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HPE Zerto Software vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

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

HPE Zerto Software
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
342
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (1st), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (1st)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 2.6%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.1%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE Zerto Software2.6%
IBM Storage Protect2.1%
Other95.3%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Real-time or near real-time replication has been the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential."
"The core functionality is what's beautiful about it."
"I am quite familiar with the user interface. It is easy for me to operate and perform different operations because I am an experienced user. In my opinion, the user interface is easy to understand and operate. The user interface is user-friendly."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."
"Their support is very good."
"It's helped reduce downtime in certain situations."
"We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal."
"The live test failover is the most valuable feature because it allows me to validate that my data is protected in the event of a failure."
"The best functional system I utilize is integrated with the data domain and DIGS backup solution, which makes it easily manageable and comprehensive."
"The tool's backup engine is very powerful. Previously, our client finished backup with HPE product in 48 hours. IBM Storage Protect completes backup in 8 hours."
"We apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping."
"Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates."
"The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature."
"I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting."
"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."
"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."
 

Cons

"In Azure... We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group."
"Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have."
"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."
"I have experienced some issues sometimes during upgrades."
"Near-synchronous replication has some trade-offs."
"The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be."
"I don't feel like we're a big enough customer to warrant being called every week or every month but it would be good to get a little bit more contact with a salesperson or engineer group."
"There should be an automatic installation in a cluster. When I add a virtual client or ESX source to the cluster, it should automatically install that. There should be automatic installation. Currently, I have to do that manually."
"RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us."
"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."
"Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups."
"In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center."
"IBM's support hasn't been so good in the last few years."
"The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too."
"I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution."
"Although I am not a technical user, I would say the cloud integration features could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup."
"To ensure proper data protection, we require a separate backup solution alongside Zerto for disaster recovery therefore the price for Zerto is high."
"License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it."
"We subscribe to their annual license package and we have tier one support with them."
"Zerto is a little bit expensive [for our budget] but as far as the value that it provides, it is completely justified by all of the savings."
"Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service."
"Pricing is kind of expensive, but for what we get, it is probably worth it. I know they just had a huge price increase due to the VMware stuff getting expensive, which added about a thousand dollars a month to our bill."
"I do not like the current pricing model because the product has been divided into different components and they are charging for them individually."
"The solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."
"There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more."
"At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."
"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution."
"When compared to the cost of other enterprise products, it seems to be in the same range. However, compared to the cost of non-enterprise products, it is really high."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"IBM Spectrum Protect has a fixed price and includes no additional costs."
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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
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business92
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise193
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal with it, but from what I hear from my finance team, it's somewhat on the higher...
What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Zerto Software vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.