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NetApp SnapCenter vs Zerto comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

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

NetApp SnapCenter
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
36th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
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 NetApp SnapCenter is 0.6%, up 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

Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates well with various applications , provides a cloning feature for creating snapshots or clones of volume and a centralized command
It is basically centralized command control software. When the users visualize the workflow of the backup, the management and the customer storage administrator know the ins and outs of the backup and recovery. They can make the strategy for their backup and recovery and the certainty of their backups and restore. Strategic planning: Also, it is easy to make a strategy when you have visualized the inflow and outflow of the backup and recovery. With the CLI or native way, without any UI or management tool, you might not be able to create any strategy at all. This is especially important when you have multiple storage systems inside your data center or organization. You need a tool that connects and visualizes the workflow of the backup and recovery from all the storage systems and NetApp storage systems installed within the organization. It is very important when you have multiple storage systems, and you need to manage your backup and recovery workflow. Ease of Management: Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp has its own product called SnapCenter. Other vendors need to acquire third-party software or integrate with other software to manage storage systems. NetApp has its own solution, which is SnapCenter. NetApp's SnapCenter gels well with their storage systems and products. Ease of management is already there. It's a fine software with easy installation, management, and understanding. It's not a complicated software to understand.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has been very helpful when we have issues."
"Most banks and financial institutions use the solution."
"It's all together managing both storage and backup, which makes it easier for troubleshooting issues and the automation part of it"
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters."
"It's very helpful because SnapCenter is already integrated with VMware Snapshot, so it's very easy to use."
"You can quickly deploy new virtual environments. It provides efficient and easy-to-use data protection. If a file goes missing or corruption occurs, you can restore it swiftly using the snap restore feature, allowing you to return to work almost immediately."
"The backup process finishes very quickly."
"The main purpose of this tool is to allow failover between different data centers and different locations. When one site is unavailable, we can start the failover activity and perform the failover task. When a primary location is unavailable, or there is some hardware or logical issue at the primary location, it allows us to resolve the problem. We are able to start services at safe locations. We handle the disaster recovery process, and this is the main function for which we are using it all the time."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of upgrades."
"We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud."
"Using Zerto, you can have your VM up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is flip a switch, then you are good to go."
"Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover."
"We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable."
"We have had many instances where VMs were corrupted by an application owner, where they were installing something and did not create a snapshot in VMware for it. Instead of tapping into our backups, with just two clicks, we were able to restore the VM back to its original state. It helps a lot in the day-to-day running of our business."
"We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management."
 

Cons

"The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has."
"The tool could be faster."
"Reporting of the jobs could be better."
"The GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot."
"Some of the minor functionalities from SnapManager did not transfer over to SnapCenter. These should be added in future releases."
"One thing that might be improved is the ease of management."
"I have an issue with SnapCenter because sometimes a VM cannot be backed up... The way SnapCenter works is that it makes a backup of all the VMs and then it removes all the old backups. If one VM cannot be backed up for some reason, it has already created a new backup for all the VMs but it cannot remove the old backups. It ends up creating so many backups in VMware and it will cause a performance problem if the condition is not fixed."
"I'm waiting for SnapCenter for hybrid solutions. Right now, we only have SnapManager for hybrid. I need agents for that. People are looking to install SnapCenter in a SQL environment, but where they're running SQL on Hyper-V and using virtual files. Currently, we don't have support for hybrid."
"When we migrated to new virtual infrastructure, we had to set up Zerto all over again. And that took a long time. It would be nice if Zerto had some sort of migration tool where you could migrate all of your virtual machines to a new infrastructure without having to set up Zerto all over again."
"Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better."
"The solution is very expensive."
"As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it."
"Our operational teams have discussed the ability to integrate multiple Zerto cloud platforms more seamlessly. For example, we have acquired 22 companies over the last seven years. Some already had it deployed, and integrating those existing deployments into our primary deployment is more challenging than it could be. We have provided our feedback to them."
"It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor."
"When it comes to failover tests, we would like to be able to take that extra step to shut things down and see what it looks like at the other site versus just doing it in a virtual environment."
"The native Zerto implementation requires quite a big environment. My environment is rather small. I do not have hundreds of virtual machines."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."
"The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles."
"The product is inexpensive."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
"Zerto is reasonably price for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price."
"It is cost-effective."
"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."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
"I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery."
"Zerto is fairly expensive, but worth it."
"Its price is reasonable. I have not worked with other tools, but as compared to its competitors such as VMware, its price is lower. So, in my opinion, its price is good."
"There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for."
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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
Manufacturing Company
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NetApp SnapCenter?
Most banks and financial institutions use the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp SnapCenter?
If you have a license, you don't need to buy anything extra. If you have multiple storage systems and want to manage them with a central tool, you are covered.
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapCenter?
There is always a chance for improvement. One thing that might be improved is the ease of management. It might be made a little less complicated.
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.
 

Also Known As

SnapCenter
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

All for One Steeb AG, Accenture
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 NetApp SnapCenter vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.