IBM Spectrum Protect vs Zerto comparison

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IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 19, 2023

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

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect is highly regarded for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users also praised Spectrum Protect for its compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. IBM Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.
Service and Support: IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy. 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: IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.
Pricing: IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume. 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: Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.

Comparison Results: IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud. 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 IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto Report (Updated: July 2024).

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

147

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 IBM Spectrum Protect is 3.1%, up from 2.3% 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:

No other categories found

Cloud Migration

1.5%

Cloud Backup

4.6%

Featured Reviews

VLADIMIR RAMIREZ

Owner at ACANI Soluciones, SA de CV

May 28, 2024

A security component for protection aganist cyber attacks and ransomware

We have two technical people to maintain the solution. Support is key if people need secure access to their data in the event of a disaster recovery or to restore data to a previous point in time. Sometimes, when people look for something on the web, finding the information is difficult. So, they help each other, work together, and resolve issues or find the necessary information. Sometimes, we only use it to manage the number of activities related to the hardware. In our company, we go to the center, download, apply, and test the updates. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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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

"Since the technology is reliable, it simplifies the backup process significantly. Now, our focus can primarily be on managing full backups and creating some offline copies."

"Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system."

"With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups."

"In general, the solution is quite user-friendly. The GUI is very nice."

"Data archiving is easier and less time-consuming."

"The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers."

"Scalability is pretty much unlimited."

"Traditional storage works perfectly with it."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

"It's easy to install."

"In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster."

"The Zerto functions I like the most are data protection, static discovery, and, most importantly, virtual machine backups."

"We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations."

"The ease of adding additional servers is valuable. We have a portal that we can go into to add those new servers, and then outside of that, the overall time that it took for disaster recovery simulation is also good."

"I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements... It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor..."

"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."

"When we replicated our data, I turned up the machine, and it was up in seconds. It blew my mind. I could not believe it."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms."

"The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure."

"There could be various client systems and process integration included in the product."

"The software is very complicated. You have to do a lot of configurations to build a server, and you would need to backup and restore."

"Enhancements are required for backing up our virtual environment."

"The administration interface should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line and needs improvement in how some reports are created."

"It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs."

"It might be seen as leaning towards the legacy side, missing some features of newer solutions. The main drawbacks would be its complexity and high pricing."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

"Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better."

"It works only for a virtual platform, it does not support bare metal."

"There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better."

"I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved."

"Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this. Now we are testing version 10 which include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: we expect more from these features for superior hybrid cloud security."

"The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards."

"When we do failover and failback, it doesn't maintain some of the settings that it should and I don't really understand why that happens."

"The new licensing model didn't work out for us because we used one-to-one replication."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."

"The different license models can give good benefits to the end customer."

"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. However, there are a few packages and it is unclear because, for the entry suite they have both options, which are the back-end storage capacity and the front-end storage capacity."

"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."

"IBM Spectrum Protect can be considered an averagely-priced product."

"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is not cost-effective, and ten is cost-effective."

"When compared to the cost of other enterprise products, it seems to be in the same range. However, compared to the cost of non-enterprise products, it is really high."

"The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

"Zerto's price seems fair. It's competitive."

"The product's pricing is the one area where it is less competitive."

"Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that."

"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."

"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."

"Zerto is reasonably price for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price."

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

"Zerto is slightly expensive, but we do see the value in it."

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

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Retailer

Government

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 do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

Customers don't check the price because they buy the solution's value. IBM offers the right price. My customers choose it because they know it is a very good solution from IBM. Some previously used...

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

The stability could be improved.

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.

Veeam Backup & Replication vs IBM Spectrum Protect

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Compared 20% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 8% of the time

Rubrik vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 7% of the time

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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

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Product Reports

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

IBM Spectrum Protect

July 2024

Download Zerto product report

June 2024

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Zerto Virtual Replication

Learn More

IBM

Overview

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

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

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

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