We compared Dell Avamar and Zerto based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Dell Avamar earns acclaim for its scalability, data compression capabilities, swift incremental backups, and seamless integration with Data Domain and VM stacks. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. Dell Avamar could improve its tape connectivity and bare-metal restoration. Users also requested better Azure backups and a more user-friendly interface. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.
Service and Support: Some customers express satisfaction with Dell support, but others said there is room for improvement. Customers have generally had positive experiences with Zerto's customer service, noting their quick response times and ability to resolve issues. Some customers have encountered slower response times and needed to go through multiple levels of support to get their issues resolved.
Ease of Deployment: Opinions on Dell Avamar’s setup were mixed. Some users found it to be straightforward, while others considered it complex and difficult. Deployment time ranged from a few hours to a week, and assistance from Dell engineers might be necessary. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.
Pricing: Dell Avamar’s pricing is generally seen as reasonable, but some users think it is expensive. Zerto’s price tag is considered reasonable and in line with industry norms. Others said it was somewhat expensive but still worth the cost.
ROI: Dell Avamar provides cost savings through data reduction, deduplication, and compression. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.
Comparison Results: Dell Avamar is a scalable solution that offers excellent data compression and fast compression. However, Avamar earned mixed reviews for support, deployment, and pricing. Users also requested better Azure and bare-metal backups and restoration capabilities. Zerto offers top-tier data protection, excellent customer service, and real-time replication, but some users say its cloud and multi-site functionality could be better.
"The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable."
"The deduplication feature is the best aspect of the solution."
"Avamar has long been the best in its class, but that's changing as new solutions emerge. However, Dell has traditionally been a leader in deduplication and compression. Avamar enabled us to shift data from on-premise local appliances to data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure. That's a powerful feature. because customers can back up to the cloud without upgrading o high-capacity links or congesting their backups."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Data Domain and your VM stacks."
"It's simple to configure."
"Every product is good and bad, but its claim to fame is that it is scalable. We're doing more than 3,000 VMs. Every single night a complete image backup to disks and replication are easily done in under four hours."
"Source based deduplication is the most attractive feature as it drastically reduces the backup window."
"Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable."
"There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
"It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution."
"We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery."
"Some of the most valuable features are the synchronous replication and migration with RDMs. I really like the conversion of RDM VMs for migration."
"Zerto's continuous data protection is unmatched. It's phenomenal. It's also very easy to use. The menus are self-explanatory. Once you understand the terminology of the product, what the VPGs (Virtual Protected Groups) are, you're able to pretty much do what you want in the product. It's very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of upgrades."
"Stable disaster recovery solution with a very simple setup and fast failover."
"The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage."
"In my opinion, the user interface and the user friendliness could be improved. The specific thing I have in mind are the graphics, which are not quite user-friendly."
"Avamar is dependent on the hardware. It can't be implemented with ordinary storage. It can only be implemented with an EMC product. We want to have a backup solution that allows us to use independent storage and other hardware. It would be good if they can simplify its technology and make it possible to implement it with another storage. This is probably not possible because Avamar is an EMC product, and EMC would like to sell its own products."
"The product could be improved by simplifying the components available."
"Backup image browse times should be faster."
"EMC has discontinued their Avamar hardware version. They only advertise the Avamar virtual edition."
"More integration would be helpful, as well as the addition of more applications."
"This solution could improve by introducing daily verifications and another repository."
"It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms."
"More user support would be best for me because I'm not in the product all the time. So, having strong support is probably the most important decision on any products that we buy."
"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."
"Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site."
"We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that."
"In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them."
"I don't like the evacuation process. The host evacuation process could be a little simpler too. It takes our maintenance a bit longer, when we are doing host maintenance, because we still need to evacuate the vRAs manually. I know they tried to make it more automatic, but it is not quite there yet."
"They could improve their online documentation."
"Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes... A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there."
Dell Avamar is ranked 12th in Backup and Recovery with 81 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 236 reviews. Dell Avamar is rated 7.6, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell Avamar writes "Stable, integrates well with other solutions, and has a good price, but its UI needs a refresh". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". Dell Avamar is most compared with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell NetWorker, Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) and Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud and Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines. See our Dell Avamar vs. Zerto report.
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We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
