Dell Avamar vs Zerto comparison

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Dell Avamar

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 19, 2023

We compared Dell Avamar and Zerto based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.

Features: Dell Avamar earns acclaim for its scalability, data compression capabilities, swift incremental backups, and seamless integration with Data Domain and VM stacks. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. Dell Avamar could improve its tape connectivity and bare-metal restoration. Users also requested better Azure backups and a more user-friendly interface. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.
Service and Support: Some customers express satisfaction with Dell support, but others said there is room for improvement. 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: Opinions on Dell Avamar’s setup were mixed. Some users found it to be straightforward, while others considered it complex and difficult. Deployment time ranged from a few hours to a week, and assistance from Dell engineers might be necessary. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.
Pricing: Dell Avamar’s pricing is generally seen as reasonable, but some users think it is expensive. 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: Dell Avamar provides cost savings through data reduction, deduplication, and compression. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.

Comparison Results: Dell Avamar is a scalable solution that offers excellent data compression and fast compression. However, Avamar earned mixed reviews for support, deployment, and pricing. Users also requested better Azure and bare-metal backups and restoration capabilities. 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.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Avamar vs. Zerto Report (Updated: July 2024).

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Dell Avamar vs. Zerto

July 2024

Helped 793,295 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Dell Avamar

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

11th

Average Rating

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (3rd)

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

270

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell Avamar is 4.4%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 2.6%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Unique Categories:

Deduplication Software

9.5%

Cloud Migration

1.5%

Cloud Backup

4.6%

Featured Reviews

Samuel Sencion

Supervisor de servicio técnico at Hyh solutions

Mar 16, 2023

Direct activity feature is very helpful; good tech support

Our primary use case for Dell Avamar is backup and verification Dell Avamar has helped our organization by allowing us to do backups. We can tell machines to do backups in the application. The most valuable feature for me is direct activity. This solution could improve by introducing daily…

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Derrick Brockel

Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Dec 19, 2023

Good GUI, easy setup, and fast recovery

When we tested it, it had more functions than what we used it for, but it was a very good BCDR product. We liked the reliability and availability. Zerto enables you to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, but we did not use that feature. We used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It was strong in that aspect. I would rate it an eight out of ten there. Zerto's speed of recovery was comparable. There was no synchronous and asynchronous replication. If I had to give it a number, it would be a seven out of ten. It was the same as others. There was not much difference. It was easy to migrate data. There was some initial configuration in syncing, but it was easy. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of migration. Zerto’s ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration was good. I would rate it a seven out of ten in this aspect as well as in terms of its impact on RTOs. Zerto helps reduce downtime in any situation. We can bring up a database in minutes. It probably takes five minutes for the final sync. The cost of downtime depends on the database. It may be 50,000 if you have call center people sitting around. Normally, most of our small outages like that ranged in the tens of thousands. Zerto did save time in a data recovery situation. We did not have ransomware, but there were times we had database corruption where the users would corrupt the database, and the database would not start. It would do snapshotting. It was not necessarily ransomware, but it was testing upgrades or Oracle upgrades. The data recovery happened within five minutes, if not sooner. A normal restore would probably be four to eight hours if we had to restore from a tape and apply logs. Zerto helps to reduce an organization's DR testing. You can spin off an extra database pretty quickly and have users test against the third or fourth copy. It saves one to three days of testing depending on test cycles. You could do sequential testing. I would probably measure it more in days than hours. All of that time can be used by a DBA to do something else. Zerto reduces the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. One person could probably orchestrate it now versus one to three people. It did not reduce the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management because we are pretty thin. We would not have gotten rid of anybody.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Dell Avamar has helped our organization by allowing us to do backups."

"The fast backup and recovery and the Full Backup features are valuable."

"We have a lot of backups, and this tool helps us with the RMAN Backup."

"The solution is very user-friendly."

"For the on-prem backup, it has all the necessary features that we require. They keep coming up with new scripts and new updates."

"The initial setup is easy."

"Duplication and the speed of backup are great."

"The performance of Dell EMC Avamar is good."

More Dell Avamar pros

"The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to precopy data to a remote destination prior to the actual live migration period. That saves us a lot of time and has been very helpful. For example, if we had migrations occurring in waves over a period of several weeks with a VPG or VPG setup of approximately 50 VMs, that is multiple gigabytes of data, even terabytes in many cases. Having that data already copied on the evening of the migration saves considerable hours of time. It easily saves us four to six hours a night."

"The test features have been really good for us. Our DR testing goes very quickly and easily now for all our stuff with Zerto. We have our priority recovery process, where we cover our databases for our app servers and web servers. All our teams pretty much get their VMs very quickly. The RPOs are very low."

"The most valuable feature for us is accelerating cloud adoption, as it helps provide greater speed for disaster recovery. Ultimately, this saves us time, as well as resources."

"We used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful."

"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 use the solution to move servers and VMs between data centers."

"Zerto is truly inspiring."

"The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"The screen design is a bit back-dated."

"The challenges we do face typically revolve around aligning specific features with our accustomed tool usage."

"Some customers need to back up to tape, but Avamar lacks support, so it costs a lot."

"The configuration and expansion aspects of the solution need improvement. They're complicated and don't really integrate well."

"It would be helpful if there was cloud support."

"Avamar is still competitive because of the way we have deployed it, but we need to diversify and shift away from specific technologies. In addition to hypervisors, virtual machines, and bare metal servers, our customers need protection for Microsoft 365, SaaS, and the public cloud, so we need other technologies in the business to cater to those customers' needs. Those are the enhancements we would want from the Avamar platform, but that's not likely to happen. Dell has PowerProtect and Apex backup services. There are other Dell solutions that we'll use to fulfill our customers' requirements."

"The solution, in the future, should offer support for mobile."

"EMC has discontinued their Avamar hardware version. They only advertise the Avamar virtual edition."

More Dell Avamar cons

"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."

"The RPO for our SQL server has room for improvement."

"It would be good if we could store a snapshot of the images coming through so that we can always go back and have a vision history."

"I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them."

"There needs to be more flexibility in the licensing."

"We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs."

"Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it."

"Zerto generates many false positive alerts, which is annoying. I still have thousands of alerts in my inbox, and those are false alerts. When I check there's actually no problem."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is easy to use."

"The cost is high."

"It's a very high-end solution and comparable to Rubrik and Cohesity."

"This solution is less expensive than Veeam for us, although it depends on the customer because we get a great discount."

"Its licensing is weird. It is not just the licenses; we also purchase hardware. With most software products, such as Veeam, Commvault, and Data Protector, there is no hardware purchase at the same time. Because Avamar and Data Domain are tied together, they have an integrated pipe. You can separate them, but basically, they're designed to work as a couple. Because the Data Domain backend is designed to do dedupe and compression, we get 60:1. When you count it, you count it as a straight compression, but of course, that's with dedupe and some other stuff. You have to buy the hardware, the licensing, and the software at the same time. So, it's not just software."

"The cost of the solution is very expensive."

"There are licensing costs for Dell EMC Avamar and it is paid annually."

"Dell Avamar is a moderately priced solution."

More Dell Avamar pricing and cost advice

"The cost per VM is a bit high."

"This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup."

"It is very expensive. It is overpriced. No doubt. What held us up for many years from committing to buying it was always the cost. That's also why we only have 10 licenses."

"The pricing is based on virtual machines. They need to do better in regards to their tiering pricing rather than one price per VM. A lot of times we have VMs that are lower tier, such as Tier 2 or Tier 3, but we pay the same price as for Tier 1. I know they are developing this out, but it would be nice if they could provide a little better pricing in regards to their tiering protection."

"In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing."

"Pricing is adequate at the standard of the product, but there could be "always" some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model."

"It works very well as a backup and recovery solution, with frequent recovery points. It's very good. But it's too pricey for us to use it as a backup solution for all of our clients. Not every customer needs recovery points every five seconds."

"We have seen ROI. Several times, we needed to recover, and we were able to go to Zerto."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user159711

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 9, 2014

VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto

Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly...

What do you like most about Dell EMC Avamar?

It's stable and offers good performance.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC Avamar?

The solution is costly. Competitors are less expensive. However, Dell Avamar is the right tool if we want to protect our critical systems and receive proper engineering support.

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?

Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...

What do you like most about Zerto?

The most valuable feature of Zerto for us is its DR capability.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?

Zerto is expensive.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Avamar

Comparisons

Compared 26% of the time

Veeam Backup & Replication vs Dell Avamar

Compared 17% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Avamar

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Dell Avamar

Compared 1% of the time

More Dell Avamar Competitors

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 23% of the time

Veeam Backup & Replication vs Zerto

Compared 20% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 7% of the time

Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines vs Zerto

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service vs Zerto

Compared 5% of the time

More Zerto Competitors

Product Reports

Download Dell Avamar product report

Dell Avamar

July 2024

Download Zerto product report

June 2024

Also Known As

Avamar

Zerto Virtual Replication

Learn More

Dell Technologies

Overview

Dell Avamar data protection software delivers flexible and efficient backup and recovery operations that can scale from daily backup protection for endpoints to high-performance protection for large enterprises with diverse applications and workloads. With application consistent recovery, automation and fast backup and restores, Avamar can help you meet your SLAs and optimize your backup and recovery processes

If you are deploying all or part of your backup environment to the cloud, Avamar enables you to make the most of your cloud investment, enabling replication, disaster recovery and long-term retention for customers using AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Avamar is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. Avamar is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

Zerto is used for disaster recovery, business continuity, data migration, and ransomware recovery, providing continuous data protection and near real-time replication. Valued for ease of use, efficient failover processes, and versatile integration, it enhances organizational efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts productivity.

Sample Customers

Dodge County, St Laurence's College, FieldCore (a GE Company), Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Getronics, Lewisville Independent School District, EnvisionRxOptions, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies