Dell Avamar Reviews

Dell EMC Avamar is a very complex product. It took a lot of time for the IT admins to get trained on how to use it. It is not very user-friendly, and we won't be using Avamar anymore.

It needs a lot of improvement in terms of how the backups have been configured, and the reporting is too complex. There are a lot of improvements that should be done in the reporting feature and how the endpoints are getting added to the console. These processes need to be a little more simplified. It is not that easy to get an immediate report based on our requirements. It is too complex. We have to write some scripts and things like that. There are predefined scripts, but they aren't very user-friendly for the customer.

We have been using this product for more than six years.

The stability is okay.

If you want to scale up again, you have to buy a complete appliance. There is no option for just scaling up for the mid-phase entities. Only the larger entities would be able to afford that kind of complete appliance scalability. In terms of scalability, I'm not a fan of Avamar.

We haven't used Veeam before, but we are currently replacing Avamar with Veeam now. We are still in the process of switching.

The cost is high.

I would rate this product 5 out of 10.

We use it for our desktops and laptops end-users. We have a network in place for server backup and archive.

I have not yet explored this solution in its entirety. Maybe six months down the line, I will be able to tell you about this solution with more confidence.

I believe it is a good backup and recovery solution based on our limited experience in the short period we have been using it.

It is easy to use.

More integration would be helpful, as well as the addition of more applications.

The technical support should be improved. They could be more responsive in the future.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for six months.

I assume we're using the most recent version because it was just installed by our implementation team.

In order to make an opinion, we must compare the performance to established benchmarks. We are still working on it, and we're still evolving.

Scalability is determined by the number of licenses purchased. Only a few have been accepted.

We have approximately, 100 users, but we have plans to expand very soon.

We may have some remote offices set up, in the near future.

We experienced a problem with the network backup installation, so we called technical support. One of the backups failed continuously.

We were not exactly satisfied with the turnaround time. It was an issue that was unique for them to resolve, but we were not able to assistance instantly.

The support could be better.

When you consider the hardware involved, the initial setup was not straightforward.

In the beginning, there were a lot of trials and errors to suit our exact requirements. Our installation was the standard that most normally have.

This solution was not installed by us. We agreed that the implementation team would complete the installations.

Licensing fees are paid annually.

I am not sure if the fees are comparable; I would like to compare them to other solutions.

We have Data Domain and network backup software.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar, an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a backup. Avamar is used to back up our production workloads. Production workloads include Oracle, EBS, SharePoint, file and print service, other application services.

The stability is good. We have found that the performance is excellent.

The product is easy to use.

The installation process is pretty straightforward. 

The solution could be a bit easier to use in the sense that they need to make it simpler to backup products and restore items.

I've been using the solution for more than three years. 

The solution is very stable and the performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Whether or not we will scale the solution depends on the business. If we have a requirement to do so, then definitely we'll expand it. If there will be year-over-year growth and if it will be 10%, we're likely to expand and will need to scale.

If you need to add more capacity, you will need to pay for it.

The installation process is straightforward. That said, it would require an engineer from Dell to do it. We ourselves cannot do it. We don't have the knowledge necessary.

We needed two engineers to handle deployment. 

Installation was quite fast. It took about four to five hours. After that, the configuration and other policies, that took about two days.

We had Dell assist us with the implementation process. 

This is a capacity-based license, it's a one-time payment.

In order to increase capacity, you need to pay more. You also can expect more maintenance.

The pricing of the product seems to be less expensive than other options, however, I can't speak to the exact cost of the product.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

This product is for production users. We do not backup user backups; it's only for the production workload.

I'm using the solution for our entire daily data backup for laptops and desktops. We also use it for some of our virtual machines and some of our databases systems.

The product has a proven track record of good backups without much of a failure ratio. It also has a good backup in terms of the compression ratio. 

Overall, my experience with Avamar is very good.

Technical support has been helpful.

The performance of the solution is excellent.

The product scales easily.

The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive. 

The reporting aspect of the product could be better. For example, I'd like to have reports on the daily failure of systems. If I have more than 1000 systems, if I want to know that how many systems failed yesterday, I'd like to be able to pull that information in a single click.  

I've been using the solution for the past ten years.

I'm very happy with this product and the performance of this product is good. For the purposes of backups and restoring, it is very smooth and proven for the last 10 years. The failure rate is low. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

While, on the admin side, we have two to three people as administrators for Avamar. However, in the case of how many systems are to be backed up through Avamar, it's around 1,000 or more.

Right now, the current product is Dell DP4400 and it's a very scalable product. I have purchased the license for 8 TB only, however, the box itself already comes with a 64 TB hard disk. At any point, we can increase it. We just have to put in a license and we can increase it very easily.

We use the solution on a daily basis. 

Technical support is good. I get support in a timely manner. Since our last installation, which was in March, we have just logged two calls and both were closed in a very timely manner. We are quite satisfied with the support.

In the past, we've used Arcserve and Commvault.

In terms of differences, Arcserve and Commvault, are both Windows-based systems. They do not have their own hardware, which means that they are only software-based backups. It's your own decision in terms of which type of hardware you want.

There is nothing like a complete product with these two options. You are buying software from the vendors, and then you have to buy the hardware from another vendor. The issue is, when you need support, sometimes the software vendors tell you that problem is with hardware and the hardware vendors tell you that problem is with software. That can become an issue.

Also, due to the fact that both are Windows-based systems, there are some performance-based issues. I found that the Avamar system is better than Arcserve and Commvault for these reasons.

The initial setup is somewhere in between straightforward and difficult. 

The deployment takes between four and six hours. 

The maintenance required is quite minimal. It's based on a Linux setup, which makes it pretty easy.

I have set up the solution with an expert from Dell. With the help of an expert from Dell, the setup is straightforward.

The pricing of the solution is okay.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. It's an iteration of version 17.

I'm very happy with this product. I recommend it to everyone who is searching for any complete backup for an entire infrastructure, for example, for a virtual server, a database server, or a laptop or desktop. This is a single product that can handle a complete infrastructure backup. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

It is our main backup system while we're in the middle of switching over to Cohesity.

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. 

In terms of functionality, it is rock solid. It does its job.

The UI is a complete mess. It is graphic, but it might as well be a CLI considering how difficult it is to work with. It takes an entire person and a significant amount of time to manage backups within the company. It really shouldn't be that hard.

When you get down to doing certain things, such as somebody wants a particular file restored, the process by which you do that is stupid. You kind of have to know exactly where to look for in order to find it. Even on older backup products that I've used, I didn't have that kind of problem. If we were looking for a file with a particular kind of a name, the solution would find that file anywhere irrespective of where it resides within the backup system. So, we didn't have to know the name of the specific server, the specific timeframe, almost all the characters of the file name, and all kinds of data in order to find a file. In Avamar, we got to know these details. We've gone around and around with them on that, and their attitude seems to be that it is working just fine. There is nothing for them to improve. The organizational system of other products that I'm working with, such as Zerto and Cohesity, seems to be centered around the tasks that you would most commonly do and want to do, as opposed to we've laid it out in a really neat technical hierarchy. 

There should be some kind of greater granularity in the way it is storing backups. The reason why we're using things like Zerto and going to Cohesity, at least in the DR environment, and this will work in terms of backups as well, is that we need to be able to have a recovery point objective with some kind of granularity, such as every 15 minutes, every half hour, or every hour in case of a disaster recovery scenario, ransomware scenario, etc. We're pretty much allowed to do our once-in-a-day backup every 24 hours or however we schedule them. In most cases, we don't do anything different for basic backups, but it seems very difficult within Avamar to do anything if we want to have an image of a system every so often or at least an incremental point of reference or an RPO point. 

The other thing is that the way that it locks files seems to make those systems unavailable while it is operating the backup. So, we have to very carefully schedule our backups after hours or over periods of time when there is low bandwidth of the transactions happening. With the other products we have, we don't have this problem. I certainly don't have that problem with Zerto. I've got a recovery point of every few seconds, and it doesn't seem to take a lot of storage room to do that. Storage is a big thing for us. It is very expensive, and that's always an issue for us. So, things like deduplication would be really nice to have.

I have been using this solution for at least six years.

It is rock solid. We don't ever have any problems with backups being lost or anything like that.

All of the data in the company is used by one person or another, so there are a couple of thousand users.

Their technical support is excellent. We've never had any problem dealing with Avamar in terms of technical support. We've had some nasty instances too where they've not been able to drill down on things and support their own product.

I've only been with the company for about five years, and it was present when I came on board.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a six out of 10. It is a pretty basic backup system in terms of features. It does its job. However, its UI is just ridiculous.

The primary use case is for remote office or branch office type protection.

We don't have a current instance. It is pretty old. We have tried desperately to decommission Avamar.

Quick incremental backups and product replication are the two highlights of the product. Once you capture a full backup, incrementals are pretty quick. It is fairly efficient from that perspective.

It is expensive. It is more about cost than it is about anything else. 

If you need to pull data out of it to offload to tapes, that's messy. You have a mechanism for it, but it is painful.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

Once you're in the product, and the product is running, it does a really good job.

It is node-based, so you can add nodes as you need. It is pretty scalable.

The people who supported it did a very good job. If it gets messed up, it is not easy to fix, but on a day-to-day basis, it just runs like a tank of gas.

They were all set up when I got here.

It is expensive. Its cost is the main thing.

My advice would be to compare costs to other solutions and also look at the virtual appliance version of it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a six out of 10.

We use Avamar for all of our backup and data management solutions in our co-location facility. I have two co-location facilities with one in Carrollton, Texas, and one in Austin. 

I have data domains, Avamar platforms, and Avamar software that we use across our enterprise. 

I manage a global technology team and a global infrastructure team. We use those platforms across all of our data centers, as well as on our sites where we have on-premises storage for either our Burrtec solutions or Isilon solutions that we have in territories, where we have to have data remain in the country due to the compliance requirements. We use it globally.

The most valuable features are scalability and integration.

The problems are, that it has issues with support. Dell has issues in that area.

I think the other problem is, that when we've had to do upgrades, it's a bit problematic. Dell hasn't done a good job at handling these upgrades, or the way EMC used to handle them. 

EMC was very thorough and if you got a piece of software that you had to upgrade, you knew that it had been thoroughly tested and it was going to work well. 

We have had issues with the consistency and the reliability of the code that is coming out for upgrades and enhancements.

I have been working with Dell EMC Avamar since 2017.

We are working with the most recent version. We recently updated it.

The stability has been okay. It hasn't been on par with what we would have expected, based on the fact that this would have been considered an EMC solution. 

With Dell purchasing EMC, there has been some degrading in their capabilities in that area.

The scalability of this solution is one of the best features.

I manage the global infrastructure team. My team is responsible for all the storage and backup infrastructure globally. It's my team that uses it, all around the world.

The technical support needs improvement.

I last used Commvault in 2017.

Dell EMC solution is much more scalable. It is built for an enterprise environment where you have high-end requirements for the movement of data. 

Commvault is not as advanced. It doesn't have all of the features and functionality.

When you talk about data management, storage management, comparably you're talking about companies like Rubrik, Cohesity, and Dell EMC, who are the major players out there.

The Avamar solution has a lot of the same features and functionality that Cohesity and Rubrik have, and is a very high-end enterprise solution for data management, data recovery, and  Commvault isn't quite at that level.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is a true enterprise solution. It has a lot of configurable options that you may or may not use based on your environment.

I have engineers that are all over the world, and I have those that are global to manage this solution, and a storage and backup team.

We have 10 people globally. There is a director who manages that group as well as a principal storage lead or principal storage engineer who does a lot of design and architectural work.

It's a very high-end solution and comparable to Rubrik and Cohesity.

You have to be really concerned about the Dell support model, the quality of their upgrades, and their support team's knowledge because they have issues in that area.

When you consider rating this solution, there are two parts to consider. There is the physical platform, the data domain, and the Avamar software. There is support for both of those. 

The physical platform is pretty reliable. I would rate it an eight, and for the support and the software, I would give it a six because of the issues that we've experienced with it.

Overall, I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

We use it as a backup and restore solution for our customers. For replication, we use the Data Domain application. We replicate from our primary site to the DR site.

Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable.

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.

It should be simplified because currently if we want to upgrade Avamar, it requires us to assemble too many EMC products. For upgrade, we have to ensure compatibility with Data Domain, proxy, and firmware for storage. There are many dependencies and many steps that we have to take if we want to upgrade the services, which is a weakness of Avamar.

It should also have support for reporting. We have too many reporting challenges. We cannot get information from the console about how big is the data of customer A, customer B, and customer C. EMC should think about providing reporting for the backup solution. Our customers use the basic reporting, but inside our infrastructure, we should be able to see and then analyze the data consumption by different customers. We should also be able to split information and see data consumption within our organization. Such analytical reporting will help us in planning our usage for the future, such as for the next two years. It will be useful for customers and service providers.

Its price should be reduced, and it should have a flexible and pay-per-use licensing.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is stable.

We have had their tech support until now. There is no problem with their tech support. They provide good support.

Its initial setup is complex. 

Its price should be reduced. It would be good if you could pay as per usage, and there is a subscription model like VMware. There should be some flexibility because sometimes, the customer only uses the backup for one month or three months. Currently, I have to pay whether I use it or not. Its licensing should be flexible and based on consumption. 

Currently, we are evaluating Veeam to see if it is possible to switch to Veeam. Veeam has an issue of deduplication failure. With Avamar, we use Data Domain, and the deduplication ratio is 26 or 25 times, whereas, with Veeam, the ratio is only half. We are thinking of using Avamar for archive backup and using Veeam for short retention.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.