Likelihood to Recommend We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.
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 It has fully automated and customizable dashboards that can run with less administrative attention. It should be able to run on virtual machines or be deployed as a virtual machine within MS Azure or AWS. It's AI-based ransomware detection helps to understand data characteristics and alerts for ransomware attacks. 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 Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error. Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained. Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device. 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 We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.
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 I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?
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 The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Performance The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Support Rating They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.
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 It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Implementation Rating The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.
Read full review Make sure the end goal is in mind before implementing. That way results meet expectations.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run
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 Scalability Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
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 It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department. We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality. Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us. 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