Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Zerto comparison

Dell Data Protection Advisor

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98% willing to recommend

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Zerto and Dell Data Protection Advisor serve in the data protection and disaster recovery category. Zerto has the upper hand in user satisfaction due to its features, while Dell Data Protection Advisor is favored for its broader functionality despite the higher price.

Features: Zerto users highlight its strong replication, disaster recovery capabilities, and simplicity. Dell Data Protection Advisor users value its extensive reporting tools, integration capabilities, and detailed analysis.

Room for Improvement: Zerto users need improved support, faster updates, and better customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor users suggest better documentation, more user-friendly features, and enhanced usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto is noted for quick and straightforward deployment with reliable customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor has a more complex deployment process but benefits from detailed documentation and responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto offers cost-effective pricing with a good return on investment. Dell Data Protection Advisor is more expensive but provides value through advanced features and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto Report (Updated: January 2025).

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dell Data Protection Advisor

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

26th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

284

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell Data Protection Advisor is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 2.9%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Mario Castillo

Jefe de IT at Asociación de Azucareros de Guatemala

Backup solution that improved our RTO and RPO

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. It would be a 10 for me if there were more features for disaster recovery. For someone who wants to implement this solution, my advice is that they need advanced knowledge about the solution. It can't be implemented without technical experience.

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Sachin Vinay

Assistant Manager-Networks at Amrita

Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features

Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.

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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 most valuable aspects of the solution are the compression and the duplication."

"It supports our chargeback process by identifying resource users, which helps ensure that departments are billed accurately for data protection services rather than receiving them for free."

"The deduplication is probably the most valuable feature of that requirement."

"The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment typically takes about one hour. You just need one person to handle the deployment process."

"I can increase the tool's licensing as per my requirement with no conditions applied."

"It has a lot of stock reports. I believe over 300 canned reports, which for the most part meet a lot of generic needs."

"This is a stable solution."

"The solution is easy to use, flexible and has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. You can configure the dashboards or you can use a script. However, to fully utilize its capabilities you will want to use a lot of scripts which you will need advanced training. The reports can be customized for many things, such as chargeback billing."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor pros

"In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window."

"The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage."

"We use to use VMware replication appliances to attempt to replicate our VMs to remote locations and servers, but Zerto's one-to-many replication options with deduplication have made the process much simpler without having to constantly worry about the versions of each driver."

"We have seen ROI. The biggest way that we have seen it is in avoided downtime. We have had outages before, and we count downtime in terms of dollars spent. We have cut that down so dramatically, which provides us a very quick ROI. We have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes us to recover workloads, from an average of two hours to an average of 10 minutes."

"We are in the process of switching over our production data center and Zerto has been a true time-saver that has cost us zero downtime."

"The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center."

"In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy."

"The most valuable feature is the rollback feature that captures every couple of minutes. Whenever we have a server that goes down, we can use that to pull it back a couple of minutes before and it's good to go."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"The solution requires more integration with our other solutions. I know that they have full integration with VMware because it is also from EMC. However, we have to have better integration with Microsoft and Nutanix as well."

"We have encountered issues where we were unable to pull data from the database server. It should also improve the backward compatibility."

"It's a bit difficult for first-time users."

"The stability of the solution needs improvement for stand alone users."

"The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy."

"Some minor adjustments could be made regarding the graphical interface and customization options."

"There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful."

"The functionality of the Data Protection Advisor is limited and is something that is lacking in this solution. Other solutions like CloudIQ and DDMC provide a much better outlook on how data protection should be done."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor cons

"The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do."

"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."

"I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."

"I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit."

"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."

"Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better."

"It would also be nice if you could update without having to download a new installation file for Zerto Virtual Manager. Within the app, it could prompt you to install and perform the installation from within the application. Generally, it's relatively easy to use, but it gets a little complex when customers have special network requirements and need to customize how long they want the save points to be retained. We need to work with the storage team on the backend to see what makes the most sense for the client."

"You have to start with 25 VMs which is too much for SMB clients. It would be better if they had the option to start with 10."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to make an upfront payment for three, five, or seven years and renew the licenses for support. We can do an annual maintenance contract with Dell. I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."

"The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement."

"The product is affordable."

"You have to procure the license when you are ordering or quoting for Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS). DPS is bundled with the suite and comes with a license. However, if you purchase NetWorker separately then you will have to procure the license for DPS separately."

"It's not very expensive — I think the price is fair."

"For pricing, I would rate Dell 2 out of 5. It's affordable."

"If the customer has huge lineup of Dell Products then they receive discount on the pricing."

"Its price can be better, but it is not bad. Most small-scale organizations can afford it, but they can come up with more customer-friendly packages."

"It's expensive, for sure, but for us, it comes down to the fact that we do not replicate our entire environment using Zerto. We replicate the mission-critical servers and services, so the yearly cost of Zerto is heavily outweighed by the potential cost of an outage."

"Zerto is pretty reasonable. I haven't checked to see how much Rubrik is going to quote us for their solution. At least for us, the price doesn't play a big factor in the decision-making because it is a pretty small deployment for our use case."

"The licensing is a little bit steep, but there is some value that you do get for it as well."

"This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup."

"The pricing is top tier but offers good value."

"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."

"Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model."

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

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The platform's most valuable features are data protection and retention.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement.

What needs improvement with Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy. Additionally, enhancing bulk update capabilities for items like cost centers would be...

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.

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Comparisons

Compared 29% of the time

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 18% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 16% of the time

Rubrik vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 12% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 10% of the time

More Dell Data Protection Advisor Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 16% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 9% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

More Zerto Competitors

Product Reports

Dell Data Protection Advisor

February 2025

Download Dell Data Protection Advisor product report

Download Zerto product report

January 2025

Also Known As

DPA

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

Effectively managing your data protection environment can be labor intensive and complex. It requires knowledge of backup applications, replication technologies, and the entire supporting infrastructure, yet it is critical in keeping your data secure.

With Dell Data Protection Advisor, you can automate and centralize the collection, monitoring and reporting of this data and get a single, comprehensive view of your environment, no matter where your data resides. This includes monitoring data on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

With clear visibility, you can gain actionable insight and effectively manage service levels while reducing costs and complexity. You can also collect and report on that data to help other stakeholders make the best decisions for your organization.

Data Protection Advisor is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite.

Dell Technologies

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

Nielsen, Trek Bicycle, Cal-Israel Credit Cards

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