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OpenText Data Protector 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

OpenText Data Protector
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
102
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
304
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of OpenText Data Protector is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Jeroen Vranckaerts - PeerSpot reviewer
Though a highly stable tool, it needs to be made easier to use and configure
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. OpenText Data Protector is complex to configure correctly, but the areas concerning the data and compression are good. Once you get the product to work, it works, but it's much too complex to configure and troubleshoot, as it takes a lot of time and energy, making it not so efficient. Once the tool is configured in your environment, it provides good backup and compression features. In my company, we use OpenText Data Protector as a backup for our servers, and we have a team of 20 people to take care of the data backup using the tool. My company doesn't use OpenText Data Protector as a backup for our client's computers. In my company, we have scheduled the process related to backup, which makes the tool run daily around 30 to 40 times.
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

"If you have an idea of what you are doing, it's very flexible and very stable."
"I like that Micro Focus keeps a separate catalog of our data."
"Regarding scalability, it's unlimited with Data Protector. You can link multiple installations and let them work together. They can share backup devices. You have many possibilities with Data Protector. It's very proficient."
"The normal file system backup is easy to manage, and our success rate is quite high."
"Backup of SAP/Oracle -- they are more robust than the competition."
"The feature that was most valuable was that we could restore one mailbox and we could do different backups for different databases."
"The command-line interface is user-friendly and well documented in the reference guide."
"The installation was simple and provided an easy way to install even on Unix servers. It has excellent features like deduplication."
"In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy."
"We used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time."
"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."
"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."
"You can set the number of days a VM can be rolled back in case of corruption or virus infection."
 

Cons

"VM backups needs to be improved. They need to make it similar to the way Veeam and Commvault are doing the virtual backups."
"Many of our users complain about the GUI. You still need to rely on the command line interface. Because it originated as a Unix system, Data Protector is still a command line-driven solution, which makes it seem rather dated compared to systems that are built around a GUI from day one. It doesn't affect the functionality, but some people don't find it user-friendly."
"If you compare the solution with the same specific features and enhancements on another solution, Data Protector is expensive. This is especially true when compared to, for example, Veeam."
"OpenText Data Protector is more difficult to use and configure than OpenText VIM. The user-friendliness of OpenText Data Protector has to be increased, and the complexity of the tool needs to be reduced."
"Micro Focus are improving Data Protector with every new version and since we began undergoing training with the latest version we have not faced any real challenges yet. However, their support does need to be improved, in my opinion. In certain critical cases that we've had, they did not provide a satisfactory level of support."
"I don't like this solution so much because it's very technical and compared to Commvault and Veeam, it's not so user-friendly. The interface needs improvement."
"The technical support was very slow."
"The scheduler setup could be better. We are facing some issues scheduling the job based on our requirements."
"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."
"Sometimes we require extra storage for Zerto."
"The monitoring and alerting functionality need to be improved."
"The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere."
"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."
"I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins... as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which."
"Right now, if you have an error, it creates a link that takes you to a website to review information about the problem. It would be nice if Zerto could give you information within the app instead of referring you to a web application."
"The technical support response time has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is neither too expensive nor very cheap."
"They have two types of licensing, one is for storage capacity and the other is client licensing. The capacity licensing here is a bit expensive."
"It is more affordable compared to other vendors."
"Avoid using many LTO drives; when using fewer drives, the price will be extremely good."
"Pricing for Micro Focus Data Protector is reasonable."
"We have many competitors who are pricing better, and we believe that our pricing is higher."
"Data Protector's pricing is very competitive and we have no issues in this regard. I would give it an eight out of ten in terms of pricing."
"Our licensing is on a capacity basis."
"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."
"Its pricing is way better than Veeam."
"The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions."
"It is cost-efficient because we have perpetual licenses. We are a small to medium-sized business, so cost is a pretty big important factor."
"The pricing is top tier but offers good value."
"The product's pricing is the one area where it is less competitive."
"The cost per VM is a bit high."
"Zerto is reasonably price for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price."
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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
16%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
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 Micro Focus Data Protector?
I haven't experienced any crashes while using the solution...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus Data Protector?
The solution is expensive as it requires purchasing all features without the option to negotiate based on client numbers, unlike Veeam which offers flexibility in pricing.
What needs improvement with Micro Focus Data Protector?
OpenText Data Protector is not user-friendly, especially for cloud backup. It lacks functions and facilities compared to Veeam, which offers more user-friendliness for virtual machine backups. Ther...
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?
The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.
 

Also Known As

Micro Focus Data Protector, Data Protector, OmniBack, HPE Data Protector
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GSK Vaccines, Repsol, Vodafone Group, Siemens AG, Medium Enterprise Transportation Services Company
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 OpenText Data Protector vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.