We compared IBM Spectrum Protect and Zerto based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: IBM Spectrum Protect is highly regarded for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users also praised Spectrum Protect for its compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. IBM Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.
Service and Support: IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy. 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: IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.
Pricing: IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume. 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: Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.
Comparison Results: IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud. 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 main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3."
"The solution is really scalable."
"It is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions."
"It integrates well with Spectrum Scale."
"The deduplication and compression features are the most valuable features."
"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It's a completely centralized solution."
"It is a very good and mature enterprise product. Once it is set up and everything is put in, you don't have to manage it. It actually runs automatically by itself."
"The most valuable feature is the backup speed."
"The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field."
"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."
"I found the very easy VPG setup, the easy recovery, and failover testing to be the most valuable features."
"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."
"We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations."
"We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%."
"The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross-v set of V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes."
"Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year."
"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."
"Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent."
"I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up."
"We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away."
"Restoring massive files is a very time-consuming process."
"It needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.)."
"Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities."
"The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement"
"It is difficult to manage failing over between sites if you are at the site that was impacted."
"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."
"It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual."
"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."
"From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option."
"It is crucial for Zerto to collaborate closely with VMware in order to promptly test updates."
"Zerto's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms."
"When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 236 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Rubrik and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud and Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto report.
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