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 setup is very easy."
"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."
"All the features in the system are highly valuable."
"The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable."
"The installation of the solution is easy."
"Dell EMC Avamar has many valuable features. It's very stable and it's easy to manage."
"We have seen huge data reduction and data deduplication and compression, which is very cost-effective and cost-reducing for the company."
"We are talking about a complete end-to-end solution which comes with its own hardware storage to back up the data on tape-less."
"The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware."
"For initial setup, we started with the blueprints, which were great. The blueprints allowed us to be able to decide if we needed to use small, medium,k or large. Because we are a large environment, we used a large blueprint. Once we followed everything in the blueprint, it was a smooth transition from there."
"The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container."
"It helps our customers protect their data, especially with stuff like ransomware, compliance, and regulatory requirements."
"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It's a completely centralized solution."
"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."
"IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution."
"Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward."
"The interface could be more helpful for people."
"Setting up Avamar wasn't so easy, and we had a partner doing the installation for us. Though it was hard at first, it's getting better. The main difficulty was finding plugins for Oracle Database. It took some time to open a ticket with Dell, but everything was fine after that."
"The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive."
"The reporting should be improved, as we currently have to use another tool for that purpose."
"Desktop-laptop backups and backup over the WAN needs lot of improvisation. For DTLT there must be a provision to push agents from the management console."
"Some integrations are not in place, such as the email alerts, which are not compatible with Office 365 SMTP gateway."
"The solution is not very strong on the Cloud. They should work out how they can use this as a backup as a service."
"The solution could improve by having better integration and more flexibility."
"I would like to see integration with Copy Data Management, which is an IBM product. Right now, these two products are siloed, so if these two become integrated, the product would become a bit of a powerhouse."
"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."
"Ease of use. That has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers, that it's a little bit more difficult than it should be. What I'm finding is that IBM has heard that and they're responding with updated interfaces and things like that."
"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 cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment."
"I want to see better compression than what it currently does."
"Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities."
"The features should be a little bit closer together."
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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