We performed a comparison between Dell Avamar and NetApp SnapCenter based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Backup and Recovery solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The initial setup is easy."
"The deduplication feature is the best aspect of the solution."
"Avamar has long been the best in its class, but that's changing as new solutions emerge. However, Dell has traditionally been a leader in deduplication and compression. Avamar enabled us to shift data from on-premise local appliances to data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure. That's a powerful feature. because customers can back up to the cloud without upgrading o high-capacity links or congesting their backups."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The backup and recovery speed is very fast."
"Its deduplication technologies are the best in the market, currently."
"Dell EMC Avamar has many valuable features. It's very stable and it's easy to manage."
"For the on-prem backup, it has all the necessary features that we require. They keep coming up with new scripts and new updates."
"A feature that stands out is cloning databases. If you have a SQL database and it's huge, like one terabyte, the classical SQL way would be to do a backup-restore to create a clone of your database for test purposes. With SnapCenter now, we can clone a database but through the Snapshot technology, which means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly."
"What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues."
"The way that it interconnects with VMware is really handy, because you can go right into your vSphere client, where you spend a lot of the day anyway, right-click on one of the VMs where you have backups running for however long, and you can restore either some files or restore the entire thing."
"Most banks and financial institutions use the solution."
"The main advantage is its fast backup and restore."
"Technical support has been very helpful when we have issues."
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
"The configuration and expansion aspects of the solution need improvement. They're complicated and don't really integrate well."
"The management of this solution is a little bit difficult for IT administrators. They have to be trained before going through the system."
"The bare-metal restores could be improved."
"The solution used to freeze sometimes while taking a snapshot backup."
"We'd like to see something that could also work with Unix servers and physical servers to have a unified solution that works with everything."
"It was challenging to back up our Exchange database, which is one of the reasons we did not continue using this solution."
"The product could offer more integration capabilities."
"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."
"When you have role-based access, for example, it's a bit of a problem that the person who creates the backup job is the owner of it. We are struggling a bit with this, that everyone has the same view and the same permissions in there."
"My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60... They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times."
"The Microsoft environment is its biggest disadvantage due to the central management of all the actions. Because the SnapCenter server is where we deploy everything, it also affects the Microsoft environment, which can cause many difficulties when resolving issues like Windows update problems."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
"I would like to see replication support between systems. Right now, it's kind of limited. We manage them separately from the storage system interface, not from SnapCenter. It would be nice if it was integrated into SnapCenter."
"There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there."
"Reporting of the jobs could be better."
"The tool could be faster."
Dell Avamar is ranked 12th in Backup and Recovery with 81 reviews while NetApp SnapCenter is ranked 42nd in Backup and Recovery with 24 reviews. Dell Avamar is rated 7.6, while NetApp SnapCenter 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 NetApp SnapCenter writes "A stable solution that is mostly used by banks and financial institutions". 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 NetApp SnapCenter is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Cloud and NetApp Cloud Backup. See our Dell Avamar vs. NetApp SnapCenter report.
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