Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) vs Zerto comparison

Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Zerto and Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) compete in the data protection and disaster recovery category. Zerto is favored for its cost-effectiveness and customer support, whereas Dell PowerProtect DP is recognized for its robust features.

Features: Zerto is valued for continuous data protection, easy replication, and efficient disaster recovery functions. Dell PowerProtect DP offers comprehensive data recovery, integrated backup, and long-term data retention capabilities. Dell is rated higher for its extensive feature set, making it suitable for more complex needs.

Room for Improvement: Users seek enhanced scalability, more frequent updates, and additional advanced capabilities from Zerto. Dell PowerProtect DP users desire a lower entry point, simplified management options, and reduced complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto is praised for its straightforward deployment and excellent customer service. Dell PowerProtect DP has a steeper learning curve and mixed feedback on support, although it meets extensive requirements with its comprehensive setup.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto offers competitive pricing with quicker ROI due to its efficiency and lower setup costs. Dell PowerProtect DP has a higher initial cost with a longer ROI period, justified by its extensive feature set. Zerto is seen as more cost-effective, while Dell is viewed as a premium solution for extensive needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) vs. Zerto Report (Updated: January 2025).

Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) 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 PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

21st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

4.6

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

296

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 PowerProtect DP (IDPA) is 0.6%, down from 1.3% 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

Johny John

Technical Support Engineer at Mannai

Good deduplication and consolidated storage with easy management capabilities

It's a converting solution. We don't need to manage different devices. For example, for storing the data, you don't need to have separate storage. It is in a purposeful built-in backup pipeline. It's a very good product. For our purposes, we are happy with the product. We don't have any challenges and it is not that critical to managing. For a person having any kind of backup experience, background in the backup software, he'll be able to manage it easily. It's one of the best products in the field. The product offers an easy initial setup. The pricing is good. It's not the most expensive option. It gives you a very good deduplication ratio. It is my understanding that no other database can do this much deduplication.

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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

"IDPA's best feature is Turbo Boost Technology. The compression and duplication features are excellent, too."

"It backs up our Windows systems and our Linux systems and everything."

"The solution is strong."

"Instead of four or five tools, consisting of backup software, storage where the backup resides, and a separate system for reporting and central monitoring, they all now come in the virtual edition for IDP."

"Dell PowerProtect is stable and scalable."

"It is very simple to perform an upgrade of the system and the environment."

"The solution's most valuable features are networker and continuous data protection."

"The product is integrated with Huawei software and its backup and recovery time is very fast."

More Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) pros

"It's good for reliability, timing, and simplification. For reliability, it's a logical construction that behaves productively. It's a critical system where timing and coordination are necessary. It also offers simplicity to design and analyze the system by clearly defining the relationship between events and conditions."

"The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover."

"Zerto offered a very good front-end GUI for orchestration. The graphic interface was very good."

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

"When we need to failover or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. It only takes a single person to activate a failover and we can pretty much automate everything else."

"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."

"Zerto also improves application availability as our business continues to increase our lifespan."

"The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"I would like to see integration with Dell EMC's Cloud Tier."

"Dell PowerProtect DP needs to include more features and improve backup for a continual base."

"Managing the product is a little bit complicated."

"The solution should be easier to use."

"The only thing that could be improved would be the complexity of the initial setup."

"The price could be lowered slightly, to make it more competitive."

"There is room for improvement in terms of network connectivity."

"The product's index master feature needs improvement."

More Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) cons

"I always get some blowback about the cost. It does not seem too bad to me. We had to upgrade to a premium subscription to get some other features. Maybe a one-size-fits-all option would be better."

"We have had issues with licensing, where the license we've been given by Zerto support doesn't include VSS replication, which was a pain at the time."

"I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time."

"The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set."

"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."

"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."

"Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners."

"Zerto's current reporting capabilities are insufficient for our needs."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license. It is a capacity-based license."

"Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) has a yearly subscription fee."

"I would rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"It is a cost-effective solution."

"The licensing is billed on a monthly basis. Dell is bundled so that when you order IDPA, you get everything together with the license."

"The licensing costs are not cheap. It is kind of an expensive product. However, I am a get-what-you-pay-for kind of person. After using this product, I can understand why the licensing costs are high."

"We're getting our money's worth with Zerto."

"Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it."

"Obviously, I wish it were cheaper and more affordable. But I get what I pay for, so I can't complain."

"Zerto's pricing structure could be more competitive to better suit the needs of a wider range of businesses."

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

"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."

"At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop."

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

Educational Organization

37%

Government

University

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 do you like most about Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?

What I find valuable about Dell PowerProtect IDPA is its stability and strong performance.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?

Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) has a yearly subscription fee.

What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?

The solution's implementation was very complicated and could be improved.

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?

It is not the cheapest product; it is not the most expensive product, but it works. It is a mid-range product, and it is justified in terms of being pretty quick and easy.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

Comparisons

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Compared 27% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

Rubrik vs Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

Compared 8% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

Compared 6% of the time

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Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 9% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)

February 2025

Download Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) product report

Download Zerto product report

January 2025

Also Known As

Dell EMC IDPA, Dell IDPA, EMC IDPA

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

The PowerProtect DP series appliances is the integrated appliance solution from the Dell data protection appliances portfolio.

PowerProtect DP series appliance: Simple, efficient and agile data protection

The DP series is an all-in-one backup appliance that reduces the complexity of managing multiple data silos, point solutions and vendor relationships. The DP series simplifies deployment and management—while delivering powerful, enterprise-grade data protection capabilities for small, mid-size and enterprise organizations at a low cost-to-protect.

It is an integrated solution that offers complete backup, replication, recovery, deduplication, instant access and restore, search & analytics, seamless VMware integration — plus, cloud readiness with disaster recovery (DR) and long-term retention (LTR) to the cloud — all in a single appliance.

With the DP series, customers reduce their time-to-protect and become more agile with a solution that’s fast, protected more efficiently, can be recovered quickly and is reliable.

Simple to deploy, scale and manage

The DP series enables organizations to protect a broad ecosystem of applications quickly with a single system management console, consolidating workload protection, and eliminating infrastructure or data sprawl. The easy-to-use System Manager simplifies backups and automates daily tasks, including monitoring, management, reporting, analytics and search. The DP series delivers all-in-one data protection: protection storage and software, search and advanced monitoring and analytics, combined with cloud extensibility. It offers integration with VMware, SQL and Oracle management tools so that admins can use familiar UIs.

Powerful cloud, performance and efficiency

The DP series can scale to fit the needs of enterprises with the ability to protect up to 195 PB (logical) of data to the public, private or hybrid clouds with Cloud Tier, with no additional hardware.7 Plus, native Cloud DR with end-to-end orchestration allows enterprises to copy backed-up VMs from on-premises DP series environments to the public cloud with AWS, Azure, or VMware Cloud on AWS —3 clicks to failover and 2 clicks to failback.

The DP series provides support for modern applications like MongoDB and MySQL and is optimized for VMware. It provides fast, single-step recovery of individual files, dynamic policies for VMs as well as complete VMware images, which can be instantly accessed and migrated live from the DP series appliance back to the production environment (using vMotion) while still running, further simplifying and optimizing VM recovery. Plus, instantly access up to 64 VMs with up to 60,000 IOPS to meet the strictest SLAs.

Data protection search simplifies file-level-recovery (FLR) activities with an easy-to-use search interface. The DP series is also built on the industry-proven Data Invulnerability Architecture (DIA), for encryption, fault detection, and healing.

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

Under Armour, Christian Brothers University, Presidio

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