Dell Avamar vs Zerto comparison

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Dell Avamar

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Dell Avamar and Zerto are prominent solutions in the data backup and disaster recovery space. Zerto seems to have the upper hand due to its features, and users feel it is worth the price.

Features: Dell Avamar is praised for its efficient data deduplication, reliable backup capabilities, and comprehensive data management. Zerto is recognized for its continuous data protection, seamless replication features, and advanced disaster recovery functionalities.

Room for Improvement: Users of Dell Avamar suggest enhancing reporting capabilities, improving restore speeds, and reducing the time required for initial setup. For Zerto, users recommend better integrations with third-party tools, an improved alerting system, and a more user-friendly interface for easier management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell Avamar deployment is straightforward but can be time-consuming. Users mention that Dell's customer service is responsive and helpful. Zerto offers a simpler and quicker deployment process, and its customer service receives high marks for effectiveness and speed.

Pricing and ROI: Dell Avamar is generally perceived as more affordable, offering good value with its comprehensive backup solutions. Zerto, although pricier, delivers better ROI due to its advanced features and efficiency in disaster recovery. Users are willing to invest more in Zerto for its superior capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Avamar vs. Zerto Report (Updated: December 2024).

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Dell Avamar vs. Zerto

December 2024

Helped 823,875 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Dell Avamar

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

12th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (3rd)

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

279

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell Avamar is 3.6%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 2.8%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Sebastien Chene

Senior Business Development Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Stable, integrates well with other solutions, and has a good price, but its UI needs a refresh

What would make Dell Avamar better is if it can do faster backups because right now, PowerProtect Data Manager is better in this area with its new UI and a new way to implement backups. Customers nowadays also expect more up-to-date solutions, and this is another area for improvement in Dell Avamar. It's not as up-to-date, so I'm counting on PowerProtect Data Manager, but customers who have Dell Avamar don't want to switch because you don't have as many backup problems in Dell Avamar compared to other solutions. What I'd like to see in the next release of Dell Avamar is an updated UI and a different way to manage backups because currently, backup management is a bit heavy for customers using Dell Avamar.

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Derrick Brockel

Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Good GUI, easy setup, and fast recovery

When we tested it, it had more functions than what we used it for, but it was a very good BCDR product. We liked the reliability and availability. Zerto enables you to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, but we did not use that feature. We used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It was strong in that aspect. I would rate it an eight out of ten there. Zerto's speed of recovery was comparable. There was no synchronous and asynchronous replication. If I had to give it a number, it would be a seven out of ten. It was the same as others. There was not much difference. It was easy to migrate data. There was some initial configuration in syncing, but it was easy. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of migration. Zerto’s ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration was good. I would rate it a seven out of ten in this aspect as well as in terms of its impact on RTOs. Zerto helps reduce downtime in any situation. We can bring up a database in minutes. It probably takes five minutes for the final sync. The cost of downtime depends on the database. It may be 50,000 if you have call center people sitting around. Normally, most of our small outages like that ranged in the tens of thousands. Zerto did save time in a data recovery situation. We did not have ransomware, but there were times we had database corruption where the users would corrupt the database, and the database would not start. It would do snapshotting. It was not necessarily ransomware, but it was testing upgrades or Oracle upgrades. The data recovery happened within five minutes, if not sooner. A normal restore would probably be four to eight hours if we had to restore from a tape and apply logs. Zerto helps to reduce an organization's DR testing. You can spin off an extra database pretty quickly and have users test against the third or fourth copy. It saves one to three days of testing depending on test cycles. You could do sequential testing. I would probably measure it more in days than hours. All of that time can be used by a DBA to do something else. Zerto reduces the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. One person could probably orchestrate it now versus one to three people. It did not reduce the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management because we are pretty thin. We would not have gotten rid of anybody.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution is easy to use and has high performance."

"We have seen huge data reduction and data deduplication and compression, which is very cost-effective and cost-reducing for the company."

"The installation process is pretty straightforward."

"For the on-prem backup, it has all the necessary features that we require. They keep coming up with new scripts and new updates."

"Avamar has long been the best in its class, but that's changing as new solutions emerge. However, Dell has traditionally been a leader in deduplication and compression. Avamar enabled us to shift data from on-premise local appliances to data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure. That's a powerful feature. because customers can back up to the cloud without upgrading o high-capacity links or congesting their backups."

"The most valuable features are scalability and integration."

"The backup and recovery speed is very fast."

"I think the brand is very good. Support is also very nice for end users and integration with EMC products for businesses."

More Dell Avamar pros

"The customer service and support are excellent."

"The granularity enables us to failover specific workloads instead of an all-or-nothing type of scenario, where you have to move your entire IP block and your data center, or you have to move large chunks of VMs. Those situations also make it prohibitive to test effectively."

"The most valuable feature is how quickly it powers down the original source VMs and the speed at which it powers up the new VMs. The amount of time it takes to put up the operating system is valuable. The speed is what I like the best."

"Zerto is scalable."

"One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end."

"The stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems."

"The most valuable feature for us is accelerating cloud adoption, as it helps provide greater speed for disaster recovery. Ultimately, this saves us time, as well as resources."

"With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"Setting up Avamar wasn't so easy, and we had a partner doing the installation for us. Though it was hard at first, it's getting better. The main difficulty was finding plugins for Oracle Database. It took some time to open a ticket with Dell, but everything was fine after that."

"It's not the best solution for big databases."

"It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms."

"Compared with Cohesity or Rubrik, which have some continuous data protection for backup and replication, this solution tends to lack in this area."

"It is very scalable, and that's its claim to fame, but that also makes it hard to make changes. Anytime there is a large piece of software, changing that piece of software is harder. You've got a larger install base, so you can't just rapidly change. We also use another product called Veeam, and it has this new feature called Continuous Data Protection, which basically lets you get very close to the way the system was in time. We have a system or two up there on which we have set 10 minutes Continuous Data Protection. So, we can roll it back to whatever it was 10 minutes ago, 20 minutes ago, or 30 minutes ago. This feature doesn't exist in Avamar Data Domain. That's the one feature I'd like to see first."

"When you get down to doing certain things, such as somebody wants a particular file restored, the process by which you do that is stupid. You kind of have to know exactly where to look for in order to find it. Even on older backup products that I've used, I didn't have that kind of problem. If we were looking for a file with a particular kind of a name, the solution would find that file anywhere irrespective of where it resides within the backup system. So, we didn't have to know the name of the specific server, the specific timeframe, almost all the characters of the file name, and all kinds of data in order to find a file. In Avamar, we got to know these details. We've gone around and around with them on that, and their attitude seems to be that it is working just fine. There is nothing for them to improve. The organizational system of other products that I'm working with, such as Zerto and Cohesity, seems to be centered around the tasks that you would most commonly do and want to do, as opposed to we've laid it out in a really neat technical hierarchy."

"It was challenging to back up our Exchange database, which is one of the reasons we did not continue using this solution."

"Dell EMC Avamar is a very complex product. It took a lot of time for the IT admins to get trained on how to use it. It is not very user-friendly, and we won't be using Avamar anymore. It needs a lot of improvement in terms of how the backups have been configured, and the reporting is too complex."

More Dell Avamar cons

"Zerto could improve by offering more flexible pricing models, especially for startups."

"If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens."

"The technical support has room for improvement."

"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."

"Their support can be faster."

"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."

"Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that."

"They have moved to appliances, and the configuration of appliances is a bit complicated."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell Avamar is a moderately priced solution."

"I'm not sure, but perhaps the pricing could be done better at the moment."

"The solution is costly."

"Dell Avamar is free when we deploy the data protection. When we order data protection, this software is included in the hardware."

"The cost is high."

"There is a license required for this solution."

"Dell Avamar, including its virtual add-ons and cloud-based offerings, is cheaper than other solutions, but in the end, the price still depends on your use case. Price-wise, I'm rating Dell Avamar as six out of ten."

"Licensing fees are paid annually."

More Dell Avamar pricing and cost advice

"The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper."

"I would like to see different service levels. They're good, but it still takes a lot of our budget in ops."

"The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."

"The pricing seems really good. We're an enterprise customer, so we get all the bells and whistles."

"The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions."

"It is cost-effective."

"I would suggest getting a dedicated, well-informed rep."

"Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user159711

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 9, 2014

VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto

Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC Avamar?

The pricing is not competitive enough.

What do you like most about Dell Avamar?

Easy to configure and highly reliable for backup.

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?

Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...

What do you like most about Zerto?

Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?

I would rate the pricing, setup cost, and licensing around a seven on a scale of one to ten. The pricing model could be more flexible to accommodate startup companies with lower budgets.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Avamar

Comparisons

Compared 30% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Avamar

Compared 16% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Avamar

Compared 13% of the time

Rubrik vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup vs Dell Avamar

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell Avamar Competitors

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 18% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 17% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Druva inSync vs Zerto

Compared 1% of the time

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Product Reports

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Dell Avamar

December 2024

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November 2024

Also Known As

Avamar

Zerto Virtual Replication

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Dell Technologies

Overview

Dell Avamar data protection software delivers flexible and efficient backup and recovery operations that can scale from daily backup protection for endpoints to high-performance protection for large enterprises with diverse applications and workloads. With application consistent recovery, automation and fast backup and restores, Avamar can help you meet your SLAs and optimize your backup and recovery processes

If you are deploying all or part of your backup environment to the cloud, Avamar enables you to make the most of your cloud investment, enabling replication, disaster recovery and long-term retention for customers using AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Avamar is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. Avamar is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

Zerto is used for disaster recovery, business continuity, data migration, and ransomware recovery, providing continuous data protection and near real-time replication. Valued for ease of use, efficient failover processes, and versatile integration, it enhances organizational efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts productivity.

Sample Customers

Dodge County, St Laurence's College, FieldCore (a GE Company), Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Getronics, Lewisville Independent School District, EnvisionRxOptions, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies