Veeam on IBM Cloud promises to provide continuous
availability to enterprise clients through its combined and automated backup
and recovery solution.
Veeam is deployed in the user's IBM Cloud environment for:
·
Agentless image-based backups
·
Recovery of entire VMs, individual files, and
application items
·
Item-level recovery and eDiscovery for
Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Active Directory
·
Transaction-level restore of…
$11
per VM
Zerto
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, aims to enable customers to run an always-on business by simplifying the protection,
recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto’s cloud
data management and protection platform is designed to eliminate the risks and complexity of
modernization and cloud adoption across private, public, and hybrid
deployments. The software-only platform uses continuous data protection
at scale to converge disaster recovery, backup, and data…
The only benefit we found to Zerto was continuous data protection.. otherwise Veeam.. hands down. For our department, speed was more important so that we could quickly recover customer and site data to ensure confidence in our systems.
The Veeam on IBM Cloud functions [is] easy to set on the first time to use the platform and the effective capability on predictive disaster, easy to backup the most important data through the Veeam on IBM Cloud functionalities. The features [have] multiple different responsibilities like copy data management, effective data restore functions among many more.
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.
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.
The reporting could use some work. If you have a client who has some serious audit controls in place, you may find yourself creating the report versus depending on the system do that piece for you.
My complaint would be with the notification emails. They are not configurable and come out regardless of whether a backup set completed or is still running.
The scheduling is a little clunky. It would be much nicer if the backup could be "continuous" anytime it's connected to the Internet (similar to Carbonite).
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
Veeam is very easy to use once fully on-boarded and trained. Part of the reason we can respond to a critical situation swiftly is that it is so easy to use. We did take 2 years to be fully comfortable with the product as we tested it with others, but once we committed to Veeam, there was no question about it.
Usability was the primary reason we purchased the software in the first place. We had compared it to several other software products in the same area, and it was by far the easiest to set up and use. Long-term maintenance proved to be similar, with updates driven by updates to VMware and vSphere, rather than the product itself.
At the moment I cannot say anything bad about the overall provided services. It's holding me back to put the mark even higher as other cloud solutions have their advantages as well, so I can't rate this one higher than competitor ones. However the experience is really positive to the moment and it has delivered always.
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.
Veeam BLOWS AWAY Veritas in terms of reliability, recoverability, and Especially PRICE! Veritas is literally thousands of dollar more than comparable Veeam Software. Veritas's support is virtually non-existent. I believe the only reason Veritas is even still in business is because of their reputation as the ONLY backup software a decade or more ago. If you use Veritas, I HIGHLY recommend throwing it away and trying out Veeam - You will NOT go back to Veritas!
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.
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.
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.
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.
