Dell Avamar Reviews

We primarily use the solution as a backup.

The backup is the solution's most valuable feature. It's very reliable.

The configuration and expansion aspects of the solution need improvement. They're complicated and don't really integrate well.

The solution requires a remote site application in a future release. I believe they are currently working on this. 

The solution is very stable. It's really reliable.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is very complex.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We were lucky to receive the solution as part of a bundle. It was actually a relatively good price, but there are better solutions, like Veem. However, they can be expensive.

We are using the on-premises deployment model of the solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

The price is the main thing I'd like to see them change. If they can come down in price, that would be a good thing. It's very cost-competitive in the entry-level range because Veeam pricing is much cheaper than Avamar.

I think they could also move more towards cloud solutions. It already has some cloud tiering, but I think that could be more extensive. They should work with all cloud providers and I think in the future they will be on all cloud platforms.

The stability is really good. We have no complaints. Everybody who has Data Domain with Avamar sticks with it. We have not seen anybody leave once they go in.

Scalability is good. Data is getting expanded rapidly, so it really needs scalability and it was scalable. Of course, it did not support the data explosions that we had because of unstructured stuff and other complications. Now, there's a new product called Data Protector for that, which is scalable as well. It can scale out as well. The only thing with this solution is 60 terabytes is the starting point, which is a good high-end solution. I hope they will come back with an entry-level version for that as well.

Technical support was announced a few months ago and we are still on the learning curve.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

You need to work with a specialist and EMC is a very huge company now. If, however, you go and talk to the right person who knows Avamar and data protection stuff, they can help you price the solution perfectly. That's not something that you should take for granted. There are so many tools available to do a proper sizing.

I would rate Avamar as six out of ten. I would like to give it a seven or eight, but the price is too high. It depends on who wants this solution. For enterprise companies, I can rate it as eight or nine. For entry-level companies, I would say it's a six, or perhaps even lower, like a four, because the price point is very high compared to other companies.

We use the on site version.

I think the brand is very good. Support is also very nice for end-users and integration with EMC products for businesses. Customers choose this EMC product because they also have this brand in their infrastructure.

I think the biggest advantage it offers is backup, for end-users as well as computers, not only servers and storage paths. The solution can also backup end users. One of the most important things is also deduplication.

The interface could be more helpful for people.

It works smoothly.

It's easy to scale.

I would give the technical support nine out of ten.

The initial setup is complex.

I'm not sure, but perhaps the pricing could be done better at the moment.

I can definitely recommend this product, but I don't have any other advice.

I would rate this product around eight out of ten.

We recently stopped using this solution but it was being used to back up our servers and client machines.

We were using an on-premises deployment.

It was very simple to deploy the solution to the client that wanted to backup.

It was challenging to back up our Exchange database, which is one of the reasons we did not continue using this solution. It was very tough, and a case of having to contact the Microsoft Partner Network.

Technical support needs to be improved.

We could not integrate this solution with our tape backup.

This is a stable product.

We had about one hundred users on the platform.

I would not rate technical support high for this solution. We had a problem and nobody could be specific about the issue, or what it is that we needed to do in order to resolve it.

Technical support could not resolve the issue that we had in terms of integrating with tape.

We were not able to back up the Exchange database with this solution. In the end, we had to discontinue using it. We switched to EMC Data Domain, and the cost was one of the factors that influenced our decision.

Our in-house team implemented this solution, although I was not part of the process so I do not know the details.

This is a solution that I recommend. It is a good product. It's stable, it is easy to deploy, and the visibility of the backup and restore is good.

If I had my way then we would be using this solution for other applications and we would be running them side-by-side as a comparison. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution to protect our virtual machine.

We love the instant recovery functionality. It's very useful. 

We found some difficulty around co-locating with restructuring. I think the co-location between Avamar and vCenter, in my opinion, is not the best.

We like the easy integration with VMware and vCenter, but we'd like to click a button for any kind of virtual machine and then click on backup and restore. It would make things easier if this could be done in a few clicks. Right now, it's a bit more in-depth.  

Technical support does a very good job. They are very reactive when we come to them with issues.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to deploy the solution.

The licensing model is not very flexible. Every time we upgrade our storage size, we need to upgrade the Avamar license.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I think it is a powerful tool. We use it on both our production and disaster sites.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Data backup is our primary usage of the solution. 

I am impressed by the ease of troubleshooting due to the internal database. You can get a lot of information from the backup jobs and that is very useful. For example, the program has a very nice importer called Clientele Activity.

Sometimes when you run backups for products, you will get the information about the backups - some successful some unsuccessful. You also often get information about some clients who don't run any data backups. So from a troubleshooting point of view, it offers valuable information that you can work on. 

There are some limitations on the backups and the databases so I think that needs a little improvement. The client caches and deduplication system have a few problems.

The solution is stable as long as you are very careful when you shut down and start up. If you will do everything according to the rules, everything will be okay. But if you make a mistake or shut down the wrong way, or install something the wrong way, you will have some problems. The system is a little sensitive about things that are not done correctly. If you follow the rules, the system will pay you very well. If you do not follow the rules, you will have some troubles.

The program has something called RAIN, and RAIN is the head of the systems, that hosts computers that work together. This RAIN has some limitations on the number of nodes you can put it together to make something like the cloud computer for which something can be seen as a great computer. The second thing is that Avamar has many internal things checking the consistency of the data.

And from this point of view, you sometimes get some mutations on the performance miles and the composite. You can overcome this by using Data Domain. If you add the Data Domain to the system, then you'll see stuff that can be seen as a kind of management system by Avamar, stored back in the Data Domain. It's a beautiful component.

Because I am the inspector at our company I simply call my global instructor or another linked instructor if I need something checked. So I've never used the technical team.

We used Omniverge for some time, but at that time the cost became too high so we switched to Avamar. If you look at the backup and database of Avamar, it stands out above the rest. 

The initial setup was complex and it was very hard to implement that in Avamar itself because there were about 500 pages you had to go through. It was a nightmare. It was 18 years ago so it will probably be easier now. I did the deployment myself but I can't remember how long that took.

Before you start using this program, you must know that you can't do everything with Avamar. There are some limitations like the size of the database. 

One lesson I've learned from working with Avamar is that you must follow the rules. Often people do not follow the rules for different products. Some products are very forgiving and you don't need to strictly follow the rules, but with Avamar, you have to follow the rules. You have to read the manual, you have to really know what you are doing, especially when you do the first implementation.

The product is good for backups but if you look at the analytics, I would like to say that there is a possibility to improve the caches or to do something with the application process on the clients' side, and back-ups for the bigger objects like the databases of the processing systems. 

I rate this product 8.5. It could be nine, but it has a few limitations. 

Backup of virtual machines.

Very reliable tool.

The speed of backups.

Reports generation.

This product is very easy to use. The interface is easier to use than other backup solutions. The product is mature and can handle all of our data protection.

The simplicity of use and the ease of updating physical client software is one of the best features.

• Image level backups
• Replication for DR
• Almost instant access restores
• The access to the logs for each backup allows for easy troubleshooting.

It would be nice to have a truly native SQL backup solution. All of our DBAs are looking for a truly native solution. They are satisfied with the current solution but would really like a truly native solution like the Oracle RMAN solution. What we mean by true Native solution, is that no Data Protection product has a true MS Native solution to protecting data. What we have been doing for years is have the DBA script in the Native MS to do a dump of the DB to a file. Then the backup solution would come behind and pick up those dumps. Then the DBA would have to request a restore of the dump files, and then use a script to pull that information. Where with RMAN, the DBA can write a script to backup and restore directly to the Avamar. It is a much cleaner and less costly solution. With the SQL dump and scape, we need so much MORE storage space to help them keep all of their data protected.

This product is very stable. We have never had any outages and the support for this product is very good.

This product can grow with your company. We selected this solution as it allows us to keep the existing data domains that we used for our previous solution. We have the ability to add more storage to the existing DDs or to add another as needed.

Like any other company, many of the support calls go to places on the other side of the world. It is sometimes difficult to understand them. I found that the support that was given was very good. I usually choose to receive support via Webex and email due to the communication challenges you get with offshore support.

We used to have Veeam and NetBackup. We moved to Avamar as it had more features; it helped reduce the number of environments we had to support. It also reduced the amount of time we spend on upgrades. It simplified our total data protection and reduced the number of clients that were required to be installed.

The initial set up was very straightforward.

We used a combination as we have some people who are new to the Avamar product.

The set up is really easy. They have a virtual edition for smaller environments, and the documentation for doing the install is really good. For larger environments, the PS group works directly with you on the install and setup for new customers. The cost was actually cheaper than any of the other solutions we looked at.

We looked at a variety of other products. One of the main reasons we selected Avamar was the fact that they have support for physical servers running Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX. We have a large enough physical environment that we needed the ability to protect them.