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IBM Spectrum Protect vs Zerto comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
148
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
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 IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.5% 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

Rainer Kummerfeldt - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable security solution for data center protection
We have the requirements for cybersecurity. Spectrum Protect or other products do not have the technology. They need external products to meet this requirement. We utilize various storage solutions across different data centers, including tape and disk storage. It is immutable, preventing external changes. External tools may be required to verify backup integrity. Additionally, there's another product called IBM Spectrum Protect Defender, which aids in backup verification. However, other products can integrate with various tools depending on specific backup needs and at a lower cost. The service cost for IBM is very high. In the event of problems, we open a support call and discuss issues with the lab, which is crucial given the critical nature of some situations. Spectrum Protect's development trajectory differed from Veeam's as it initially didn't prioritize virtualization, resulting in later integration efforts. The first version of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus had shortcomings, though subsequent iterations like Plus may have improved. However, I need more direct experience with Plus to offer a comparison. Veeam holds a stronger market presence, particularly concerning cloud and virtualization, as it was developed with these trends in mind. The evolving landscape, including cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, demands versatile backup solutions with various storage and connectivity options, whether Amazon, Google, or others. This necessitates interfaces tailored to different cloud environments and storage types. Previously, our focus primarily revolved around IBM Protect, which centered on systems storage and tape libraries alongside platforms like AIX. However, the current landscape predominantly features Linux and Windows environments. Despite these shifts, AIX remains notably stable. Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.
Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Since the technology is reliable, it simplifies the backup process significantly. Now, our focus can primarily be on managing full backups and creating some offline copies."
"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It's a completely centralized solution."
"The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"Every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes."
"Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment."
"Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs."
"IBM support is friendly, knowledgeable, and they always respond quickly. They've always been able to find the cause of my problem."
"The Zerto university for training staff is very useful."
"It is the backbone of our DR solution for critical databases that hold the data we can't afford to lose. It provided new opportunities to change how we approach disaster recovery."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and easy. We were able to start replication within minutes of the initial setup."
"Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover."
"Zerto also improves application availability as our business continues to increase our lifespan."
"The ability to have a RPO of seconds has enabled us to restore data to just before an incident has occurred, which certainly saves a lot of time and money."
"Zerto is a flexible and resilient business continuity and disaster recovery solution."
"Zerto has helped us reduce overall DR testing in our company. What used to take a month I can do in less than two days."
 

Cons

"Our new leadership has pushed us to go more toward the cloud, so we are definitely going to leverage anything we can in that direction."
"IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool."
"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."
"I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory)."
"It needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.)."
"There needs to be a bit more automation."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent."
"This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic."
"The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product."
"An integrated encryption would allow for faster initial install and connection to the remote cloud site."
"Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement."
"It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default."
"One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet."
"Adding or changing VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) may require restarting replication."
"The tool must improve its long-term storage cloud strategy, making it more seamless and improving the solution's downtime features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Going to IBM Tech University Conference saved me from making a major purchase of the wrong thing, which was very helpful."
"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."
"It is fairly reasonable as compared to other solutions in the market."
"The solution's pricing is fair. Price-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable...I don't think most people know that when a company has large systems in place, the TCO is a lot lower."
"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."
"The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface."
"I think the cost is reasonable for VM licensing. It's not outside the scope of an enterprise product."
"All of my customers are happy with how this product works and they like it, but unfortunately, in the market that I represent, Zerto is expensive when compared with the competition."
"Compared to other options like SRM, Zerto is a more expensive solution, making it primarily suitable for larger organizations."
"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."
"It is less expensive than the full solution that we had previously, but at the same time, it's not an inexpensive product either."
"When we purchased Zerto, we felt it was worth the cost as it would protect us from any potential problems and give us peace of mind knowing that any critical items could be recovered quickly."
"The pricing doesn't seem too bad for what it does."
"Licensing Zerto was very simple. They had a product that fit our size and scale. It made it really easy to choose."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?
For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable, but most people don't know that. People only see one major price for the tool, which runs into millions, so they would always say that it is a...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
The technical team's service depends on where the support service is located. Some products are not included in IBM itself, but external companies are developing some solutions for IBM. I think the...
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.
 

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.