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HPE Zerto Software vs IBM Storage Protect vs Veritas NetBackup comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 2.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veritas NetBackup is 2.8%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE Zerto Software2.6%
Veritas NetBackup2.8%
IBM Storage Protect2.2%
Other92.4%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.
Rizwan Islam - PeerSpot reviewer
We optimize critical data management with versatile enterprise solutions while maintaining excellent user interface experience
The features of Veritas NetBackup that are most useful for us involve different backup scenarios such as huge contents, including our file server repositories. We have to write that backup on the tape media, which is why we observe that Veritas NetBackup is a very strong product in these areas. Regarding granular recovery, we sometimes use certain files, specifically accidentally deleted or required files from the backups, in maintaining data continuity. The feature is effective and works every time. The interface in Veritas NetBackup is very friendly and useful, and it has been standard during the last 10 years. We are very used to this interface and do not feel any complications. Veritas NetBackup is basically a single product which fulfills all the technical requirements specifically required for the backup job or the backup domain. It supports multi platforms, multi applications, and multiple hardware at the same time, so we generally feel it is a full feature solution. Most importantly, they have very tight integration at a very granular level, and recently we inducted another product Veritas File System in our environment because we have an issue with huge content data, so we have optimized the problem of that data by using the Veritas File System VxFS. Veritas NetBackup is a scalable solution for us. It is a very comprehensive solution that can manage numerous backups, and we already have a somewhat complicated environment in which backups are first written on the backup appliance and then moved to tape, and everything is managed through Veritas NetBackup very easily.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks."
"We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%."
"The ability to test that my backup regime is actually doing and working as I want it to do is valuable."
"I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten."
"The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of HPE Zerto Software was its failover capabilities."
"The disaster recovery features are the best I've found."
"The user interface is very user-friendly."
"Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space."
"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."
"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."
"The solution offers very good flexibility."
"They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system."
"It is a very stable product. The cost is similar to that of other enterprise solutions."
"Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment."
"Spectrum Protect's best feature is that I can use it practically anywhere, on any platform, and for any servers or clients."
"Veritas NetBackup Automatic Image Replication and CloudCatalyst features allow me to replicate deduped backup images from one site to a remote site, as well as duplicating deduped images to the Cloud (i.e. AWS S3, etc.)"
"This is the best solution that I know of."
"The backup and restore features are helpful."
"Backup and recovery software with great stability, and can support large-scale environments."
"Its ability to cover a large spectrum of products and operating systems is invaluable. We evaluated other products but always found certain limitations like some products had only intel-based virtualization, while others had power servers."
"This product is flexible enough to allow for backing up data from physical machines, as well as from your cloud environment."
"The solution is stable."
"The reporting is very good, with all of the details highlighted and very clear."
 

Cons

"The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers."
"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."
"It is expensive."
"If we could integrate our AIOps solutions and incident management capabilities within HPE Zerto Software, that would be beneficial."
"The tech support on my latest issue wasn't so great. I had to figure a lot of stuff out myself. It could be that I had a Level 1 tech who was new or something, but it seemed like the tech was spitballing, which does not help me."
"The HPE Zerto Software can be improved with more visibility."
"Certain areas were designed and work fine for VMware but are under development for Hyper-V. Eventually, all features will work for both platforms."
"I would suggest improving automatic updates. Their software requires updating level by level to keep it current. I was unaware that I was several versions behind, so I needed assistance to guide me to the current version."
"We did not see any drawbacks to IBM Spectrum Protect before assisting a customer using Windows that wanted to migrate to using UNIX. IBM Spectrum Protect does not offer an option to migrate from other operating systems."
"Better integration with other tools and databases is needed."
"Replication services would be nice. If these could be enhanced to be always on so multiple storage backup services could be added as a cluster pool. This would provide a better availability service."
"Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console."
"I find the Level 1 and Level 2 support spend 80% of the time communicating the same information that I have already provided."
"They do not have a unified GUI, they only work on CLI and operations center, which is really complicated for the installation and configuration."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"Stability is very good now. It used to be rocky years ago."
"You cannot tell what your costs are going to be by using the dashboard, which is something that should be improved."
"In the next release, I would like to have a better way to protect against ransomware attacks and a better way of logging issues where you don't have to enable the verbose logging to capture the problems."
"NetBackup is expensive and should be cheaper. That is why we are moving on to another solution."
"It would be better if it had a cloud integration feature. I would like to use a single product for the cloud instances and the on-premise instances. The price could also be better."
"The product could improve the user-friendliness and comfort of its environment, especially for those unfamiliar with it."
"The solution could have a more clear dashboard about the license and the operation status."
"The virtual environment, cloud integration, copy data management features need improvement."
"Maybe they could add more cloud solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive, but it's worth the price."
"I am not very involved with the pricing, but from my understanding, it is fairly expensive for us. This is why we limit its use to our tier-one customers. We have other disaster recovery solutions for our other customers due to the cost."
"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."
"Zerto is not cheap but is an invaluable asset."
"We subscribe to their annual license package and we have tier one support with them."
"I think the cost is reasonable for VM licensing. It's not outside the scope of an enterprise product."
"It was a little higher. We were in a corporate agreement, and we had a software package that included RP for VM. It is easy to compare pricing when you are already in a corporate agreement. Zerto lost on the pricing scorecard."
"There is a lot of confusion with Zerto licensing. They have a migration license and a replication license. They should simplify the licensing process. The migration license costs a lot of money, and it is only on a one-time basis. If you use that license, it ties to that VM. I might re-migrate that VM in the next five to ten years. It is another environment, but my license is stuck there. The replication license is fine, and I have no issue with its pricing model, but they should simplify the migration license."
"There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more."
"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
"The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface."
"We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system."
"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."
"The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, IBM and Symantec have less costly options."
"At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."
"It is expensive."
"Veritas NetBackup is considerably cheaper than that of Druva, the former being quite affordable."
"Annual licensing fee."
"Our license is capacity-based."
"Price-wise, most of the backup products are similarly priced, and NetBackup is the same."
"Pricing is expensive, so it could be lower."
"When you compare NetBackup's software licensing system with Veeam's, which is simpler and based on instances (or how many physical machines or virtual machines you want to protect), NetBackup isn't that competitive for smaller scale companies. However, if you're running many large workloads, then NetBackup may be the better option."
"The pricing, of course, can always be better."
"The price of Veritas NetBackup is high, it should be reduced."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise193
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise65
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal...
What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will contin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost m...
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past....
What is the best next generation backup tool?
Assuming you have an onprem ecosystem which runs the VMware, physical systems on Win, Linux and Unix and run both tra...
What do you like most about Veritas NetBackup?
The most valuable feature of cloud integration is the ability to send data outside of your location. This can be achi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas NetBackup?
Veritas NetBackup is quite expensive, and sometimes vendors do not suggest it and always recommend different other op...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
IBM Spectrum Discover
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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