Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Zerto comparison

"The product's ability to give predictions and advice on how to protect data is incredible."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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 most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time."

"With Zerto CDP, we can pull to our recovery objective in six seconds."

"The customer service and support are very good. Every time we have problems, they're ready to help us."

"A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site. Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery solutions, the recovery point typically is about 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, recovery point objectives tend to be minutes or a few seconds if the bandwidth is adequate. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto: there's no need to run incremental backups every xx minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well, like a shutdown and reboot of a VM. Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time. Zerto is also a very easy product to use."

"I like the granularity of the checkpoints."

"Zerto is an excellent solution for cloud-based environments, but for DIY clients who have another site to recover their systems it also works well."

"It is incredibly granular and I really appreciate that."

"The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"They should empower their customers with the ability to upgrade this solution as long as it's in the same major release."

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

"They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement."

"There are still some pieces in testing that aren't automated. There are still some built-in scripts or workflows I wish Zerto would do out-of-the-box, versus having to PowerShell or have a vendor create it, or create it myself."

"When setting up Zerto, you have to set up VRAs. I would like to see those not be needed as much. They're a little cumbersome and take up a lot of VM counts."

"The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed."

"Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it."

"I would like for Zerto to improve reporting, provide more data on individual VMs and their performance, and maybe expand into backup with the ability to scan for malware or offline scanning."

"Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site."

"The alerting could be fine tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The product is affordable."

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

"Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."

"I think everything can be cheaper. Pricing limited our ability to use Zerto as much as we'd like, but that's not why we haven't adopted it as our primary backup solution."

"To ensure proper data protection, we require a separate backup solution alongside Zerto for disaster recovery therefore the price for Zerto is high."

"Pricing is one area where there could be 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. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting."

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

"The pricing seems reasonable. It's still within what we consider to be value-add."

"We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running."