Compare Commvault vs. Zerto
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | |
The solution also provides me with a complete view of our data. I write scripts to report information from the Command Center daily. I report it in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment. We use Commvault IntelliSnap a lot. It's a very good product and has the functionality to enable a snapshot of a vendor's storage... It really helps to speed up the backup process for some of our environments. Its compression and deduplication allow us to store more backups and save storage space. The reporting is great; we are able to obtain critical business reports and infrastructure/usage information very easily. The solution’s user interface for managing the on-prem environment is good. What I find valuable is restoring the complete server. Restoring files is also valuable, but I like restoring the server because you don't have to rebuild a new one. One of the most valuable features is the encryption which helps save you from ransomware. Because the data is already encrypted, it cannot be encrypted again. The Command Center is provided from the web interface. You can back up the data for everybody, but also you can give everybody the ability to view and restore their data. For example, if a laptop, machine, or environment is owned by X, then X can look in and see the environment and data that he has backed up. He can see everything that he owns and can manage the environment as he wishes. It gives him an excellent view of his environment and infrastructure. Also, if you are a service provider, you can back up data for multiple companies and give everyone an interface for their environment to manage, backup, and restore data. Commvault has done excellent work in this area. The data is well-protected. It doesn't age off until it's copied. That's a big feature right there. When you reach the end of your retention, it does not expire until the secondary copy is completed. That allows you to hold onto data that otherwise would have aged off by retention. I like that feature. It's hard to just delete or lose data using the Commvault platform. | Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. For replication purposes, it's definitely better than Veeam. Veeam doesn't do as good a job as Zerto does when it comes to replication. The other alternative would be to just have backups somewhere. But even with backups, you lose a lot of time because you have to set it all up. With Zerto, you failover, you just click a couple of buttons and you run from the other location. 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. The Move feature is the most valuable feature because it allows us to move the VM from our old environment to our new environment with minimal disruption. In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy. The continuous data protection is great. We love it because I can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product. Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it. The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location. We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great. |
Cons | |
What I need is deeper CLI documentation for both QCommand and SQL queries. The software is good, but I always have issues with the documentation and, especially, the communication regarding new functionality. Commvault has a new maintenance release every three months, and it's always hard to know exactly what has changed in the software. They have improved a bit on that topic by communicating what has changed, but there is still a lot of room for improvement on that side. The solution requires constant attention. Commvault is very complex. We are constantly making adjustments and working through hotfixes, updates, and issues. Suppose I am restoring a particular file. If I want to restore the permissions only from that particular folder, that is not possible. I have to restore all the data for that particular folder. If there was an option to just restore the permissions, that would be better. We get an alarm if a lot of files are deleted, for example. That could look like ransomware, even if it is not. It takes a lot of technical expertise to implement. Commvault could increase the training it provides to customers and partners. I would like them to keep working on the new web interface to migrate out of the old interface because the old interface is a bit complex. It was driving customers away because of the complexity. If they migrate everything (100 percent of the features), this would make the product be perfect. Commvault likes to be ahead of the game when it comes to merging with other platforms, but sometimes it's before they have the solution truly baked in. Office 365 is an example. I feel that my company might be a litmus test for their solution, because we have such a large environment. Some of the promised solutions that we received from Commvault were more like testing solutions. They weren't really validated, meaning they were possibilities. There have been a lot of hot fixes for the solution that we're using right now, more than we expected. | The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere. The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it. Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have. The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be. For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool. The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue. Compared to other products, I would praise the intuitiveness of the product. But I think that can always be improved. The intuitiveness of the graphical user interface, while it is very solid and I don't have issues navigating it. I would say that it can always be improved. One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | |
We work with Commvault and a partner on our environment needs according to capacity, licensing, pricing, components, modules, etc. Additional costs depend on your backup needs. We have checked some other products, but we are not testing them because price-wise, Commvault is better than the other solutions. It is cheaper than Veeam. It was not very popular because of its previous cost, but they have been working on the pricing, and now anyone can afford to use Commvault. They changed the modeling criteria for their pricing. Previously, there was only the capacity modeling based on your content capacity. In this case, they would give you a license and you would have to pay it. Now, most of the environment is virtualized so you can have the best CPU, VMs, etc. You buy whatever you need and pay for what you need. We went from Veritas NetBackup to Commvault. We switched due to upfront licensing and costs. We have more visibility into what we're actually purchasing. It seemed like, overall, the cost of Commvault was cheaper. The complete license gives us options for all the features. Commvault does not license based on storage or the management components. It can integrate with any storage vendor. That means that when we are out of storage and need more, we can integrate without additional licensing. In my opinion, Commvault needs to reduce the licensing cost by 20 to 40 percent to make it cost-efficient. Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly. There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution. | Zerto is more expensive than competitors, making the price difference pretty high. While it is very expensive, it's very powerful and good at what it does. The cost is why we are not leveraging it for everything in the organization. If it was dirt cheap, we would have LTR and DR on everything because it would just make sense to use it. It's very equitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per core as far as what we're backing up. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we're backing up and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all. There is a one-time cost for maintenance and support. We have a three-year contract that we will have to renew when those three years come up. There is also licensing on top of that for whatever product you are using it for. If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense. I would suggest getting a dedicated, well-informed rep. Zerto is not cheap but is an invaluable asset. You need to figure out how many critical servers and applications you have in your environment so you will know how many Zerto licenses to buy. The cost per VM is a bit high. |
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Ranking  | |
Views 34,762 Comparisons 23,275 Reviews 25 Average Words per Review 1,223 Avg. Rating 8.7 | Views 18,568 Comparisons 12,332 Reviews 27 Average Words per Review 1,006 Avg. Rating 9.4 |
Popular Comparisons | |
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Also Known As | |
| Zerto Virtual Replication | |
Learn | |
| Commvault | Zerto |
Overview | |
Commvault can help you transform your data into a powerful strategic asset, with data protection and information management solutions that enable you to protect, access and use all of your data anywhere and anytime. | Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by eliminating the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, backup and cloud are managed. At enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted by over 6,000 customers globally and is powering resiliency offerings for Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS, SunGard AS and more than 350 cloud services providers. |
Offer | |
Learn more about Commvault | Learn more about Zerto |
Sample Customers | |
| Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, Alliant Credit Union, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company | Tencate, Spirit Airlines, Woodforest National Bank, UW Health |
Top Industries | |
Comms Service Provider18% Healthcare Company14% Energy/Utilities Company9% Government9% Computer Software Company44% Comms Service Provider10% Government6% Media Company6% | Healthcare Company17% Insurance Company15% Financial Services Firm10% Manufacturing Company10% Computer Software Company43% Comms Service Provider11% Media Company5% Manufacturing Company4% |
Company Size | |
Small Business29% Midsize Enterprise27% Large Enterprise44% Small Business6% Midsize Enterprise10% Large Enterprise85% | Small Business26% Midsize Enterprise31% Large Enterprise43% Small Business15% Midsize Enterprise50% Large Enterprise35% |
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: July 2020.
431,670 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Commvault is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery Software with 27 reviews while Zerto is ranked 3rd in Backup and Recovery Software with 28 reviews. Commvault is rated 8.8, while Zerto is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Commvault writes "Enables me to work on other things because I know the system is handling backups by itself". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Instead of one mass disaster recovery exercise, we're easily able to perform up to 12 in the year". Commvault is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup, Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Acronis Backup, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and CloudEndure Disaster Recovery. See our Commvault vs. Zerto report.
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