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IBM Disaster Recovery Services vs Zerto 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Disaster Recovery Services
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery as a Service (6th)
Zerto
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
306
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (2nd), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Şefik Mert Polatay - PeerSpot reviewer
Ease of use, performance, availability, and scalability
The initial setup is very easy, user-friendly, and not complex. It mostly comes with all installed, an operating system, database, and security, all included in Power Systems. So users can easily install, configure, and use it. It's integrated with other systems. You can run different systems from IBM Power Systems, AIX Linux, or IBM I operating system. It's also integrated into Windows systems and other databases and servers.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Disaster Recovery Services is stable."
"The initial setup is very easy and user-friendly."
"The solution works well for very large organizations. It can scale quite well."
"Zerto's near-synchronous replication is extremely important to our organization."
"RPO time for the copied-off VMs appears to be quite short."
"The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"I love Zerto's near-synchronous replication. I've been using Zerto for three years at my current employer and many years before that. It's been great. Anywhere I've used it, it's made the failover process a lot easier so that pretty much anybody can do it. This feature is our number one priority because we can keep our critical apps running if we have a failure, or even if we have a misconfiguration, it's very easy to recover something quickly."
"It is convenient to use because the API allows for seamless integration when performing our day-to-day operations."
"When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto."
"Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
"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."
 

Cons

"Stability could always be better."
"Disaster Recovery Services could provide better value for money."
"The infrastructure level of IBM's recovery systems could be improved."
"They are doing a lot of great things, but I have heard that Zerto is expensive."
"I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue."
"The native Zerto implementation requires quite a big environment. My environment is rather small. I do not have hundreds of virtual machines."
"Customer service is five out of ten. There is room for improvement. We need more local support."
"Its pricing could be better. Also, Zerto needs to improve its reporting capabilities and provide better dashboards."
"The VPG model causes us a bit of concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager is very easy when we have entire data scores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings. It is all covered. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work much closer with the applications teams to develop the VPG configuration and determine how the VMs will be grouped. It will be a lot more overhead for us to go that route."
"The alerting could be fine tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them."
"It's pretty expensive per server."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution is based on the scale of the project or business. It's based on the server amount and the amount of data being stored. For our client, based on the amount of data they have, it may be around $20,000 USD. It could get much more expensive on the customer side."
"Disaster Recovery Services is expensive."
"License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it."
"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."
"It's a little bit expensive."
"Zerto is expensive but offers many features that make it competitive."
"Everyone knows Zerto is a little on the expensive side, but what else is there on the market that does the same thing?"
"Zerto is definitely more costly compared to its competitors, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager. It may not be suitable for small and medium-sized industries."
"The pricing is straightforward."
"The pricing seems fair."
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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Disaster Recovery Services?
The pricing is perfect. It's not expensive because it's all-inclusive. The operating system, database, security, different file systems. So, overall, it's cheaper than Oracle or UNIX systems with O...
What is your primary use case for IBM Disaster Recovery Services?
The use case is for high availability and disaster recovery.
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.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

i-Virtualize, QD, Continuum Managed Services LLC, Royal Arctic Line, Department of Science and Technology of the Republic of the Philippines, Idwala Industrial Holdings Limited, A-Plant c.a.r.u.s. Information Technology GmbH Hannover, eASPNet Taiwan Inc., Mobile Mini Inc., TriDatum Solutions Inc., M7 Managed Services Ltd., Hospital de la Concepci‹n
United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Disaster Recovery Services vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.