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 ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers. They have been able to do this within the product."
"Every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"It saves you a lot of storage."
"SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. It sends snapshots using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly."
"Data archiving is easier and less time-consuming."
"It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"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."
"The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want."
"The most valuable aspect of Zerto is the recovery speed."
"The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover."
"Another big attraction is the near zero RPO. A lot of other products have minutes, half-hour, or an hour RPO. We have proof indicating that Zerto is near zero, or a matter of minutes, as far as the RTO is concerned. So again, that's another attractive offering where you can actually fail something over and bring that back up in a target location in a matter of minutes. Meaning very little data loss as far as recovery time. It's fantastic."
"There are two things that are keeping us with the solution: 1. It does a very good job of keeping the data in sync at all times. 2. In the event of a failover or in the event of a contingency, we are able to retrieve the data very quickly without any issues."
"The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple."
"We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%."
"The initial setup is complex."
"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."
"Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area."
"IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container."
"High availability (HA) is a scalability challenge."
"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."
"This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment."
"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."
"Zerto should add the capability to replicate the same VM to multiple sites."
"Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did."
"We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking."
"Analytics has a 90-day window, where it keeps data. It would be nice to have on-prem storage instead of cloud storage for that so we can keep the data for longer. Unless you discover the problem within three months, you don't know that you need the data. Then, it is gone by the time you realize there is an issue."
"I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions."
"The replication appliances tend to have issues when they recover from being powered off when a host is in maintenance mode. Sometimes you have to do a manual task where you go in and detach hard disks that are no longer in use, to get the replication appliances to power back on. There are some improvements to be made around the way those recover."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 238 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 Veeam Backup & Replication, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Commvault Cloud, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Cohesity DataProtect, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto report.
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