Dell Avamar Reviews

The primary use case is backup, but in this case, my customers want to offload the Avamar server on tape.

I like Dell EMC Avamar's compression of data.

It's stable and scalable, and I have not had any problems with it.

The initial setup could be a bit simpler.

An offload to tape would be a great additional feature. The audit people ask for data to be put somewhere else in another location to have a gap between backup data and tape, but the Avamar solution only backs up on Avamar store.

I've been using it for about two and a half years.

It's very stable and is the most stable solution I've seen.

It's scalable, and I have not had any problems with it.

The initial setup is a bit complex and could be simpler.

The price is fair.

If the setup is done right, it can be great.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use Dell EMC Avamar for our critical servers backups.

The solution is easy to use and has high performance.

The solution could improve by having better integration and more flexibility.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have hundreds of users using this solution.

There is a license required for this solution.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

The solution is easy to use.

We've found the product to be stable. 

The scalability is there if a company needs to expand it out.

The initial setup is easy and the deployment is fast.

The solution should offer a better data domain.

It would be helpful if the product offered more integration potential.

I've dealt with the solution for three or four years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is quite good. 

The scalability potential is good. If you are a company that needs to scale, you can do so with this product.

We do not have a lot of customers using this solution. Only maybe five to six percent of our customer base uses it.

The technical support is quite good. they are helpful and responsive and we are satisfied with the level of support they provide. 

We did not find the initial setup to be overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

The deployment is fast. You can have everything up and running in three to four hours. 

We have four to five people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance duties. 

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the help of an implementor or consultant. I can do it alone, in-house. 

At this time, we do not pay any licenses to Dell.

We don't have a lot of customers that use the product, however, we are recommending it often.

Our customers are using the latest version of the product, however, I can't speak to the exact version number.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a seven. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. It's worked well for a few of our customers. 

My customer has a huge virtual environment — vCenter and VMware. They need images backed up, they have different workloads like Oracle, SAP, and NetWorker. They have a compliance policy that they have to tape out but Avamar, out of the box, cannot do the tape out. That's why I had to introduce NetWorker into the picture.

Graphically, it's very user interactive. It's got a very nice interface. Compared to NetWorker, although Avamar is more user-friendly, it lacks support for certain plugins, like SAP HANA, for example. In this particular project that I'm working on, they need to back up SAP HANA but Avamar does not support that. Also, regarding compliance, they need to tape out. Avamar does not support that out of the box. 

I have been using this solution for over six years. 

For the project that I am currently working on, I will be using Avamar to migrate their old historical data to the new environment because this new environment is attached to Data Domain. Scalability-wise and stability-wise, I don't see any issues.

I haven't had to contact support as of yet. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's good that Dell EMC provides the virtual additions of these appliances for people to practice beforehand. Otherwise, you might be familiar with a certain version but not understand the subsequent versions. You would never know unless you could get a production set up, which is not possible. You can't go and play with the client setup. For this reason, Dell EMC, like other good vendors, offers virtual additions. Data Domain, NetWorker, Avamar, everything you can practice.

The client has directly bought this solution from another partner. I've been subcontracted for this. I don't know anything about the pricing.

Regarding end-users, I would say stick with disk-based backup. Avamar does it very well with the VMware virtual environments, even Hyper-V for that reason.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell EMC Avamar a rating of seven.

The reason I am giving it a rating of seven is because of the plugin issues and the inability to tape out. Frankly, there are still a lot of clients in this region who need to be in compliance — they need the tape out. It's really a nightmare if you want to tape out with Avamar. There's a way to work around this but you've got to install an ADME node, which is actually a small brother of NetWorker. Still, it's a really painful process.

We use a basic called a DPS. Typically, we are using mostly networkers just to back up most of the workloads, like cellphone audio ware and the connection, et cetera.

The solution is very stable.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

The initial installation is pretty straightforward and quick to set up.

The user interface needs to be improved. It's not as good as it could be.

There are certain bugs in terms of support. It's too slow. It needs to be more responsive.

We've found the product to be a little costly.

I've been likely using the solution for five years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable in terms of performance overall.

We've found the solution scalable. If a company needs to expand the solution, it can do so with relative ease.

We are mostly using it for the server backups, not for the end-users.

We do plan to continue to use the solution.

The technical support isn't as good as it could be. They are rather slow to respond. They should work towards getting their support staff to be more responsive to clients when they have queries. We're not overly satisfied with the level of support provided to our organization.

We did not the initial setup to be overly complex. It's pretty straightforward and relatively easy to deploy. The deployment process itself is fast and only takes a few hours.

We only needed a product manager that handled the implementation and can handle any maintenance required.

We did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant during our implementation process. We handled it ourselves in-house.

The solution is a bit expensive.

We are Avamar partners.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

The primary use case of this solution was for projects to backup customer laptops for the application capabilities.

The product could be easier to troubleshoot. When I had a problem with the software, I invested a lot of time to find out what the problem was. Once I found the problem, I realized that it was a simple solution, but there were no helpful indications.

As an example, with Avamar, you have a different storage node and if one of these nodes had a problem with an NTP server and there was a different time on the node, nothing would work. Finding the solution to this problem involved many steps, which was not easy to determine.

I have been using the solution for 5 or 6 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, but I prefer a solution like NetBackup when I am networking.

When we used the solution, it was still new, and so the customer service/technical support was not the best.

The installation of the solution is easy.

The cost of the solution is very expensive.

In a data center, the entire workloads are virtualized, and they are backing up the content, and sometimes because of bandwidth, operations need to be backed up quickly. In that kind of scenario, this source site replication is very supportive. Avamar evaluates the data that's already backed up, and only the chain blocks can be transferred via the network. There won't be any heavy network traffic, and the time it takes to backup is quick and within the window.

On the client-side, we can also backup clients with Avamar. These days with the pandemic, most of them work from home, and we're using less network bandwidth to backup end user transfers.

The source site replication feature is valuable. 

It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms. I would like to see better integration with VMware vCenter. We normally integrate Avamar with VMware vCenter Server and virtualize Avamar within the VM. Once, we wanted to backup only a few VMs within the vCenter, without integrating it to the vCenter. But we come across some problems. Without adding the vCenter directly, there was some difficulty in adding the VMs. When we replaced more clients in the OS, this problem was solved.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for three years.

Dell EMC Avamar is stable so far. As we have worked with software engineers trained to use this product, they can configure and provide support on their own.

Dell EMC Avamar is a scalable solution.

Support is okay. We don't use it frequently as our engineers can manage well. Only when they can't handle a problem, they call support. We also use technical sites and the web portal, and these help our engineers capably handle day to day requirements.

The initial setup isn't complex. Because the engineers are trained, they're familiar with the product and can do this implementation.

The implementation time depends on the data center. The issues we face are mainly on the network. For example, sometimes, their policies on implementing the communication between the servers lead to some downtime. Other than that, we can implement Dell EMC Avamar between two-three days.

We implemented Dell EMC Avamar ourselves, in-house.

It was very expensive before, but after integrating it with Dell EMC Avamar Data Protection suite licensing, we are getting better discounts.

I always see improvements on the Avamar side, and we are happy with that. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell EMC Avamar a ten.

We are system integrators who are selling backup solutions, and Dell EMC Avamar is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

I had come across it for backing up laptops and VMware but previously, I have had clients using it to backup system machines like AIX, Solaris, and others. Slowly, people are moving away from those.

Using Avamar for VM backup is pretty good, but we've used it for other purposes as well.

It works quickly and is very stable.

The screen design is a bit back-dated.

The reports are not very presentable.

The price of this product should be lower.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for a few years.

This is a very stable product.

Avamar is quite scalable.

With respect to technical support, sometimes you get a good technician or a good engineer, and you can get the problem resolved pretty fast. If on the other hand, you get someone with a very heavy accent then you can speak for three hours and not understand what the other is trying to say.

We work with quite a number of backup products including Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Backup Exec, Dell EMC Networker, Dell EMC Avamar, and Rubrick.

The choice of product that I recommend depends on the situation and what the customer is saying. If they are not happy with one then I can suggest others that are good, too.

If my customer is already using an existing product then I will not recommend that they switch unless there are serious problems. If there is some heavy restructuring, for instance, because a previous person knew the environment very well, it will be difficult to take over. It is best if they have something very simple to manage.

In general, it is not easy to switch from one backup platform to another because of incompatibility.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Dell EMC Avamar is that it's always good to have a plan first. You want to know exactly what you have on-hand that you need to back up.

Overall, this is a good product. The stability and backup speed are very good but the GUI and reports are not something that a new user can get used to.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.