Arcserve backup appliances are presented by the vendor as combining enterprise-ready software and industrial-grade hardware united, to create turnkey backup appliances for disaster recovery (DR) and application availability – now with Sophos Intercept X Advanced for defense against malware, exploits, and ransomware.
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Zerto
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, aims to enable customers to run an always-on business by simplifying the protection,
recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto’s cloud
data management and protection platform is designed to eliminate the risks and complexity of
modernization and cloud adoption across private, public, and hybrid
deployments. The software-only platform uses continuous data protection
at scale to converge disaster recovery, backup, and data…
Very good for quick onsite file and email restores. The built-in granular email restore tool is honestly amazing. The file restore options are similarly useful allowing the restoration of a single file or email from any restore point, making those little restore jobs super quick. It might not be the best for a bare metal restore however, as while it does have this functionality, it requires some additional setup of a server before a backup to allow this to work.
Zerto is well suited for disaster recovery and virtual machine replication between multiple data centers. DR testing for audit or regulations is much easier with Zerto, great reporting, dashboard etc. It is not well suited for physical server replication for disaster recovery or as a primary backup solution.
Anyone with a large disk (VMDK) knows the issues of VMware snapshots. Most backup software is a "point in time backup" that uses snapshots. While the backup can be run multiple times per day the stress of the snapshot on the host and storage is eliminated by the continuous protection of Zerto log replication.
A client had a the disks on a VM go missing for some reason. We had them "flip the switch" for a real fail over and press the fail over button. The VM on our DR site started to come alive as the VM at the customer site was brought down. When the DR VM was fully up, automatic reverse replication started. The DR machine was available in a few minutes (to take into account different host hardware) for access. One the vm at both sites were in sync, we had the customer again repeat the fail over process and the DR site VM was turned off and the Production site VM was brought back on line. This was a 200 GB VM and the whole process was finished in about 3 hours.
Zerto also allows for "Test" fail overs that can be configured on many different functions, such as host, datastore, network and IP usage. Configuring the IPs is crucial to avoid inadvertent site cross contamination of the same VM.
Zerto can also retrieve files from any VM disk on the DR site without starting a VM. Very handy for retrieving files or directories.
Since Zerto is running continuous log replication, changes on the production VM are nearly instantaneously copied to the DR site. As with any data process, having sufficient bandwidth for "churn" peaks minimizes the delay in updating the DR site.
Scalability. Main issue is each appliance has a finite space for backups, and can't be increased on the box itself without replacing it with another appliance completely.
Onboard interface. Doesn't have an interface that's accessible via the web natively. While that's great for security, it is a little awkward if you need to access it from offsite.
We really like the easy setup of this replication solution, as well as the ease of management. Not to mention, our internal IT Economist determined that the Zerto solution would provide the best ROI out of the competing solutions we analyzed. So far, his calculations have been spot on, and we have saved substantially
It's very easy to use. Plug it in, run through the wizard and you're pretty much set. Hardly ever have to go back in and check on it. Everything can be scheduled fairly granularly. The console is simple and laid out well. While doing a restore takes a number of steps, it is not hard to follow what you're doing. A few things couple be displayed better, but the built in help options do explain things well enough.
Usability was the primary reason we purchased the software in the first place. We had compared it to several other software products in the same area, and it was by far the easiest to set up and use. Long-term maintenance proved to be similar, with updates driven by updates to VMware and vSphere, rather than the product itself.
[I] have only used it a couple of times, but they've always been responsive and solved the issues I've had. Time to get to a person was fairly low, under 10 minutes each time.
Overall support is very good. We sometimes get pushback when asking Level 1 support to escalate to Level 2. This causes undue frustrations when you need a more knowledgeable support person to get involved. We've had to escalate to account reps a few times for this scenario. Zerto is very responsive and normally handles our requests very quickly.
Barracuda had the best console of the three we evaluated. Cloud hosted it was the easiest to access. However, it took forever to do the initial seeding backup, and then the nightly backups ran over into the next day. It was just so slow to do the backups - we never even tried a restore. The resulting backups also seemed to take up a significant amount of the appliances space, it was almost 3/4 full from the get go. Unitrends did not have natively a granular email restore option, it had a third-party option, but that was not something we were interested in. It also took a long time to run the backups. Arcserve was the fastest by far, [as] it did not fill up as much (way better deduplication) and it had a built-in granular email restore. While I wish it had a cloud console, overall it had the most important features we were looking for.
We started out using Backup Exec which was in service until we virtualized our environment where it didn't perform as well at the time. Then we switched to Veeam which worked well, but then as we started needing to do migrations and off-site DR, we found ourselves relying on Zerto more often.
For my organization, the pricing model was an upfront investment for the Zerto licenses. My organization prefers to pay upfront and not deal with month-to-month or year-to-year pricing models that most companies are moving to. But for some, the investment may be more than they can afford, and would prefer the year-to-year pricing model.
I mean, it was 6 years ago, but we were up and going with all applications synchronizing in short order. The longest tasks was getting the 30 TB of application data synchronized between the datacenters.
Zerto is like having the best possible insurance ... it just works, and often provides the backups taken overnight that are key in recovering data/work between overnight backups.
Zerto easily enabled the move of primary datacenters by allowing easy failover to a secondary site, and failback to the primary site.
