We performed a comparison between VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and Zerto based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Zerto wins out in this competition. Its consistent sub-second response for RTO and RPO makes it one of the most responsive and fastest in the marketplace today. Users are able to easily run tests and change scenarios without any effect on an organization's production.
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"It made the DR process a lot faster and easier for recovery after we were familiar with the product operation."
"VMware's tech support gets a nine-out-of-ten. They are responsive and get you a useful reply."
"The installation and initial setup are straightforward."
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"The ability to have a RPO of seconds has enabled us to restore data to just before an incident has occurred, which certainly saves a lot of time and money."
"Moving the VPGs from one location to another is a valuable feature. You just click on it and move it and it's done."
"Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover."
"The stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems."
"The replication piece with the built-in WAN compression is important because the network circuit that we send our replication traffic across isn't actually behind our normal WAN accelerators. We were able to use Zerto's built-in WAN acceleration to help those workloads compress."
"If we lost our data center and had to recover it, Zerto would save us a great deal of time. In our testing, we have found that recovering the entire data center would be completed within a day."
"We selected Zerto because the RPO is extremely low, so you can get that server back up almost immediately. That was a huge thing. Also, the ability to do failover tests, where you can test your environment, but not have it impact your production environment, was huge."
"The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"SRM has to be installed on two separate data centers, so both have to be coordinated very well, which becomes complicated when configuring the software for disaster recovery."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"The technical support is not very good and needs to make an effort to improve."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload."
"It works only for a virtual platform, it does not support bare metal."
"The overall management plan could improve. If something happens with the VM on the vSphere side, the error codes are pretty weak. If there was a way to click on something within the UI that takes us to a support page or article, that would be very beneficial."
"The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale... We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going."
"The VPG model causes us a bit of concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager is very easy when we have entire data scores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings. It is all covered. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work much closer with the applications teams to develop the VPG configuration and determine how the VMs will be grouped. It will be a lot more overhead for us to go that route."
"My only business complaint is the cost of the solution. I feel like the cost could be a tad lower, but we are willing to pay extra to get the Premium service."
"If I were to nitpick, I would say that I wish I had a better account manager. Our sales guy has changed a couple of times. I would like a little more responsiveness from our account manager. I've had a couple of issues where getting in touch with him has been a little difficult, and I end up just going around him and dealing with support and support has handled it right away."
"The number one thing we have found we would like changed so far is the cost per VM. It would be great to get that pricing reduced."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 235 reviews. VMware SRM is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of VMware SRM writes "A scalable solution that integrates well with the VMware platform, but its platform agnostics do not support on-cloud usage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". VMware SRM is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service , whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Commvault Cloud and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. See our VMware SRM vs. Zerto report.
See our list of best Disaster Recovery (DR) Software vendors.
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