-one product, eliminating the need for two or three other things from different vendors.
It is also vendor agnostic, which is not the case with some other vendors. I can have HPE on one side and Pure on the other side for storage. I can have VMware on one side and Hyper-V potentially on the other side. Zerto can move data from site A to B. It does not care what we are using for servers or storage.
I would absolutely recommend Zerto. It is almost the only product in its market space that provides what it promises, such as near real-time replication and protection. The cost is very reasonable. There is no reason not to suggest Zerto for disaster recovery and ransomware protection.
I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.
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.