Axcient x360Recover vs. Zerto

I feel that Axcient x360Recover is well suited for any environment, both large and small. Weather you build your own device, BYOD or purchase one of theirs, it all works great. I even use it at home via the direct to cloud option. Well work the investment. I am unable to find a downside at this time.

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

• Setup and configuration is extremely easy.
• The business continuity component for spinning up the desired recovery point as a virtual machine on the appliance in order to keep the business operational is rock solid.
• Recovering the desired backup point back to the physical hardware or virtual environment and syncing the most recent changes to finalize the recovery is awesome.
• The system documentation is concise and easy to use.
• The support team is absolutely fantastic.

• Anyone with a large disk (VMDK) knows the issues of VMware snapshots. Most backup software is a "point in time backup" that uses snapshots. While the backup can be run multiple times per day the stress of the snapshot on the host and storage is eliminated by the continuous protection of Zerto log replication.
• A client had a the disks on a VM go missing for some reason. We had them "flip the switch" for a real fail over and press the fail over button. The VM on our DR site started to come alive as the VM at the customer site was brought down. When the DR VM was fully up, automatic reverse replication started. The DR machine was available in a few minutes (to take into account different host hardware) for access. One the vm at both sites were in sync, we had the customer again repeat the fail over process and the DR site VM was turned off and the Production site VM was brought back on line. This was a 200 GB VM and the whole process was finished in about 3 hours.
• Zerto also allows for "Test" fail overs that can be configured on many different functions, such as host, datastore, network and IP usage. Configuring the IPs is crucial to avoid inadvertent site cross contamination of the same VM.
• Zerto can also retrieve files from any VM disk on the DR site without starting a VM. Very handy for retrieving files or directories.
• Since Zerto is running continuous log replication, changes on the production VM are nearly instantaneously copied to the DR site. As with any data process, having sufficient bandwidth for "churn" peaks minimizes the delay in updating the DR site.

Incentivized

• The only thing missing is the ability to cancel a backup as they appear to just continue to try to run even after rebooting the BDR and endpoint until a failure finally occurs.
• The only other ask would be to expand support to Linux operating systems.

Incentivized

• 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've been using Axcient over the years and have worked with their development team to suggest new features, something that you would not normally be able to do with other companies. They listen to what we have to say and understand that we are a business, just like them. It's great to know that someone will always be there for you when you need them.

Incentivized

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

Easy to use and doesn't require a lot of training.

Incentivized

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

Issues with failing backups drag out for months at a time. Axcient hardware replacements are quick to be suggested by support but as the issues are most often with the software architecture this almost never helps. Support often uses their access to the appliance as a back door into customer environments without our consent and despite our repeated complaints, accessing our customers servers and executing disruptive diagnostics like chkdsk in the middle of production hours for that customer environment. More recently they've been blaming their frequent off-site transfer failures on our customer's firewalls (of all makes and models) and insisting that the only possible resolution is to increase the TCP session timeout dangerously high (multiple hours), putting every client environment at substantial disk of even accidental Denial of Service attacks. Talking to any two support individuals, even when escalated all the way to their development team, often yields entirely different and contradictory answers regardless of the problem.

Incentivized

Overall support is very good. We sometimes get pushback when asking Level 1 support to escalate to Level 2. This causes undue frustrations when you need a more knowledgeable support person to get involved. We've had to escalate to account reps a few times for this scenario. Zerto is very responsive and normally handles our requests very quickly.

Incentivized

I had the miss fortune to go back to this device. Alot has changed since the first time I had used it. Now instead a full deployable network appliance, you have to download a preconfigured virtual machine that will only run on an ESXi server. What about Hyper-V? I have many clients that are Hyper-V only. I setup a test lab to get this thing up and running and it has been a nightmare to say the least. Will be looking at other options.

Incentivized

Make sure the end goal is in mind before implementing. That way results meet expectations.

Incentivized

Security and encryption of Axcient is a top priority . Axcient have all the tools to provide solutions to different kind of businesses Best part is it has an MSP friendly console to manage multiples devices and clients at the same Dashboard. Deployment process is very easy in Windows an VMWare Devices.

We started out using Backup Exec which was in service until we virtualized our environment where it didn't perform as well at the time. Then we switched to Veeam which worked well, but then as we started needing to do migrations and off-site DR, we found ourselves relying on Zerto more often.

Incentivized

For my organization, the pricing model was an upfront investment for the Zerto licenses. My organization prefers to pay upfront and not deal with month-to-month or year-to-year pricing models that most companies are moving to. But for some, the investment may be more than they can afford, and would prefer the year-to-year pricing model.

Incentivized

I mean, it was 6 years ago, but we were up and going with all applications synchronizing in short order. The longest tasks was getting the 30 TB of application data synchronized between the datacenters.

Incentivized

• The few customers I have I feel confident and comfortable that a disaster will make recovery easy and fast for my clients.
• I can set it up and forget about it with reports and alerts
• I recommend it to any client that requires a good solid backup solution;

• Zerto is like having the best possible insurance ... it just works, and often provides the backups taken overnight that are key in recovering data/work between overnight backups.
• Zerto easily enabled the move of primary datacenters by allowing easy failover to a secondary site, and failback to the primary site.

Incentivized