Dell Avamar vs ExaGrid EX Series comparison

Dell Technologies and ExaGrid are both solutions in the Deduplication Software category. Dell Technologies is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3, while ExaGrid is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell Technologies holds a 9.6% mindshare in DS, compared to ExaGrid’s 8.4% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ExaGrid users who would recommend it.

Dell Avamar

Read 89 Dell Avamar reviews

2,224 Views
426 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

ExaGrid EX Series

Read 6 ExaGrid EX Series reviews

2,100 Views
1,403 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell Avamar

ExaGrid EX Series

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Dell Avamar and ExaGrid EX Series compete in the data backup and recovery market. Dell Avamar often holds an edge in pricing and support, while ExaGrid EX Series stands out for its advanced features and rapid recovery capabilities, appealing to businesses with significant data volume needs.

Features: Dell Avamar offers source-side deduplication, integration with VMware, and efficient data protection, reducing network bandwidth requirements. ExaGrid's features include a landing zone technology for faster backups, an adaptive deduplication for optimal storage use, and scalability that grows with the organization.

Room for Improvement: Dell Avamar can improve by expanding its plugin support, enhancing performance in non-VM environments, and refining its user interface for more intuitive navigation. ExaGrid could enhance its dashboard functionality, improve data deduplication for long-term storage, and streamline processes for even faster initial deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell Avamar is praised for its smooth integration into existing environments and responsive customer support. ExaGrid boasts a straightforward deployment process, facilitated by pre-configured appliances, with customer service noted for its proactive and hands-on approach, ensuring efficient implementation and support.

Pricing and ROI: Dell Avamar is attractive for its lower initial costs, appealing to budget-conscious buyers, with ROI enhanced by storage efficiency and deduplication. Conversely, ExaGrid, with a higher initial investment, justifies its ROI through significantly reduced backup times and enhanced scalability, suitable for businesses focused on long-term growth and performance optimization.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

June 2025

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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

Dell Avamar

Ranking in Deduplication Software

5th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Backup and Recovery (7th)

ExaGrid EX Series

Ranking in Deduplication Software

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Deduplication Software category, the mindshare of Dell Avamar is 9.6%, up from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ExaGrid EX Series is 8.4%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Deduplication Software

Featured Reviews

Ayodeji Oyewole

Managing Director at Atlantic factorial

Reliable with good backups but has occasional failures

I use Dell Avamar primarily for backup and recovery The most valuable feature for me is the backup functionality. It gives large enterprises the comfort of knowing their workloads are being backed up. There are instances where backups fail on certain applications, which is an area that could be…

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Daan Lieshout

Server and Storage Specialist at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

With great features like deduplication and landing zone, the tool also provides stability and scalability

Speed-wise, ExaGrid is much faster than the other solutions in the market. When you choose between or from several different manufacturers, you need to understand a little bit about how the product exactly works and why its speed can be so high while being able to compare it to other solutions, allowing you to know of the backup window if you ever need it. You have to understand how it works and the product's preferences, even though the price may be slightly higher. Learning about the solution is not at all a problem, but when you open a console, you see so many things, and in the beginning you don't understand it all. Later on, it becomes more usable when you start understanding it. In general, ExaGrid provides you with a lot more information than any other system in the market. It is difficult to say what is additionally required in the solution because, presently, it has a lot of things like immutability, anti-hacking, and retention. The solution does put efforts towards improvement. The product's interface provides you with a proper overview of the deduplication rate and the status of how many storage systems you are left with through a visual screen, which is more than enough. When you go deeper, you can access all the enhanced consoles. The product can easily be integrated with third-party products because ExaGrid has all its best practice documents for integrating it with many other products. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dell Avamar has a push upgrade feature that lets you simultaneously push updates to thousands of clients. I also found the self-service part of Dell Avamar helpful."

"The most valuable feature is the virtual backup."

"The initial setup is easy."

"We sell Avamar with Data Domain. Data Domain and Avamar work really well together and their compression ratios are very high compared to Veeam, Commvault, and all the other backup software on the market."

"Scheduling is valuable. It does a good job of backing up, and it does a good job of restoring. Nobody has got a problem with that. The agents are well supported."

"The source site replication feature is valuable."

"The most valuable feature for me is the backup functionality."

More Dell Avamar pros

"The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the process is fast, ensuring smooth backup and recovery operations at high speeds. However, the process becomes slower for long-term backups moved to the retention zone due to fragmentation. So, if the data is older than a few days, the speed may be limited, especially for non-deduplicated data in the landing zone."

"The most valuable features of the solution are deduplication and landing zone."

"It is a solid and a quite simple solution, which is a good combination. The customers like the simplicity and its scale-out capacity. They like the support pricing, and even the extension capacity pricing, a fixed price, which the executive is offering in Czech market."

"One of the main features is the landing zone, it is a particular space where the information is not duplicated."

"The solution easily integrates with the backup targets, such as Veeam."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and data deduplication. It's extremely easy to use and does a very good job of data deduplication and compression."

Cons

"Reporting in Dell Avamar needs improvement. The current reporting tool is very basic, and you have to dig deep into each function to get the information you need. For example, getting the status of failed and succeeded backups is very difficult in Avamar compared to Veeam. As for additional functionality, I would suggest improving WAN optimization. It's very important for getting offline or off-site backups. It should also include a tool to check for ransomware which would be beneficial. If a backup is vulnerable to ransomware, there should be a way to detect it, like using ARR rules to ensure your backup is ransomware-free. I haven't had any experience integrating Dell Avamar with AI solutions. It’s also a good point that Avamar doesn't offer such integrations, which is an area where Dell could improve."

"I have found the support from Dell EMC Avamar to be not as good as Veeam. The time it takes to receive support could be improved. However, once we have the support the agents are knowledgeable and helpful."

"It was challenging to back up our Exchange database, which is one of the reasons we did not continue using this solution."

"A huge storage space needs to be bought with Dell Avamar, even when it's unnecessary for an organization"

"Desktop-laptop backups and backup over the WAN needs lot of improvisation. For DTLT there must be a provision to push agents from the management console."

"The solution should improve its tape-connectivity features."

"Avamar is dependent on the hardware. It can't be implemented with ordinary storage. It can only be implemented with an EMC product. We want to have a backup solution that allows us to use independent storage and other hardware. It would be good if they can simplify its technology and make it possible to implement it with another storage. This is probably not possible because Avamar is an EMC product, and EMC would like to sell its own products."

"The solution, in the future, should offer support for mobile."

More Dell Avamar cons

"The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against ransomware attacks. As a result, the retention zone with duplicated data is experiencing more demand, leading to space constraints. This necessitates using higher-end, more expensive models to address the issue."

"The one place where we are sometimes losing the opportunity with ExaGrid is that a few customers still require a fiber channel connectivity, which is not always possible."

"The solution could improve by switching to a flash-type solution rather than the spinning drives that they currently use. However, we have not had any failure with the spinning drives. The flash-type drives are more up-to-date and are something that is in their roadmap."

"The product's documentation can be made more precise."

"When speaking about a scale-out, you want to have better equipment. You cannot just add a disc to the foreign equipment. You have to buy another one and put it together, like parallel."

"I would like for them to develop direct cloud integration with a third-party cloud. Direct integration with AWS and other cloud providers."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive. The maintenance comes with it for five years. So, you buy the whole thing for five years, and your maintenance is included with it, but it's a big chunk of change upfront. We like capital expenses because we can CapEx them. We pay once every five years, so we spend a big chunk of change. You'd have to divide that out by the five years to come up with how much it costs. It's just about three-quarters of a million dollars for five years."

"The current pricing is generally satisfactory."

"I rate the tool's price as a three out of ten if one means expensive and ten means it is a cheaply priced tool."

"The price is fair."

"Dell EMC needs to lower Avamar's price and add more features to stay competitive."

"Licensing was generally on a per VM or terabyte basis. They changed their licensing model a couple of times and turned it into socket-based licensing, which is an improvement in their licensing model."

"Dell's pricing structure is not overly expensive."

"On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing policy of Dell Avamar as five. The solution has a very good price, and a lot of improvements were done to it."

More Dell Avamar pricing and cost advice

"In comparison to other solutions, it's affordable. They're all too expensive."

"My company had to pay 1,60,000 EUR for the system we use, and the payment was made just once for the system and five years of full support."

"The current agreement has 21 terabytes of free space and it cost approximately $35,000."

"I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten."

"The previous solutions I have used both included the Backup Software and the Appliance making it hard to compare to this solution. However, overall the solution is reasonably priced for the features you receive. ExaGrid EX Series is priced better than HP, Dell, and possibly Commvault which I have compared in the past."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC Avamar?

The cost is very significant, and it could be lower.

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell Avamar?

Easy to configure and highly reliable for backup.

See all answers

What do you like most about ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ExaGrid EX Series?

I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against r...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 34% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Avamar

Compared 15% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Avamar

Compared 9% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

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Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 49% of the time

HPE StoreOnce vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 22% of the time

Quantum DXi Series vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 14% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 5% of the time

DD Boost vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 5% of the time

More ExaGrid EX Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar

June 2025

Download Dell Avamar product report

Buyer's Guide

ExaGrid EX Series

June 2025

Download ExaGrid EX Series product report

Also Known As

Avamar

EX Series

Overview

Dell Avamar data protection software delivers flexible and efficient backup and recovery operations that can scale from daily backup protection for endpoints to high-performance protection for large enterprises with diverse applications and workloads. With application consistent recovery, automation and fast backup and restores, Avamar can help you meet your SLAs and optimize your backup and recovery processes

If you are deploying all or part of your backup environment to the cloud, Avamar enables you to make the most of your cloud investment, enabling replication, disaster recovery and long-term retention for customers using AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Avamar is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. Avamar is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

Dell Technologies

The ExaGrid EX Series hyper-converged secondary storage for backup product line consists of eight appliance models. Each appliance is sized for a full backup and for long-term retention. Any ExaGrid appliance can be mixed and matched in the same scale-out system with any other size or age appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need as they need it. This pay-as-you-grow model allows up to 25 appliances in a single scale-out system.

ExaGrid

Sample Customers

Dodge County, St Laurence's College, FieldCore (a GE Company), Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Getronics, Lewisville Independent School District, EnvisionRxOptions, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions

NCI Group, North Attleborough Public School, North Kingstown School Department, NPS Pharmaceuticals, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Rathbone Brothers PLC, Rio Hondo College, Ruder Finn, Sarah Lawrence College

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

June 2025

Free Report: Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

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