afi.ai vs. HPE Zerto Software

Great for archiving of deleted SharePoint online sites and off-boarded Microsoft 365 users; unlimited number of on-demand backup runs that can be triggered in the application by system administrators.

Zerto is well suited for disaster recovery and virtual machine replication between multiple data centers. DR testing for audit or regulations is much easier with Zerto, great reporting, dashboard etc. It is not well suited for physical server replication for disaster recovery or as a primary backup solution.

Incentivized

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• It is simple to set up and use. In my opinion, one of the most important functions of a tool is its interface. If you have the best product in the world but it takes an arm and a leg to configure and a doctorate degree to use, then the product isn't worth very much.
• The continuous replication is done very well. The failover and failback process runs smoothly.
• This has less to do with the product than the company, but Zerto as a company really listens to their customer base. We've always had a very good interpersonal experience with their support and sales teams. Having great people behind their product is definitely one of Zerto's strengths.

Incentivized

• It would be handy to have SharePoint file versions comparisons in the UI
• Email alerts on settings changes would be good to have too.

• Moving a VM from one protection group to another could be simplified.
• I would like to see an executive-style report of recovery and testing for upper management.
• The ability to deploy Zerto as a virtual appliance, without the need for a windows server.

Incentivized

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

We really like the easy setup of this replication solution, as well as the ease of management. Not to mention, our internal IT Economist determined that the Zerto solution would provide the best ROI out of the competing solutions we analyzed. So far, his calculations have been spot on, and we have saved substantially

Incentivized

The UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

Zerto is very easy to implement and support. Uses are broad, only issues are once something doesn't sync it is difficult to get assistance until your reach tier 2 or tier 3 support. Basic file and folder recovery is great. Live and test fail overs are also easy to implement without issue.

Incentivized

We needed to contact them three times over the course of two years, and it was very good. Very fast response, and the people are super technical and to the point.

Very responsive, very capable. Overall, the product is very easy to set up and configure. Problems usually encroach when lower-level components are updated for changed, for instance, vSphere. Support usually can help us work through any issues that pop up from upgrades to other software, but their own updates can lag behind a little.

Incentivized

Ease and speed of initial co figuration.

Incentivized

afi is next generation system, with our previous vendor we had to wait for a long time to access data, sometimes up to 24h.The reason for that was our scale according to the support team. ( 50TB +) With afi it takes a few seconds. The UI is super simple and easy to use, no training required for end-users to work with the system. afi support is super responsive and very helpful.

Zerto solves issues with snapshot-based backups and provides continuous data protection up to 14 days with an astonishing granularity. Zerto's One-2-Many can provide local and offsite backups with near real-time and fast restore of a VM

Zerto does not backup physical machines or VMs that are turned off, but there are other products to do that.

Other backup products are stepping up with ease of deployment and small organizations would find them a little easier to use as there are fewer configuration options.

Incentivized

• It's hard to assess ROI here, however we were able to recover very important documents and full user accounts for executive team during the audit. It helped in a big way.
• Self-Service is a life saver for IT helpdesk team, saved a lot of human hours.

• DR and CyberSecurity recovery can be done in minutes or a few hours via Zerto, as opposed to days with backup/recovery.
• DR testing and recovery can be done anytime in an isolated environment to test recoverability and functionality.
• Zerto licensing is very affordable to protect critical business functions.
• On-prem to cloud migrations are very quick and easy to perform.

Incentivized