There are hundreds of software companies that produce extremely ingenious products, but unfortunately they have not (yet) become the focus of the mainstream: But are definitely on their way. In our opinion, this definitely includes Zerto.

We came across it in a project in which the storage manufacturer did not yet support active-active and we had to think about a solution together. A sales engineer then arrived with Zerto. We were instantly enthusiastic: A quasi real-time replication (without snapshots) of hundreds of VMs every 10 seconds? If desired from VMware to Hyper-V or vice versa? Or just the possibility to migrate hundreds of VMs to the cloud extremely easily?

The advantage is obvious: For an administrator, what good is a great HA infrastructure for an encryption Trojan? Exactly — nothing at all. With Zerto, on the other hand, I can (depending on the infrastructure) replicate my VMs from left to right and vice versa. And also define dependencies in groups (because what good is my Exchange Server without a synchronously functioning AD? Or my CRM without the SQL database?). And there is still the possibility to go back up to 30 days.

So far, so good: Does Zerto currently replace a real backup? No, because unlike Veeam & Co., it is not (yet) possible to archive and write on tape on a long-term basis.

Is there a catch? In all honesty: Yes, the price should scare at least small companies at first. Zerto assumes at least 15 VMs to be licensed. And we talk about replication here, which means that of course the respective additional resources must be given.

However, one only has to use a rule of three (and we did this together with the client in the project described above): What does it cost me in the worst case if it takes 2–3 days for all of my employees to be productive again?

In the project described, we agreed that the investment here is definitely worth it. Regardless, HA of course makes perfect sense. But above all, you get a grip on any hardware problems.

But if, for example, someone in a company caught an encryption Trojan on a Friday afternoon and it had the entire weekend to encrypt all files/systems, how long does it take the administrator on a Monday morning to make all systems available again?

With backups of tapes from hours to days — with Zerto only a few minutes.

Daily backups are good, HA is good, but it can only get really smooth with Zerto.