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12,632 views|8,894 comparisons
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Read 233 Zerto reviews
10,606 views|5,871 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated 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: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The backup is the solution's most valuable feature. It's very reliable.""The solution is easy to use and has high performance.""All the features in the system are highly valuable.""The solution is very user-friendly.""The solution is very stable.""Source based deduplication is the most attractive feature as it drastically reduces the backup window.""The most valuable feature is the virtual backup.""We have a lot of backups, and this tool helps us with the RMAN Backup."

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"Some of the most valuable features are the synchronous replication and migration with RDMs. I really like the conversion of RDM VMs for migration.""For us, the most valuable features are the quick upload time and how the sync works... We have VMware SRM and Veeam, and they have been pretty slow and sluggish.""It has enabled DR protection for virtual appliances with minimal administrator time.""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 pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward.""It helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those.""Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable.""The main purpose of this tool is to allow failover between different data centers and different locations. When one site is unavailable, we can start the failover activity and perform the failover task. When a primary location is unavailable, or there is some hardware or logical issue at the primary location, it allows us to resolve the problem. We are able to start services at safe locations. We handle the disaster recovery process, and this is the main function for which we are using it all the time."

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Cons
"Avamar is not the best tool when it comes to taking Azure backups. Like Commvault, if Avamar can support VM-level backups for the cloud, that would make it a bit better.""It's not the best solution for big databases.""The user interface needs to be improved. It's not as good as it could be.""The product could offer more integration capabilities.""The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive.""The solution is not very strong on the Cloud. They should work out how they can use this as a backup as a service.""Avamar needs a greater emphasis on storage targets. If it's going to keep pace with the times, it needs more ability to leverage cloud storage.""This solution could improve by introducing daily verifications and another repository."

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"The GUI could be streamlined a bit more to enhance the administrative tasks.""I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something,.""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.""It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records.""It needs to support more public cloud.""When building out a VPG and doing the machine types within Azure, they were not coming across correctly. It would say it had a CPU and memory of a specific type, but it was not accurate... It was a bug and they were working on it.""The replication layer can probably be improved.""Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It is very expensive. It's a trust based licensing. So that's an ethical challenge."
  • "This solution is less expensive than Veeam for us, although it depends on the customer because we get a great discount."
  • "I'm not sure, but perhaps the pricing could be done better at the moment."
  • "The price is the main thing I'd like to see them change. If they can come down in price, that would be a good thing. It's very cost competitive in the entry level range, because Veeam pricing is much cheaper than Avamar."
  • "It was approximately $70-80,000 when it was under support, but right now EMC has not been supporting this product for two years."
  • "Licensing was generally on a per VM or terabyte basis. They changed their licensing model a couple of times and turned it into socket-based licensing, which is an improvement in their licensing model."
  • "When it comes to competition the price is not what is important, it's not the problem."
  • "The price of this product should be lower."
  • More Dell Avamar Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."
  • "Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical."
  • "Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."
  • "Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back."
  • "It's a little bit expensive."
  • "We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."
  • "The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."
  • "While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install."
  • More Zerto Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:It's stable and offers good performance.
    Top Answer:The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a six to seven out of ten.
    Top Answer: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 =… more »
    Top Answer:It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time.
    Ranking
    13th
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    12,632
    Comparisons
    8,894
    Reviews
    21
    Average Words per Review
    467
    Rating
    7.6
    2nd
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    10,606
    Comparisons
    5,871
    Reviews
    122
    Average Words per Review
    928
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Avamar
    Zerto Virtual Replication
    Learn More
    Interactive Demo
    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, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specializes in data protection and empowers customers to run a business by simplifying the protection, disaster recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto uses advanced hybrid cloud IT technologies to recover and protect business-critical applications in on-premises and cloud environments, enabling them to deliver continuous service without compromising security. Zerto’s foundation is based on continual data protection (CDP) technology. Users can benefit from a single, unified, and automated recovery and data management experience across all virtualized or container-based workloads.

    Zerto's native clustering technology creates a resilient, fault-tolerant system that automates recovery of critical virtual machines while supporting software updates, new OS releases, and upgrades. With native clustering, a creation, migration, or deletion of a virtual machine is automatically replicated to all nodes in the cluster. This creates an automated failover and availability solution with the features of high-end dedicated servers running at a fraction of the cost.

    Zerto Features

    Zerto has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Continuous data security
      • Continuous replication
      • The industry's lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs
      • App and database protection and recovery on a granular level
    • Agility across hybrid and multi-cloud
      • Protection between clouds
      • Simple on-premises to cloud migration
      • User-friendly native cloud services
    • Simple to scale
      • Automation and orchestration are built-in
      • Cross-platform, multi-site analytics
      • Unified experience regardless of cloud
    • Software-based
      • Hardware, hypervisor, and cloud are all independent
      • No physical appliances
      • Future-proof

    Zerto Benefits

    • Robust disaster recovery: Continuous data protection enables recovery of entire clusters, multi-VM applications, or even a single server with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs. Zerto allows users to safeguard, manage, and recover all of their key digital assets, whether they’re recovering to a secondary location, the public cloud, or a managed service provider.
    • Constant backup: Instead of making backups every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto creates backups every 5-15 seconds. Zerto backup has no impact on production and eliminates the burden of micromanaging backup windows by using CDP instead of snapshots. Its backup provides immediate recovery of data, folders, or virtual machines (VMs) that are only seconds behind the original, which is a simple approach to completely avoid ransomware or erase inadvertent deletions.
    • Strong long-term retention: Send data to the cloud or a purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for months or years of retention. These long-term copies can be made from local backups or DR replicas, and they can be kept wherever is most convenient for your company. Its powerful indexing and search makes discovering and restoring data simple. For data you want to maintain but only use infrequently, use cost-effective cloud tiering to shift LTR copies from hot to cold to deep-freeze storage.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Zerto stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its disaster recovery abilities and its ease of use. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Justin C., Director of IT at Arnott Inc. writes of the solution, “If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building… It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."

    Brad W., Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm, notes, “The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do.”

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Retailer13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Insurance Company12%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise62%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise57%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell Avamar vs. Zerto
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Avamar vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell Avamar is ranked 13th in Backup and Recovery with 81 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 233 reviews. Dell Avamar is rated 7.8, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell Avamar writes "Stable, integrates well with other solutions, and has a good price, but its UI needs a refresh". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". Dell Avamar is most compared with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell NetWorker, Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) and Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and Commvault Cloud. See our Dell Avamar vs. Zerto report.

    See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.

    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.