Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

HPE Zerto Software vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

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

HPE Zerto Software
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
341
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (1st), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (1st)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 2.6%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.1%, down from 2.2% 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%
IBM Storage Protect2.1%
Other95.3%
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The failover feature is great for getting VMs up and running at a secondary site."
"VMware VM replication over narrow WAN bandwidth."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end."
"The most valuable feature is how quickly it powers down the original source VMs and the speed at which it powers up the new VMs. The amount of time it takes to put up the operating system is valuable. The speed is what I like the best."
"It is way faster than just manually moving VMDKs, etc. It saves hours of time and a significant amount of money."
"We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together."
"The most valuable for us and for my company is that we are replicating most of our production customers to the DR site, and we can do testing whenever we want."
"What I appreciate the most about Zerto is the simplicity of it all."
"Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward."
"You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk."
"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."
"The best part of this solution is that it just works."
"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."
"The most valuable features of the product are data deduplication and disaster recovery."
"One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market."
"It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability."
 

Cons

"I don't have any idea of areas fro improvement."
"One improvement could be addressing the market segment related to physical servers. I understand this is a limitation of Zerto's technology. Still, from a customer's perspective, I would ask the vendor to find a solution to use Zerto for virtualized physical systems, such as physical servers."
"It would also be nice if they could find a way to make it where one VM does not impact the entire journal history of the VPG."
"The recovery processes of large datasets in the Cloud have room for improvement."
"The replication layer can probably be improved."
"It works only for a virtual platform, it does not support bare metal."
"Zerto should add the capability to replicate the same VM to multiple sites."
"Some of the integrations with our internal tools, in particular, company-specific ones, do not work. In cases like this, we have to ask for additional support."
"We would like to see bare-metal restorers."
"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"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."
"The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure."
"It needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.)."
"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."
"Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent."
"They need to reduce the complexity and make the learning curve easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Zerto's pricing model is cost-prohibitive for small—to medium-sized businesses."
"Compared to other options like SRM, Zerto is a more expensive solution, making it primarily suitable for larger organizations."
"My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was straightforward."
"The pricing is fair."
"It is an enterprise-grade product. When you buy enterprise-grade tools, you have to expect to pay a higher price. It goes back to the idea of you get what you pay for."
"In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie."
"At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop."
"The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions."
"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."
"Licensing IBM Spectrum Protect can be somewhat confusing for new users due to the options available, such as licensing on a capacity or per server basis."
"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 solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."
"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."
"It is really expensive. Its price is not good for Latin America. Its price is good for the United States or Europe."
"Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."
"The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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%
 

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
 

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 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?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal with it, but from what I hear from my finance team, it's somewhat on the higher...
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 continue to use in the future.
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 might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
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. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Zerto Software vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.