Sign in Agent Mode
Categories
Your Saved List Become a Channel Partner Sell in AWS Marketplace Amazon Web Services Home Help

Reviews from AWS customer

11 AWS reviews

External reviews

164 reviews
from

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.


    reviewer2266839

Ability to decouple from hardware, allowing flexibility in source and destination

  • August 29, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases include replication and disaster recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are really happy with RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives).

Both the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are fine. They always meet our requirements. Their significance is not driven by a single factor but rather by the customers. Some customers require an RPO of a few hours, while others require up to 24 hours. It depends on the specific needs of the customer.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature for us and for my company is that we are replicating most of our production customers to the DR site, and we can do testing whenever we want. The customers are very happy with the way we do the testing while the primary is still running. There's no disturbance to the primary production site.

The most important function right now is that we have another DR site, which is in a very old environment that is non-Zerto. We were log shipping there through another method. We are migrating over to the Zerto platform so we can replicate it to the new DR site so we can shut it down. That's going to be a lot of savings for us, shutting down the old replication with the other way. That will be one of the benefits too.

Zerto offers near-synchronous replication, which is always on and constantly replicates only the changed data to the recovery sites within seconds. It doesn't really bother us because we have enough bandwidth. Since we do a 24-hour recovery, it does not take a lot of disk space. It's an issue sometimes because I have to constantly increase the space on the disks at the DR site. On the VPG (Virtual Protection Groups), I have to constantly increase the space. That's where the alerts are being generated too.

Someone suggested to me that I should turn off this feature, but that's not the way to do it. Turning it off temporarily is similar to applying a bandage.

Moreover, we have plans for DR recovery in the cloud. That's our next step, and it's likely to be on the agenda. We probably will use the license we have for that, which we can use as of today.

What needs improvement?

Zerto generates many false positive alerts, which is annoying. I still have thousands of alerts in my inbox, and those are false alerts. When I check there's actually no problem.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for four-plus years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable as far as we're running. Even though I'm running it on a very old Windows Server 2012 server, it's still running fine without any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability-wise, it's pretty good, too, but we're not there yet. We are using it for small 50+ VMs we are protecting right now, but we are continuously growing. We may have to expand with multiple ZVMs (Virtual Managers). We're going to install multiple. We just have one on each side, which we don't have an issue with.

How are customer service and support?

The customer service and support are really good. I wish they had phone support too right away, but we have to go through their website and open a ticket.

Moreover, there's always going to be something a person is not one hundred percent knowledgeable about. He has to escalate to the top tier.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

What about the implementation team?

Somebody else did the deployment in the company and I took it over after that. I just recently upgraded to the latest version without any issues. Zerto is very easy to upgrade.

There is an area of improvement for Zerto folks. Every time we do an upgrade, if we are three or four releases behind, we have to go to the next level, then the next level, and then the latest. This is a pain. We would like the ability to skip to the newest version.

What was our ROI?

ROI is pretty good compared to the recovery compared to the investment we have. The solution is worth it. If we go to the cloud, the ROI is definitely going to be much more.

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

The pricing is pretty decent. We got a good deal.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I really like Zerto. I've been using it for many years. It's a quick recovery. I failed over the complete site to the DR many times and then failed back to the production without any issues.

We have VMware SRM but we are not using it. We have a license, we can use it, but we're not using it because Zerto is our primary right now.

Zerto is very easy to use. It's not dependent on the hardware. It can decouple from any hardware. You can use it, even if you have different hardware at the source and the destination. That was the biggest attraction when we got into Zerto. It's pretty decent.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.


    reviewer2264514

Easy implementation, real-time replication, and fast recovery

  • August 24, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

How has it helped my organization?

Our customers are mostly satisfied with RPO, which only takes a couple of seconds. It does not cause big problems. It usually takes a couple of seconds. You do not have to perform any specific actions to keep it running because it mostly runs by itself and even resolves some of the issues itself. Zerto is very much related to VMware infrastructure. If VMware infrastructure is running fine, then Zerto runs fine as well. Zerto itself does not cause any problems.

I cannot compare it with others because we are mostly using Zerto, but we are very satisfied with it because within a couple of minutes, or even seconds, we are able to recover a VM or multiple VMs. Other recovery systems might work similarly.

What is most valuable?

Its ease of use is valuable. You do not have to do much to install Zerto or implement Zerto on the infrastructure. It is not very complicated. It does not have large requirements. There are mostly network requirements. It is required to be connected to two sites or more, and then you just install Zerto Virtual Manager. You also install virtual replicators on the ESXi host and perform replication of VMs.

What needs improvement?

I do not have any specific ideas right now. I know they moved to the appliance version with Zerto 10, but I do not have much experience with that because we are still using Zerto 9.5 and 9.7. The appliance will be faster and more secure. It will be good.

I do not need any additional features. The replication is real-time. We are very satisfied that this is happening all the time. We do not have to touch anything. When we implement it in a proper way, everything works fine. We just let it be.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for around two years as an engineer.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

If the VMware infrastructure works fine, then Zerto works fine. I have only observed a couple of issues, but usually, Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs work fine. They are not very problematic.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I do not have much experience with scalability. One of the customers has eight vCenter servers, and each one of them has Zerto implemented. They are all connected with each other, so sometimes replication goes to a couple of vCenters. Another customer has only two vCenters but with a large number of ESXi hosts in VMs. There are around 500 VMs that we have in production for one customer.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted their support multiple times. They are quick to respond. They are happy to help. They are happy to connect by Zoom to have a session to share the screen. I am satisfied with them so far. I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something, but overall, it has been very good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

I have implemented Zerto from scratch on the infrastructure. In most cases, I am not configuring the network. There are other engineers to do that, but if the network is working and I have all the information I need, then installing Zerto Virtual Manager and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) is very smooth and simple.

If everything is configured as it is supposed to be, it does not take long. It also depends on whether you need to deploy a Windows VM or appliance. If you need to deploy an appliance, it will take a little more time. Deploying a VM and installing Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs takes a couple of hours.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room to improve, but I do not have anything specific that can be improved.


    reviewer2264508

Stable, good support, and will be a time saver when we move to a new data center

  • August 24, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

What is most valuable?

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

What needs improvement?

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time.

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication.

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

How was the initial setup?

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

What about the implementation team?

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

What was our ROI?

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.


    Kristopher Ducheney

User-friendly, cost-effective, and saves a lot of time

  • August 24, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use Zerto for server migrations between data centers during the role swap that we do. We use it from a recovery standpoint as well.

We currently do not have disaster recovery to the cloud. We go between our data centers. That is what Zerto helps us accomplish.

How has it helped my organization?

Zerto works very well. We have not had any faults while using it. We are a financial institution, so we have to make sure the systems we have are available with very minimal downtime.

It has helped out a lot in man-hours. It has saved us a lot of overnight work. We can literally change our production servers in a matter of minutes to hours. Rather than having to do this gradually or a couple of weeks in advance and have several teams and business partners involved, we can literally do it live on the same day.

Zerto is probably one of the faster ones in terms of recovery. You can just go into the console, and because it is always replicating over to the other side, it takes minutes.

What is most valuable?

Being able to do our recovery and being able to migrate between data centers during the role swap is valuable just because of the amount of time it takes. It takes 55 hours or so. Right now, we are doing this in a VDI environment. We are going to experiment with it as a proof of concept because we have a thousand machines that we have to move and do all the assignments. Zerto would lessen that down by a few hours, and then we can use some scripts to do everything on the Horizon's side. We have not done it yet, but we are hoping to reduce it down to about 3 hours instead of 55 hours. We will also be able to manage our host better and be in a better recovery state. If the host happens to go down, we can quickly recover.

It is very user-friendly. There is no wondering about what a feature does. It is easy to use.

What needs improvement?

If they already do not have it, they can have some APIs for the Horizon environment. Instead of having to use some scripts to get around, they can make it a lot more user-friendly for integration.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Zerto for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been very stable. We have not had any issues while using it. When we need it to do its job, it is always dependable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It scales very quickly. We can set up a whole new environment in an hour. We can get the server setup and all the VMs that are required for it to function in an hour or two.

How are customer service and support?

I have not used their support. My peers had to use it. They seem very responsive and knowledgeable.

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

The other DR tool that I have used is from Symantec. It was an old-school recovery tool. It was back in the day when it took a whole day to get things back up.

How was the initial setup?

It was deployed before I joined the company.

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

Its price is fair. It is very cost-effective compared to the cost of the labor for your workers and associates.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We selected Zerto over others primarily for the ability to replicate and help with our role swap. It cuts the downtime of the production systems by a large volume. This way, we can meet the deadline and not have that much client impact. In the financial side of banking, you do not want bad performance.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but it definitely makes your life a lot easier.


    reviewer2264499

Automatic, replicates in seconds, and has responsive support

  • August 24, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We are using Zerto as a DR solution for our environment as well as for migrations. When we do data center migrations, we use it to move our servers over.

We are only on-prem at the moment. We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

In the old days, during data center swaps, it used to take days to move our workload environments over, whereas now, it literally takes an hour for hundreds of servers to migrate. Literally, in under a minute, an app stack can move down and up in a new data center. It is reflected in the uptime support to our customers. Our company is very happy with the product.

Essentially, you just tell it to go and pull the trigger. It is all automatic, so you can sit there and watch the shutdown within vCenter, and then on the remote side, you can see it coming up. You can literally have your environment up and running in under a minute. You just have to prioritize what goes first, and that is a business decision.

What is most valuable?

Its automation and the ability to replicate and keep an RTO of just seconds is valuable. It is all automatic. Everything is pretty transparent on the backend. It is just point-and-go.

Its near-synchronous replication is amazing. It is a lifesaver. You can see it replicating in real-time in seconds. The overall impact on the network is negligible as well. It is a great tool.

What needs improvement?

From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it across several employers. I probably used it for a total of four or five years before it was bought out by HPE.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is amazing. You just look at the dashboard, and it is pretty much all green unless you have some replication or journaling issues, but that is not the product's fault.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability has not been an issue. You deploy it, and it just ramps up and goes. It is all in the background and automatic.

We have about 700 servers and 130 VPGs.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very responsive and technical. Even when there is no issue and you are looking for a root cause or just a question, they are very responsive. They exceed their SLAs.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

My current employer already had it in place. In my previous role, it was evaluated against a few other competitors, and it ended up being a replacement for VMware's Disaster Recovery, which at that time had a lot of issues. Zerto came in and helped us out. We implemented a few new things that Zerto did not have, and I have not looked back.

Zerto is easy to use. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of ease of use.

How was the initial setup?

Currently, we are still on version 9. We have deployed that. Overall, it is very easy once you get the Windows Server. I am excited about the new version 10 coming out that takes away the Windows server requirement.

What about the implementation team?

We did not use an integrator or a reseller, but we are in contact with our engineer from Zerto. I personally know him from a previous job and as a friend as well. If I have questions, I am sure he will help me out.

What was our ROI?

Uptime for our customers is important. When we are able to do transitions and not impact customers or minimize that impact, that is a financial gain at the end of the day in terms of the satisfaction that customers get, as well as the overall view of the company. As a whole, the management sees that we are doing this stuff in minutes and hours versus days. So, overall, the company is not looking to move away from Zerto anytime soon.

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

I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. It scales well. It just works. It is amazingly simple. Everything is pretty much automatic. I cannot remember when I had to open a case because Zerto was not working.


    Stafford Hall

Our customers like the fact that they can restore within seconds

  • August 24, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Zerto for about five years.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

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.

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

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.


    Shawn Woods

Easy to migrate data, great recovery speeds, and helpful support

  • August 11, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used the solution for close to six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

What was our ROI?

It's hard to quantify the ROI.

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

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.


    Joseph Lamb

Easy to use with near-synchronous replication and simpler disaster recovery testing

  • August 04, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not tried to scale the solution.

I have the solution for multiple locations in one department.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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

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

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.


    reviewer2252001

Easy to use with great granularity and helpful support

  • August 04, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use the product solely for disaster recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

Initially, a consultant assisted us with the base installation.

What was our ROI?

We have not calculated the ROI of the solution.

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

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.


    reviewer2080635

Can replicate data rapidly and cost-effectively and has good role-based access controls

  • July 31, 2023
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zerto for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

The Zerto team assisted with the implementation.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment.

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

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.