Likelihood to Recommend If implemented as a Cloud Service provider (Public Cloud), In House Solution (Private Cloud) or a mixture of both (Hybrid Cloud):
The Agentless Architecture means there are less support burdens. Encryption at Source gives the customer confidence their data is secure. WAN Optimisation (Compression & Block Level Incremential Forever and De-deupe of Data), enables a large amount of Data to be protected offsite. One step Backup to both Local and Offsite storage enables LAN speed restores with offsite peace of mind. Asigra Replication from DS-System to DS-System enables another geographically separate copy of the data. Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Provides capability of local backups while maintaining remote copies on cloud to ensure faster recoveries of recent data and remote protection of all data. Helps reduce cost of long term retention by leveraging the BLM functionality. It does not need specialized hardware for it to work. Customers and Service Providers can choose their own infrastructure and do not need to rely on any OS or storage based replication even for deploying replication of backups. Supports wide range of environments including virtual environments with remarkable features like remote VDR with incremental restores. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons We would like to see Asigra come out with a Replication Model for quick Recovery of systems upon Disaster. We can have quicker recovery, DR, with Virtual Machines but we would like to have Physical Machine recovery in less than 2 hours. Replication can accomplish this... We would like to see Geolocation and remote wipe for endpoint devices We would like to see the solution provide easy "roll back" after a disaster. Read full review Moving a VM from one protection group to another could be simplified. I would like to see an executive-style report of recovery and testing for upper management. The ability to deploy Zerto as a virtual appliance, without the need for a windows server. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Asigra is a great entry way into the cloud. Compliance is a tricky thing. Jumping backup software means having to deal with previous copies somehow. Asigra is built for the long haul. Asigra is continuing to increase their feature stack. They have made huge steps in the VM backup in the last 3 years and continue to implement features there. As far as cloud backup software goes, there are many that can do it, but none that do it as well as Asigra. Read full review 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
Read full review Usability It is a bit rough around the edges and the GUI feels like a wrap around of a CLI but it is simple to use. The problem comes in when there is an error code you are usually chasing down the error code in the specific vendor's forums rather than Asigra's
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Over 6 consecutive years our Asigra Backend had 99.99% uptime and provided 7x24 data restore availability. Software is robust in operations, provides N+1 node architecture to protect against failure of half of the nodes (majority of the nodes still up) and software based replication to protect against data loss across two geographically independent datacenter locations. Why not 10 points? Some major upgrades still require short downtime within a planned maintenance windows.
Read full review Support Rating They respond quickly on your request. They ask for details at the time of logging the support request itself ensuring the first response is not for collecting the basic details only. They refund you the support request if they find it as a functionality issue. They follow up on you to ensure you are satisfied and happy with the response and resolution that they have provided.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training Anything training past level 1 and level 2 is a waste of time. They do not offer training, just an exam and require you to read 2500 pages of their documentation as their training. They are selling you something which you already have. Training exams are far fetched and cover topics hidden within the documentation. A lot of their documentation does not match across itself. They don't even follow the standard versions Major.Minor.ServicePack.Hotfix. They use the MAJOR.MAJOR.MAJOR.Hotfix method, which doesn't match their documentation. They require you to take training in order to keep your engaged hybrid partnership. If you ask me personally, their training is a scam to make more money.
Read full review Implementation Rating Quick to install, easy to create jobs, schedules and retention policies. No large cycles of setting up backup volumes or trash volumes. Retention job itself configures the BLM functionality so you don't need an expertise to handle the BLM module separately.
Read full review Make sure the end goal is in mind before implementing. That way results meet expectations.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I would say that it has the same functionality as the three mentioned above in their respective fields (might have a bit less than some of them) but Asigra offers all of this and more so if you are looking for a single backup solution across the entire firm then Asigra is the much better choice
Read full review 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.
Greg Goss SQL Database and Business Intelligence Manager
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model 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.
Read full review Professional Services 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Our entire Asigra environment can be easily monitored through one plane of glass thanks to their DS-Operator and Asigra Management Console. It's quite simple to use and navigate. Never has restoration fallen short. Data from several generations can be saved and retrieved. After a hardware failure, an edge server can be easily and quickly rebuilt. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots