Dell Avamar Reviews

Dell transformed disk-based backups. Basically, we moved from tape to disk-based backups. We moved from IBM PSM on tape, to Dell-based backups using an appliance. These appliances are purpose-built backup appliances. Avamar and DataDomain are both purpose-built and they are extremely popular — soon to be number one in the backup appliance market. Avamar is associated with compliance, and DataDomain is more of our target. They are extremely reliable and scalable — they provide the best de-duplication on the market. They are very easy to use, set up, and manage. 

They have come up with Data Protection Central. We have multiple different management layers. For each product, we have a different management interface, so if they could merge all of them into one single-pane view of management, that would be extraordinary. Technically, they've done that but it's still not a single-pane view like in Commvault or in Rubrik, or another one of these new-age unit products. With a single pane, you can manage everything.

If you have to manage your network, it's a different console — It's not easy to manage. They've introduced a Data Protection Center to basically make it easier to manage everything from one console, or at least to report everything on one console which is very good. All the statistics appear, the health and the scheduled services, all of that appears on one screen. Still, to manage it, you have to click and invoke each separate console. If they could just integrate all of that into one console, one HTML Sybase console, then our lives would be much easier. There also needs to be single sign-on support.

We need single sign-on support to access all these different tools instead of having to login individually, which is the current problem — it takes too much effort. You have to go into each one and authenticate separately. You need to enable LDAP authentication for each of these and then proceed to what they need. They don't have role-based access, which is another problem. For example, if you want one person to have less access compared to another person, you can't do that easily.

Management and data analytics could be improved. I would like to see a lot more customizable reports, without coaching professional services regarding the Data Protection Advisor — it's not that simple to do. Also, I'm looking for analytics, for instance, something that tells us about the structure of the data.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for six years.

The support from Dell is exceptionally great. They offer support for almost all of the products on the market — all of the main operating systems, applications, databases, everything. That's a big plus for them.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Dell EMC is definitely one of the top three to four solutions. I'd recommend it because I think the cost of ownership and the return on investment are both extremely good — very low. 

It's very stable, reliable and very fast. The backup center stores information extremely fast, the de-duplication is great. All of this is available under one hood. The complexity is hidden from you. With Dell, everything has been done for you.

Out of the box, it's ready to go, and it's very, very fast. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

The most valuable feature of Avamar would have to be the way it works over needing very little bandwidth to move data across a WAN or LAN.

The interface has room for improvement. It's not ideal right now.

The product needs to have compatibility with more advanced systems such as Oracle ASM files.

The automation and orchestration features need work. Other products like Vain, for example, lend themselves to better automation and orchestration. 

If you want to set up integration with a cloud environment, for example, it's very difficult to do that. Avamar doesn't work very well in the cloud environment.

The solution requires better ease of use and compatibility. It would be ideal if it could work with Oracle on an ISM environment.

There needs to be better iintegration into the public cloud environments. 

It would be better if the cost of the product was less.

I've been using the solution for about ten years now. It's been at least a decade at this point. I've worked with it in various companies as well.

Technical support, from my experience with the vendor, has been good. We're satisfied with the level of service Dell offers. They seem to be knowledgeable and responsive.

I personally have a lot of experience in the space. For example, I've worked with Looker, NetWorker, Commvault, and other competitive technologies, including Dell's own NetWorker.

The initial setup is okay. It's a little complex, however, overall, it's not too bad to implement.

The price of the product could be lower. It's actually probably one of the more expensive products, at least in the enterprise-class. Other technologies are cheaper, and other vendors are adding more features. Therefore, it's falling behind a bit in what other vendors are doing. They need to catch up.

I'm just a customer and don't have a professional relationship with Dell.

Whether or not, I'd advise a new user to implement this product depends on their environment. It's very good. It's a very well distributed environment and it's probably the best product on the market. However, most companies today are engaging in leveraging the cloud, and in that case, my advice to them is to look at other technologies.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it a seven. If it offered better orchestration and cloud capabilities, for example, it would push it up to a nine. A cost reduction in their pricing model would push it up there as well.

It was initially used for remote office, branch office backups, but eventually, it started to be used for small and large data centers.

The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable. 

Its ability to back up very large objects can be improved. In terms of new features, they can include the ability to use cloud services, like S3, more natively.

I have been using this solution for 15 years. 

It has good stability.

It has good scalability, which is a good thing for VMware infrastructures. I see it mostly being used in midsize environments or focused on VMware infrastructure backups. It does a great job there. The negative of this solution is that it certainly wouldn't cover a super large enterprise where they have other tool needs. You probably won't use it for the entire data center or for large Oracle or SQL backups.

I don't interact with them a lot. I would summarize them as being average.

Initially, it was pretty complex to install, but it got easier over the years. It is still not the easiest of all tools to install. It certainly is not as easy to install as Veeam. It is probably comparable to a Commvault in terms of installation difficulty.

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.

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

We deal with data that has compliance requirements for long-term retention, which is like 10 years plus the life of the client. As long as they're in our program, we have to keep anything related to them for that time period, which can run up to 30 years. We deal with all things related to that. I'm a storage management specialist and we are customers of Dell. 

I like that the solution integrates well with the different platforms that we have. Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM. Not all the solutions do that. 

My biggest thing for improvement would be support for either Azure Cool Storage or AWS Glacier. Right now they don't do that. They don't have official works for those peer solutions. It should go hand-in-hand with the solution. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

We've used up the space quicker than intended. We do have some growth available in the existing appliance. We're still in the process of migrating some of that data into the cloud. The big benefit of the cloud is that you can have it stored in disparate data centers that are in different regions of the country and it meets compliance requirements because it's in two physical locations that are apart. So it allows us then to totally remove it from our local copy. I do the deployment and maintenance. 

Technical support has been good, occasionally there are issues with the accents so a lot of times it's better with a chat session or typing messages versus a call. It's a very formalized process. It's virtualized now. So it's a little different than the old two physical boxes.

Moving from old to new was not as smooth as I would have expected, simply because we had to upgrade our local storage. Going forward we won't have those issues. We had just the formats and Avamar supports their own format and stores it locally. They also have the data domain which doesn't really migrate from app bar to data domain so you have to basically hydrate it and then we re-back it up to go on the data bank, which was our issue. They use their ADME product do that migration. Basically, they get their technicians involved and it took several months.

The system was sold on the premise that it was going to reduce man-hours and not require having to work with tape. I don't think it was a cost saving. Now with the cloud tier implemented, there are some long-term benefits, but I don't know if there was ever a cost benefit associated with it. It's just anytime you're having to have a dedicated internet connection or net for just simple tap operations, that's something that adds costs.

The old version didn't have a comprehensive search. It was one of my pain points with the product when it came to restores. That has now been included so I'd recommend this solution with the all-in-one solutions that they have with their data protection units - that's how I'd recommend it be deployed.  

With the DP 4,400 which includes Avamar, data domain search, and backup management, I'd rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for virtual infrastructure.

The duplication is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is actually moving over to a new PowerProtect solution. I'm not sure, in terms of the roadmap, how long they'll have Avamar and NetWorker as they have now launched a new PowerProtect backup solution.

Therefore, the concern really is what the future will be with another product. Will we have to migrate, for example, and will it be easy or hard to do so?

It would be helpful if there was cloud support.

I've been using the solution for about eight years now. It's been a while.

We've been happy with the stability. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy. It's been good.

The scalability is limited right now. A company shouldn't expect to be able to expand it too much. That may be just the case in general for the kind of software it is.

We typically work to size accordingly to avoid having to make upgrades.

The support is okay. They are pretty knowledgable and prompt. I'd rate them seven out of ten overall. We're mostly satisfied with their level of service.

We actually used to use Veritas. We got rid of Veritas Symantec NetBackup because it couldn't do all the deduplication we needed and didn't have all of the features that Avamar has. The support was also very bad. We were happy to switch to something else.

The initial setup is not complex. Implementation is pretty straightforward.

We had Dell assist us a bit in the implementation process.

I'm not sure how to calculate the cost. It's a hard question to answer. I do know that we pay for support upfront for five years.

I'm not sure how to compare costs, however, I can say that based on what we're seeing we get very good deduplication rates with the data domain on the backend.

We did briefly look at another solution, however, we decided not to move forward with it.

We're currently just customers with Dell. We don't have a business relationship with them.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the solution as there's a new solution that will be replacing it. However, it's not a bad solution as it stands.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a pretty decent product.

I recently stopped using this product because my work moved away from operations and I'm now a patents director, so I generally do the designing. My client was looking for backups and for an application along with a desktop backup. We are partners with Dell and I'm the deputy general manager of the company. 

The best feature is the duplication and the speed of backup, which really made the difference for us. 

Everyone is now talking about hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google, so I guess Data Domain and others are coming in a native format, but the pricing is really expensive compared to the rest of the competitors' software. Beam and maybe Commvault are providing cheaper solutions compared to Avamar and Data Domain on software hyperscalers. They should really move to cloud and reduce the price. It's not a portal service, so we have to buy the devices along with it. That was the problem we kept facing in the market.
Nowadays every backup solution has more features compared to this, but I can't think of anything that needs improving in Avamar because it's already an enterprise tool. 

I've used this solution for the past three years. 

The stability is good. 

The scalability is good. 

Dell EMC is pretty good in terms of customer support. We use our own team for maintenance. 

In the  case of Commvault, you should have a drive or your DVD engine, key machines which you have to start because you need to have the ability for the machine. That is the only difference I've seen between Avamar and Commvault. Commvault seems to have the upper hand because of the computation and duplication services. That said, Avamar is used mainly  for enterprise and Commvault is good for SMB and smaller customers.

The initial setup was a bit complicated, it's not a simple setup. There are a lot of challenging networks to deploy. It's not related to the software, it's more from a customer network point of view. The deployment took me about one or two days, not more than that.

If you're enterprise, you are definitely going to use Avamar because it can save a lot of space because of its duplication feature, which is great. Just the backup speed is tremendous compared to other backup solutions. If you're enterprise and having issues with set up, then I'd definitely recommend Avamar.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use this solution for tape backup and data domain. It is an on-premises deployment.

We have a lot of backups, and this tool helps us with the RMAN Backup.

The most valuable feature is D2 and conversion with the Data Domain because other solutions are not able to use the Data Domain.

Integration with VMware is great.

There are limitations when trying to use this solution with Hyper-V. The limitations exist when trying to restore a backup from Hyper-V.

This solution needs to have full integration with Hyper-V, like the way Veeam has. In the hub, the DBA cannot restore the backup directory directly on the host. They have to restore the data disks and then deploy to the VM after this is done.

I would like to see an open-source learning platform for this solution.

This is a very stable solution. We use this product on a daily basis.

I like the scalability this solution has. We have more than fifty severs and more than four hundred VMs. We do not plan to increase usage at this time.

Technical support for this solution was great. They are very quick to respond.

Prior to this solution, we worked with Commvault, Veritas, and Veeam. We still work with multiple vendors for our backup and recovery solution.

The initial setup of this solution is simple. The deployment took a couple of days for the components. There are some steps to perform on the network before everything can be installed.

There are three members that make up our administrative team.

During the implementation, we worked with a partner and it was a good experience.

This solution is less expensive than Veeam for us, although it depends on the customer because we get a great discount.

This is a solution that I recommend, although if you have Hyper-V then I would suggest you use Veeam. Veeam is fully integrated with Hyper-V, and there are more features in Veeam.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We used Dell Avamar for backup and recovery of a virtual environment.

The solution used to freeze sometimes while taking a snapshot backup. The team had to do some back-end work to fix those issues.

I have been using Dell Avamar for a long time.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Dell Avamar an eight out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s technical support is excellent.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup was easy.

The solution’s deployment took around two to three weeks.

Dell Avamar is a moderately priced solution.

We were using Dell Avamar for banking services and different banking applications. Dell Avamar's user interface impacted our backup operation quite well. I rate Dell Avamar an eight out of ten for its performance for our business size.

Dell Avamar is a good product to use. Since there is competition with other products doing a similar or better job, users should evaluate and compare different solutions.

Overall, I rate Dell Avamar an eight out of ten.