Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Zerto comparison

Dell Data Protection Advisor

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98% willing to recommend

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Zerto and Dell Data Protection Advisor serve in the data protection and disaster recovery category. Zerto has the upper hand in user satisfaction due to its features, while Dell Data Protection Advisor is favored for its broader functionality despite the higher price.

Features: Zerto users highlight its strong replication, disaster recovery capabilities, and simplicity. Dell Data Protection Advisor users value its extensive reporting tools, integration capabilities, and detailed analysis.

Room for Improvement: Zerto users need improved support, faster updates, and better customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor users suggest better documentation, more user-friendly features, and enhanced usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto is noted for quick and straightforward deployment with reliable customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor has a more complex deployment process but benefits from detailed documentation and responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto offers cost-effective pricing with a good return on investment. Dell Data Protection Advisor is more expensive but provides value through advanced features and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto Report (Updated: April 2025).

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dell Data Protection Advisor

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

24th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

306

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell Data Protection Advisor is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 3.0%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

ErmiasGirma

System and Cloud Deployment Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

Proactive support with predictive insights and seamless integration

As a system engineer, I am deploying Dell Data Protection Advisor solutions, especially in the areas of protection like Avamar, NetWorker, and Data Domain. Our team has deployed these solutions for three organizations in Africa and India Dell Data Protection Advisor provides proactive support by…

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Sachin Vinay

Assistant Manager-Networks at Amrita

Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features

Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.

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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

"The product's ability to give predictions and advice on how to protect data is incredible."

"The deduplication is probably the most valuable feature of that requirement."

"I can increase the tool's licensing as per my requirement with no conditions applied."

"The reporting feature and the Dell's continuous improvement of the solution are the most valuable features. The solution not only supports Dell Power Products but also other products."

"The solution is easy to use, flexible and has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. You can configure the dashboards or you can use a script. However, to fully utilize its capabilities you will want to use a lot of scripts which you will need advanced training. The reports can be customized for many things, such as chargeback billing."

"This is a stable solution."

"It generates very detailed reports, which makes things easier when it comes to IT auditing."

"The platform's most valuable features are data protection and retention."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor 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."

"We can use Zerto to help protect our VMs."

"The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor."

"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 near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10."

"The replication piece with the built-in WAN compression is important because the network circuit that we send our replication traffic across isn't actually behind our normal WAN accelerators. We were able to use Zerto's built-in WAN acceleration to help those workloads compress."

"The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great."

"The product is superior compared to the other vendors."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"It's a bit difficult for first-time users."

"The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy."

"The stability of the solution needs improvement for stand alone users."

"Some minor adjustments could be made regarding the graphical interface and customization options."

"We have encountered issues where we were unable to pull data from the database server. It should also improve the backward compatibility."

"Dell Data Protection Advisor's feature for data domain protection needs enhancement."

"There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful."

"It is difficult to manage the solution with the available tools. You need to know exactly what are you are doing."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor cons

"If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable."

"We have had some issues running Linux virtual machines on the new version. There were some issues with virtual replication adapters on Cisco UCS hosts running VMware vCenter 8."

"I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother."

"There's a mandatory VMware version, so we need to update our VMs in order to access our data. Zerto should work with all VMware versions."

"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."

"We're an NSX-T shop, and if I could get an NSX-T integration where it could manage the networks a little tighter, that would be an improvement."

"Some of the cloud instructions around VNets and peering of networks could be clearer with some best-case examples. It is more complicated once you move into the cloud than running it on-premises. Actually doing these things is quite easy in the cloud and with Azure, but understanding how it fits in my environment can be quite a head-scratcher at times."

"Certain areas were designed and work fine for VMware but are under development for Hyper-V. Eventually, all features will work for both platforms."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement."

"If the customer has huge lineup of Dell Products then they receive discount on the pricing."

"You need to make an upfront payment for three, five, or seven years and renew the licenses for support. We can do an annual maintenance contract with Dell. I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."

"It's not very expensive — I think the price is fair."

"For pricing, I would rate Dell 2 out of 5. It's affordable."

"You have to procure the license when you are ordering or quoting for Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS). DPS is bundled with the suite and comes with a license. However, if you purchase NetWorker separately then you will have to procure the license for DPS separately."

"The product is affordable."

"In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie."

"Zerto is like a Ferrari. It's very fast but not the cheapest solution. You're paying a high price for quality and the assurance that you will have the environment up and steady."

"The pricing is straightforward."

"The pricing is good. It's affordable."

"The pricing seems really good. We're an enterprise customer, so we get all the bells and whistles."

"Its licensing is yearly. You can do multi-year contracts, which is what we did. You pay per VM, and you replicate a license per VM. So, we bought about 20 licenses. We paid somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. There is an initial upfront cost. Basically, you buy the license, and then you have a maintenance cost on top of that. So, the upfront cost is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. The maintenance is $5,000 to $10,000 over a three-year period."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The pricing is very reasonable."

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

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The platform's most valuable features are data protection and retention.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement.

What needs improvement with Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy. Additionally, enhancing bulk update capabilities for items like cost centers would be...

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?

Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?

The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

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Comparisons

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Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 21% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 15% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 15% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 15% of the time

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Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 12% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 10% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Dell Data Protection Advisor

Download Dell Data Protection Advisor product report

Download Zerto product report

Also Known As

DPA

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

Effectively managing your data protection environment can be labor intensive and complex. It requires knowledge of backup applications, replication technologies, and the entire supporting infrastructure, yet it is critical in keeping your data secure.

With Dell Data Protection Advisor, you can automate and centralize the collection, monitoring and reporting of this data and get a single, comprehensive view of your environment, no matter where your data resides. This includes monitoring data on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

With clear visibility, you can gain actionable insight and effectively manage service levels while reducing costs and complexity. You can also collect and report on that data to help other stakeholders make the best decisions for your organization.

Data Protection Advisor is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite.

Dell Technologies

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

Nielsen, Trek Bicycle, Cal-Israel Credit Cards

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

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto