NetApp offers SnapMirror, a data replication option.
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Zerto
Score 8.2 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…
NetApp SnapMirror is a no-brainer when it comes to retaining an offsite backup for disaster recovery purposes. The backbone of the product is the Snapshot technology built into NetApp technology. In my experience, the Snapshot/SnapMirror software has been flawless and very dependable. The only piece that I can see adding in the future is potentially connecting SnapMirror to the cloud as an additional backup destination.
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.
Very well versed and a good product to deal with downtime to recover from the failure is pretty good. Also, NetApp's engagement on Incident calls is very professional and humble. I would give a 100% rating to this product as I have been working on this for the past 5 years. It is stable, fast and highly reliable
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
Zerto is very easy to implement and support. Uses are broad, only issues are once something doesn't sync it is difficult to get assistance until your reach tier 2 or tier 3 support. Basic file and folder recovery is great. Live and test fail overs are also easy to implement without issue.
NetApp support has always been great. With the NetApp Auto-support system/web portal, the visibility into your NetApp storage is incredible. There have been times when I've been contacted by them for an issue that I haven't even discovered yet. For example, I received a call 20 minutes after a drive failed in our filer. I hadn't checked my email at that time and therefore didn't see the alert.
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.
Over the years we have transitioned to NetApp SnapMirror for all our storage needs. However, due to the short life cycle of support, it is cost prohibitive to maintain after support is ended. The main reason we have liked NetApp SnapMirror due to the many options and standardized management capabilities and flexible options for provisioning and setup of storage.
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.
