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.
"The solution is easy to use and has high performance."
"They are extremely reliable and scalable — they provide the best de-duplication on the market."
"It works quickly and is very stable."
"We've found the product to be stable."
"Client deduplication."
"Its deduplication technologies are the best in the market, currently."
"Stable and scalable backup and recovery software, with good technical support."
"Dell Avamar has helped our organization by allowing us to do backups."
"The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy."
"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."
"With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups."
"Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them."
"It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps."
"The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers. They have been able to do this within the product."
"The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication."
"We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues."
"The solution used to freeze sometimes while taking a snapshot backup."
"The product could be improved by simplifying the components available."
"Some integrations are not in place, such as the email alerts, which are not compatible with Office 365 SMTP gateway."
"It would be helpful if the product offered more integration potential."
"It would be helpful if there was cloud support."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It's not as good as it could be."
"Dell Avamar could improve by adding more backup features."
"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."
"It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection."
"I find the Level 1 and Level 2 support spend 80% of the time communicating the same information that I have already provided."
"I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use."
"I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs."
"There have been scalability issues. The core product does not support scale out. We needed to create a new system and manage resources separate from the existing one."
"The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial."
"We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack."
"For the database side, it does not have object level recovery."
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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