AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery vs Zerto comparison

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery.

Set up AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery on your source servers to initiate secure data replication. Your data is replicated to a staging area subnet in your AWS account, in the AWS Region you select. The staging area design reduces costs by using affordable storage and minimal compute resources to maintain ongoing replication. You can perform non-disruptive tests to confirm that implementation is complete. During normal operation, maintain readiness by monitoring replication and periodically performing non-disruptive recovery and failback drills. If you need to recover applications, you can launch recovery instances on AWS within minutes, using the most up-to-date server state or a previous point in time. After your applications are running on AWS, you can choose to keep them there, or you can initiate data replication back to your primary site when the issue is resolved. You can fail back to your primary site whenever you’re ready.

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specializes in data protection and empowers customers to run a business by simplifying the protection, disaster recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto uses advanced hybrid cloud IT technologies to recover and protect business-critical applications in on-premises and cloud environments, enabling them to deliver continuous service without compromising security. Zerto’s foundation is based on continual data protection (CDP) technology. Users can benefit from a single, unified, and automated recovery and data management experience across all virtualized or container-based workloads.

Zerto's native clustering technology creates a resilient, fault-tolerant system that automates recovery of critical virtual machines while supporting software updates, new OS releases, and upgrades. With native clustering, a creation, migration, or deletion of a virtual machine is automatically replicated to all nodes in the cluster. This creates an automated failover and availability solution with the features of high-end dedicated servers running at a fraction of the cost.

Zerto Features

Zerto has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Continuous data security
  • Continuous replication
  • The industry's lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs
  • App and database protection and recovery on a granular level
• Agility across hybrid and multi-cloud
  • Protection between clouds
  • Simple on-premises to cloud migration
  • User-friendly native cloud services
• Simple to scale
  • Automation and orchestration are built-in
  • Cross-platform, multi-site analytics
  • Unified experience regardless of cloud
• Software-based
  • Hardware, hypervisor, and cloud are all independent
  • No physical appliances
  • Future-proof

Zerto Benefits

• Robust disaster recovery: Continuous data protection enables recovery of entire clusters, multi-VM applications, or even a single server with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs. Zerto allows users to safeguard, manage, and recover all of their key digital assets, whether they’re recovering to a secondary location, the public cloud, or a managed service provider.
• Constant backup: Instead of making backups every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto creates backups every 5-15 seconds. Zerto backup has no impact on production and eliminates the burden of micromanaging backup windows by using CDP instead of snapshots. Its backup provides immediate recovery of data, folders, or virtual machines (VMs) that are only seconds behind the original, which is a simple approach to completely avoid ransomware or erase inadvertent deletions.
• Strong long-term retention: Send data to the cloud or a purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for months or years of retention. These long-term copies can be made from local backups or DR replicas, and they can be kept wherever is most convenient for your company. Its powerful indexing and search makes discovering and restoring data simple. For data you want to maintain but only use infrequently, use cost-effective cloud tiering to shift LTR copies from hot to cold to deep-freeze storage.

Reviews from Real Users

Zerto stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its disaster recovery abilities and its ease of use. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Justin C., Director of IT at Arnott Inc. writes of the solution, “If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building… It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."

Brad W., Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm, notes, “The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do.”