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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
25th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
101
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 OpenText Data Protector is 0.6%, down from 0.7% 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

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

"The initial setup is very easy."
"It's a good product that's pretty easy to use."
"The initial setup is straightforward if you understand Data Protector."
"What I like the most about this solution is that I can change and access the Oracle backup file."
"Data Protector's GUI is the most useful feature."
"It's supports Unix, Linux, all of the OS's. It's very stable software."
"I like that Micro Focus keeps a separate catalog of our data."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...The initial setup process for the solution is easy."
"We use the solution to move servers and VMs between data centers."
"It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple."
"We use the solution for one-to-one replication from data center one to data center two, from server one to server two, or from the cloud to on-premises."
"The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution."
"The mobile application is very useful as a real-time monitoring, reporting tool. When asked the status of our machine backup and recovery ability, an easy answer is to display the status on the real-time application or browser. The Zerto Analytics tool helps predict future storage needs by tracking trends in space, journal size, and I/O rate. These are reportable statistics making quantifiable tracking easy and accurate. Having a web interface simplifies access by other system administrators."
"The granularity enables us to failover specific workloads instead of an all-or-nothing type of scenario, where you have to move your entire IP block and your data center, or you have to move large chunks of VMs. Those situations also make it prohibitive to test effectively."
"The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration."
"The customer service and support are very good. Every time we have problems, they're ready to help us."
 

Cons

"Integration with the market applications must be improved, such as MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, SAP and Oracle. Other backup tools are more efficient with the integrated backups."
"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."
"VM backups needs to be improved. They need to make it similar to the way Veeam and Commvault are doing the virtual backups."
"In terms of what can be improved, I would say integrations with MongoDB. We use MongoDB and we need to go to scripts to do backups. We need more integrations."
"Other tools seem to be easier to use."
"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."
"I'm uncertain if it supports virtual machine backup and restoration. If they could enhance this aspect, they could gain more support from end users."
"The solution is not intuitive enough. I think they should work on the user experience and the graphical interface. These can be a lot better."
"If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that."
"We encountered some issues during Active Directory recovery."
"It is difficult to manage failing over between sites if you are at the site that was impacted."
"Customer service is five out of ten. There is room for improvement. We need more local support."
"Zerto's documentation is outdated. I'm finding it hard to find documents related to my questions. Their documentation is bad."
"The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions."
"I wish Zerto had better file restoration capabilities. We have not been able to use that because of the limitations of Zerto's de-duplication technology."
"I want Zerto to add support for Proxmox."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution requires paying for a license."
"The licensing structure provides cost savings to business."
"The pricing is acceptable for enterprise level companies, but it's not acceptable for small- and medium-sized businesses. Micro Focus Data Protector is not an enterprise level solution, and it should cover small- and medium-sized businesses with acceptable prices."
"The licensing cost was not annual. We didn't pay any license. We paid when we deployed and we didn't pay for anything after that. There were no additional fees after the initial payment."
"Avoid using many LTO drives; when using fewer drives, the price will be extremely good."
"The pricing is neither too expensive nor very cheap."
"Pricing/licensing is Data Protector's single best offering. In its most basic environment, the only license required is for whatever target device is required."
"In Data Protector, if you need extra features, you need to buy the agents for these features. Some of the features are Terabytes, some of them are agents. There's some complexity in the pricing and licensing."
"Zerto is fairly expensive, but worth it."
"Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well."
"It's very equitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per core as far as what we're backing up. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we're backing up and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all."
"Licensing Zerto was very simple. They had a product that fit our size and scale. It made it really easy to choose."
"From a pricing standpoint, there is value in it without question. However, it can become quite expensive when you start looking at the number of workloads you have in the environment and what you would like to do."
"The pricing is good. It's affordable."
"The pricing is based on virtual machines. They need to do better in regards to their tiering pricing rather than one price per VM. A lot of times we have VMs that are lower tier, such as Tier 2 or Tier 3, but we pay the same price as for Tier 1. I know they are developing this out, but it would be nice if they could provide a little better pricing in regards to their tiering protection."
"Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model."
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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
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
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 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?
Pricing is high compared to other solutions. If they offer suitable features and a compatible price, we can attract clients. If the tech support becomes good, the price becomes less of a concern. W...
What needs improvement with Micro Focus Data Protector?
Recently, clients have raised concerns about the lack of comprehensive documentation for Data Protector. This has been an issue, especially when troubleshooting or integrating with other vendor-spe...
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

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: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.