We compared Dell Avamar and IBM Spectrum Protect based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Dell Avamar earns acclaim for its scalability, data compression capabilities, swift incremental backups, and seamless integration with Data Domain and VM stacks. IBM Spectrum Protect is highly regarded for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users also praised Spectrum Protect for its compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. Dell Avamar could improve its tape connectivity and bare-metal restoration. Users also requested better Azure backups and a more user-friendly interface. IBM Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly.
Service and Support: Some customers express satisfaction with Dell support, but others said there is room for improvement. IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy.
Ease of Deployment: Opinions on Dell Avamar’s setup were mixed. Some users found it to be straightforward, while others considered it complex and difficult. Deployment time ranged from a few hours to a week, and assistance from Dell engineers might be necessary. IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming.
Pricing: Dell Avamar’s pricing is generally seen as reasonable, but some users think it is expensive. IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume.
ROI: Dell Avamar provides cost savings through data reduction, deduplication, and compression. Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes.
Comparison Results: Dell Avamar is a scalable solution that offers excellent data compression and fast compression. However, Avamar earned mixed reviews for support, deployment, and pricing. Users also requested better Azure and bare-metal backups and restoration capabilities. IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud.
"Every product is good and bad, but its claim to fame is that it is scalable. We're doing more than 3,000 VMs. Every single night a complete image backup to disks and replication are easily done in under four hours."
"The solution integrates well with Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM."
"The most valuable feature is the virtual backup."
"The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable."
"It's simple to configure."
"The setup is very easy."
"I like Dell EMC Avamar's compression of data."
"The stability is okay."
"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."
"The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container."
"The platform has valuable stability."
"Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore."
"A robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical."
"Good user interface."
"The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy."
"They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system."
"It's not the best solution for big databases."
"The product could be improved by simplifying the components available."
"Backup image browse times should be faster."
"The configuration and expansion aspects of the solution need improvement. They're complicated and don't really integrate well."
"It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms."
"The reporting should be improved, as we currently have to use another tool for that purpose."
"Dell hasn't done a good job at handling these upgrades, or the way EMC used to handle them."
"The management of this solution is a little bit difficult for IT administrators. They have to be trained before going through the system."
"Our new leadership has pushed us to go more toward the cloud, so we are definitely going to leverage anything we can in that direction."
"We have run into some periods where we have found some tape issues which were causing us problems, but we resolved them. For some reason, we had a bunch of drives go offline on our disk storage (our virtual library)."
"Although I am not a technical user, I would say the cloud integration features could be improved."
"Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind."
"If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program."
"The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface."
"The Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies."
"We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away."
Dell Avamar is ranked 12th in Backup and Recovery with 81 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews. Dell Avamar is rated 7.6, while IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Dell Avamar writes "Stable, integrates well with other solutions, and has a good price, but its UI needs a refresh". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". Dell Avamar is most compared with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell NetWorker, Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), whereas IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Cohesity DataProtect and Iron Mountain Connect. See our Dell Avamar vs. IBM Spectrum Protect report.
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