Carbonite Server vs HPE Zerto Software comparison

"The efficiency and convenience are excellent."

"It does not slow down your computer or use a lot of resources as it works."

"The solution is very stable."

"I find the BMR/image and the recovery pieces are valuable."

"Technical support handled all our issues quickly and effectively."

"The Granular Restore of SQL feature has been a lifesaver more times than I can count. One of the main reasons for looking at Carbonite was their support for platforms like AIX and AS/400 Series."

"The solution is a free engine to help work with the container."

"Easy verification of things is the most valuable feature."

"We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery."

"The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. The is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum."

"What I appreciate the most about Zerto is the simplicity of it all."

"I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use."

"I like the automation of transferring data in the case of any disaster to our VMs. It is also easy to use and fast."

"We have seen ROI. The biggest way that we have seen it is in avoided downtime. We have had outages before, and we count downtime in terms of dollars spent. We have cut that down so dramatically, which provides us a very quick ROI. We have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes us to recover workloads, from an average of two hours to an average of 10 minutes."

"The solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features."

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

"The Hyper-V backup has room for improvement."

"The support for object storage isn't quite there yet. Its public cloud support can be improved. I would love to see the public cloud support for object storage, and it would be great, but what I always hear from the folks at Carbonite is that in a lot of cases, it directly competes with their cloud offering. So, I don't know when or where that will go or if that will go anywhere, but we are hopeful to see something. The dashboard is a little outdated. If they gave it a facelift and put some better design around their dashboard, that would be tremendous. I generally care less about the visual aesthetics of an application as long as it does what it needed to do, which is true in the case of this solution. We also have the Microsoft 365 platform. Because they're two separate platforms, I have to log in to my Microsoft platform to manage it, and I have to log into my Carbonite server backup platform to manage it. Having these two coexist together in one management console is really what we're looking for, but we went for it knowing this. We also knew that there would be some integration coming down the road. So, we're again hoping to see some of that coming in 2021."

"They do not yet have USB recovery but they are adding it in coming releases."

"In the next release I would like to see an improvement in the auto failover option."

"The stability has room for improvement."

"It could be a little bit easier or faster to be able to access data files without having to download anything."

"The only thing that I would like to see improved is related to marketing. Currently, it is very difficult to find the right paper and stuff for me. Their marketing department should provide better information because currently, it is very difficult to find information on the internet. It was bought over by OpenText, and you won't be able to find a lot of information about this solution on their site. They should also provide training facilities for commercial purposes. Some of my colleagues recently went for pilot training, and they were technical. If I want to get trained, the training has to be more commercial. Currently, there is no such training for users like me."

"Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."

"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."

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

"The email alerts can be excessive, so better control over frequency or resolution may be a worthwhile improvement."

"As one who is implementing it, my biggest gripe is the ticketing system. Zerto has since upgraded that, so right now, I have no complaints about it."

"Its price should be improved."

"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."

"It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks."

"We pay 9,000 dollars per year for our license."

"The pricing is between $120 and $150 per year."

"The solution is open source."

"Its price is reasonable."

"My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was straightforward."

"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."

"The solution is expensive, but it's worth the price."

"Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well."

"I think everything can be cheaper. Pricing limited our ability to use Zerto as much as we'd like, but that's not why we haven't adopted it as our primary backup solution."

"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."

"There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for."

"I wouldn't say I like the licensing pricing structure. Every year, it increases exponentially, which bothers me a little. It's worth it in terms of the value, but I worry the price will increase even more often after the Zerto merger. I still think it's worth it and that the solution is cheaper than the others."