My current use cases for HPE Zerto Software include site-to-site and site-to-cloud.
HPE Zerto Software for AWS - Disaster Recovery
Hewlett Packard EnterpriseExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Ensured fast data recovery and minimized downtime with near-synchronous replication
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
HPE Zerto Software has saved me time in data recovery situations due to something like ransomware because we have protection against it. Due to the logging functions, we can go back in time and bring systems up a day before or a day after. We have been able to avoid ransomware issues with HPE Zerto Software.
HPE Zerto Software has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing.
What is most valuable?
The features of HPE Zerto Software that I have found most valuable are the copy capabilities, specifically being able to copy a VM over to another site and bring it back up if I have an outage. I used HPE Zerto Software recently to go from cluster to cluster, and I was able to move VMs seamlessly.
I find HPE Zerto Software very easy to use. Going in and being able to copy the VM makes it very efficient.
Near-synchronous replication makes it pretty easy for me to move things on the fly, so I can be up within about 10 minutes. Being up in 10 minutes is important for me because if we're not up in that timeframe, we have users complaining and calling.
What needs improvement?
HPE Zerto Software could evolve to where, instead of me having to push a button, it can detect disasters on the fly and automate disaster detection.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HPE Zerto Software for about a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
HPE Zerto Software is really stable. I haven't had an experience where I've had downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HPE Zerto Software scales just fine with the growing needs of my organization; it's gone from a small test group to a larger test group with no problems.
How are customer service and support?
I'd give their support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The support team was really great. Everything was configured, and out-of-the-box configurations were seamless.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment from HPE Zerto Software, already just moving from data center to data center. Just moving the things over from one spot to another with no outage time, or very little outage, reflects how I've gotten the return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing and setup costs have been reasonable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I didn't consider any other solutions before selecting HPE Zerto Software. It was given to me.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Ensured compliance and effective failover with seamless disaster recovery testing
What is our primary use case?
Our main use cases for HPE Zerto Software are primarily to provide our customers with their DR solutions and to facilitate migrations, either from on-prem to the cloud or data center to data center migrations.
What is most valuable?
The feature of HPE Zerto Software I prefer the most is the test feature, which allows you to test an environment in a bubble without having to affect production.
It allows you to test your DR strategy without having to actually do a full DR test. These features have benefited our organization by allowing the customers to really be able to write out their runbook, test it, and make sure that they're meeting compliance, whether that's every six months or a year test.
My impressions of HPE Zerto's near-synchronous replication are that it's an amazing feature that customers love. Even though it's set at five minutes, it's actually typically lower than that for most environments, and customers love the ability to have failover capabilities within seconds.
The ease of use for the solution is pretty straightforward.
What made us stick with HPE Zerto is that it is just a fantastic product and was a great product to add to HPE's portfolio. The solution has helped to reduce downtime in situations; it gave us the ability to roll back a bad change that was made. It was days' worth of changes that had been made. That amount of downtime would probably have cost the organization tens of thousands of dollars.
HPE Zerto Software has impacted our RTOs and RPOs effectively in a positive way where other solutions take longer; the board is happy with the speed for us to be back online.
The solution has definitely helped reduce our DR testing and automate it, although I do not know those numbers off the top of my head.
What needs improvement?
With the current updates primarily on the Azure side of it, documentation could be improved. That's not necessarily Zerto's problem since Azure is constantly changing things; Zerto will put something out, but Azure then will change it, and sometimes it's hard to follow that documentation.
HPE Zerto Software can be improved by keeping up on top of the Azure changes happening there, trying to smooth that process out, because there are many steps that you have to take in Azure, and that's not necessarily HPE's fault, it's just how Azure functions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with Zerto for more than ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and reliability of HPE Zerto have been great; I haven't really faced any major challenges, and when we have, support has been really great at helping.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HPE Zerto Software scales with the growing needs of our organization as a great scalable solution; the only concern I have for really large organizations would be the cost. However, you have to start looking at the soft metrics that CFOs don't necessarily take into account.
How are customer service and support?
Every time I've had to talk to support, whether it's been pre-HPE or during HPE's acquisition, the technical and customer support has been pretty good at resolving any issues that have come up. I really appreciate the stateside support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to adopting HPE Zerto, we were using different solutions. Looking at recovery solutions for the capabilities, RecoverPoint was there, which is what Zerto was based on. We considered the capabilities they offered versus solutions such as Veeam.
How was the initial setup?
In an on-prem environment, when it was the Windows deployment, it was pretty easy to deploy. Now, once it went over to Linux, it's still been pretty easy on the on-prem side. Once you start getting involved with the public clouds, it gets a little clunky. Again, I don't fall down totally on the HPE side. It's the public cloud that may be at issue.
What was our ROI?
Customers have definitely seen a return on investment from HPE Zerto Software. They can automate their DR testing, test it more often, and in a worst-case scenario, they could have a help desk person literally hit a button to help them come back over or come up in the cloud or in another site if they need to.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with the pricing, licensing cost, or setup cost has been such that I don't have to deal with the pricing side of it. The setup, primarily in the Azure space, has been a little clunky, and I don't necessarily fault HPE for that.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before selecting HPE Zerto, we considered other solutions such as RecoverPoint. They would look at Veeam, even though Veeam's not in the same category, but it was something that people would use as a recovery solution.
What other advice do I have?
For the capabilities and what it does today, I rate HPE Zerto Software a ten out of ten, and it's a market leader in that category.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Unparalleled support and rapid response enable quick issue resolution and downtime reduction
What is our primary use case?
Our company uses Zerto very heavily all the time for DR activities and other activities. We are only maintaining our tier one applications with Zerto while using different tools for our tier two, tier three, and tier four applications. But only for tier one and tier two, we are using Zerto.
What is most valuable?
Zerto's product and support are unparalleled. Their responsiveness sets them apart from other vendors, as they swiftly engage with customers and manage to sort issues out quickly during calls, without needless delays for log submissions. Their replication service also boasts a sub-10-second RPO and I often see servers synced as quickly as 6 to 7 seconds.
What needs improvement?
I think Zerto should make the product less expensive, as that's the only reason many people are not registering the product with their companies. We are not using Zerto everywhere across the board, probably due to licensing costs; it could be excessive to manage it. That's why we are only maintaining our tier one applications with Zerto while using different tools for our tier two, tier three, and tier four applications. I definitely think it's expensive, and that's why we are not using that product for the other applications for tier four and beyond.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for more than 5 years; I would say almost 7-8 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We do see some impact sometimes on our RPOs due to various reasons; it could be because the cluster on the source side may not be stable, or we might have migrated the host to a different cluster where Zerto was not configured.
How are customer service and support?
I am very familiar with Zerto, which is a very good service provider. We had very good feedback. Every time when I work with them, I always receive a really positive response from them and a good solution. Whenever we come across any problem, they try to jump on the call right away. They have very little waiting time. When I open a ticket, within an hour or so, or less than an hour, someone will get connected to me. The good part is that normally, when I work with other vendors, they always look for various logs; they tell us to upload it and try to buy time for almost 3-4 hours by asking questions and wasting time to provide logs when I really need it. Zerto is not like that; they try to jump on a call with you. Another good aspect is that they provide guidance to upgrade our product to be under the supported version if the product is not a supported version. Unlike other companies, they don't just say, 'We don't support the product; follow this document and upgrade.' Instead, Zerto actually makes sure that you have a successful upgrade on your product so that they can support it.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used Storix in the past to recover apart from Zerto; we use Storix as well. The biggest difference is the faster recovery with Zerto compared to Storix. As I mentioned, Zerto's product and support are good, too. I was not complaining about the Storix product; they were good but not better than Zerto.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment for the first time definitely requires knowing about the product and how it works, so you need training. Any new person will not be able to manage or do it unless they know how to get things to work. You need proper documentation. Installing the product for the first time is definitely not easy if someone is not aware of the product, but we need to know about the product and how it works to install it for the first time.
What other advice do I have?
The product really provides good support. I'm not aware of the pricing as I'm not from management, but the product is really good. I love the product and their support. If they need any logs, they will try to get them during the call. In that way, the customer can understand that they are really responsible for the product they are providing and they try to help us out. We feel comfortable while comparing them with other vendors because I have worked with many vendors, and I can say that only Microsoft vendors are as good as Zerto in terms of jumping on calls right away to help you out. By using their product, we reduce the downtime of our outage, so if anything goes wrong, I use the Zerto product to reduce downtime. My team has used that one to ensure that we don't experience much downtime. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 9.
Simplicity and fast replication enhance disaster recovery confidence
What is our primary use case?
Our current use cases for Zerto involve using it for DR, as we replicate to each other for disaster recovery across two different properties. We back up locally and then replicate across using Zerto.
I use Zerto to help protect virtual machines in my environment.
What is most valuable?
What I appreciate the most about Zerto is the simplicity of it all. It has allowed me to rely on Zerto to do file-level backups which, as a normal DR solution, you usually don't get. I've used other platforms for disaster recovery, and Zerto by far has been the simplest to implement and maintain.
The near-synchronous replication feature is incredible; I haven't used another solution that does it as fast and as seamlessly as Zerto.
I have not seen any effect on my RPOs. Prior to Zerto, we were not able to publish our RPOs, but now we're confident in them.
What needs improvement?
For improvement points, because Zerto is not a backup company, if they could implement some kind of backup solutions, it would help us out significantly. They can do file-level backups, but if in the future they could achieve application-aware recovery, that would be an incredible help for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto since 2016 in my career.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not seen any instability, such as lagging or crashing, in Zerto.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is very scalable.
How are customer service and support?
I have contacted Zerto's technical support and customer support.
Their support is very knowledgeable about the product. I was concerned because I had reached out to Zerto support directly before they became an HPE company, and although I had never had a problem, I found that after reaching out to support following the HPE acquisition, they did not skip a beat. The support has not dropped off whatsoever.
I would give them a nine out of ten for support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment of Zerto was easy for me.
I was up and running within an hour to fully set it up.
What about the implementation team?
It was just me who handled the deployment—no team was needed.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding the pricing for Zerto, it's right on target. I was pleasantly surprised once I was introduced to Zerto. I was very impressed with the product but had that in my back pocket because I figured it was going to be overpriced. It was surprisingly affordable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have used VMware's SRM tool as an alternative to Zerto in my career.
The biggest difference between Zerto and SRM in my opinion is simplicity. SRM was clunky; you almost had to have an engineer maintain it, and it seemed it was a daily project. We just don't have the manpower, as we don't have an extra engineer or staff member to manage it, and it was way too clunky for us.
What other advice do I have?
Fortunately, Zerto has not needed to help us reduce downtime in any situations, as we have not had a situation where we would have had to use it. We do bi-annual failover testing within Zerto, and they've always been successful.
My advice for new users on how to start with Zerto is to start with a demonstration and watch the product in action; don't just review slides by sales.
On a scale of 1-10, I rate Zerto a 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Offers one-click remediation for ransomware, but their incorrect sizing of our target hardware has caused many problems
What is our primary use case?
My use cases with Zerto are primarily focused on backup and ransomware protection.
There has never been a situation where we've had to use Zerto for DR.
How has it helped my organization?
We have improved RPOs and RTOs. Immutability is a huge factor.
The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. It does work, and it's nice to have that. We're backing up all the time.
We couldn’t see its benefits immediately. A lot of time had to pass, and honestly, we're still working on it.
What is most valuable?
There is one one-click remediation for ransomware.
What needs improvement?
We have had some technical difficulties getting a full restore at a file level. One of the problems we were having was to do a full VM recovery to get one file, because we were encountering errors within Zerto. I don't think we have that one fixed yet. However, we do see a huge improvement in our RTO with a full VM recovery.
Zerto is pretty robust. My input would be to have their sales engineers not overpromise and then have the product underdeliver because we were scoped not-appropriately sized target hardware. That hit us hard. We went with Exagrid as our target. Because of incorrect sizing, we didn't get the expected compression, and we ran out of space. We didn't have enough capacity for all of our backups the way we wanted them tiered. It crippled Zerto as well.
I still don't know how I feel about the purchase by HPE. Their support has been top-notch. They've been trying to work with us to get this fixed. However, I didn't like some of the proposals that they made. At one point, they proposed that we pull out Zerto and put in the HPE backup solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto in my career for several years now, and it has played a crucial role in my work.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable.
How are customer service and support?
They're pretty responsive. The quality is there. It looks like we need to go back to the drawing board, which is very unfortunate. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Their support is very good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've used Veeam in conjunction with Dell's Data Domain. We also used the other VDI solution. They're a direct competitor of Veeam.
I prefer Rubrik over Zerto because of scalability, but the drawback is the cost. Rubrik costs considerably more.
How was the initial setup?
Initial deployment seemed easy. It was a little time-consuming and took a little bit of my sysadmin's time to create all the tiers and do all the configuration, but it was pretty easy. It was smooth.
After the deployment, it does require some maintenance. Because of all the problems that we've had, the maintenance has been fixing or trying to fix what wasn't correct with scoping. We keep running out of space, so our maintenance is that we go in and reconfigure our tiers, and we don't get a 100% backup.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's fair. My biggest gripe with Zerto is the initial scoping. What we were promised didn't work with what we ended up with. At one point, our Exagrid representative told us that he doesn't know why they scoped it this way, but that's impossible. We can't do what we're expecting to do with just these two Exagrids.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten. Their product is solid, but the implementation left a sour taste in my mouth.
Has ensured smooth database replication with resilient performance and reliable customer support
What is our primary use case?
We use Zerto to replicate our Oracle databases from the main site to the other site. I have a number of fairly large Oracle databases, approximately four or five terabytes, and we're replicating to a Doctor site. We're actually moving our Doctor site from Colorado to Virginia, and I'm not sure Zerto can support the move. We'll just have to rebuild the reputation in the new site, but I'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it.
We explored cloud disaster recovery with Zerto, but because of the size of our database, it's not cost effective.
What is most valuable?
What I appreciate about Zerto is that it's set and forget. It just works. As long as you give it enough space for journaling and things like that, it's really resilient. It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, and I know that it's always going to be available if I need it.
The near synchronous replication is great because I can restore a production database up to a minute, and the granular restore or the brick level file restore option is beneficial. It's great for real-time or store level recovery, too.
We tested it, and it performed excellently. I know it works.
What needs improvement?
I wish there was a mechanism or a plug-in to do IP failover. We have to change the DNS entry and Infoblox manually, although we can script it, but we haven't gotten around to it.
One aspect I don't appreciate about Zerto is the plug-in, especially when it migrated from appliance from Windows server to the appliance, and you have to configure Active Directory authentication. I think it's unnecessarily complicated. That should be simplified for sure.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto in my current position since we acquired it three or four years ago.
How are customer service and support?
Support is fantastic. Many vendors, especially after COVID, have seen their support decline, but not with Zerto. Their support is consistently great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have experience with Veeam before. Zerto is better. Veeam seems pretty simplistic compared to Zerto.
How was the initial setup?
The setup with Zerto was easy. It's pretty intuitive. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but not significant.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto eight or nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Offers near real-time recovery and prevents downtime with non-disruptive testing
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Zerto in my career for about six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
It was just me handling the setup and implementation of Zerto.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would give Zerto a ten out of ten.
Hands-on support and intuitive deployment streamline data recovery
What is our primary use case?
I am actually a value-added reseller. I personally do not use Zerto. I have customers that use Zerto, and they use it as their cyber recovery. They have also used it to move VMs.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
Better communication around pricing would be useful - particularly in light of the economic and tariff situation we have going on.
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?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't had a need to contact Zerto's technical support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used or sold alternatives to Zerto such as Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik. Zerto is the clear winner.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
On average, four people are required for the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is competitive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Improves recovery time and DR testing efficiency, but lacks some advanced enterprise features
What is our primary use case?
Our use cases right now are primarily for creating spot backup snapshots and things like that for recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
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 is most valuable?
What I appreciate the most about the product is its simplicity. It's very easy to use for my staff.
What needs improvement?
Expanding the product to compete more fully with products such as Veeam would be a big benefit in the market.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zerto for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not seen any instability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
We have not had to contact the technical support or customer support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It was pretty appropriate. It was not too cheap, not too expensive. It was just about right.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten.
Improves our recovery time by 90% and allows us to do quick failover tests without going to live failover
What is our primary use case?
We use Zerto as a disaster recovery as a service which allows us to bring up our entire network infrastructure and all of our critical resources into the Zerto cloud.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Zerto for a good two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
It was good. It took a little bit longer than I would have thought, but they were able to resolve my problem pretty quickly.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used Unitrends for our disaster recovery, as well as our file backups, but mostly for disaster recovery.
Zerto is 100% above and beyond that. Unitrends was very clunky. It was hard to find stuff, hard to navigate, and extremely hard to use.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
It was just me.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.