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.
"Effective in protecting the virtualization system and end points."
"So far, Avamar covers everything we want. We are replicating to other sites for disaster recovery, so it's working well for us."
"The most valuable feature is the virtual backup."
"Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable."
"Quick incremental backups and product replication are the two highlights of the product. Once you capture a full backup, incrementals are pretty quick. It is fairly efficient from that perspective."
"We sell Avamar with Data Domain. Data Domain and Avamar work really well together and their compression ratios are very high compared to Veeam, Commvault, and all the other backup software on the market."
"Easy to configure and highly reliable for backup."
"We've found the product to be stable."
"We can freeze and start databases for consistent backups."
"Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression."
"The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature."
"This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery."
"We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place."
"We have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis."
"Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it."
"You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk."
"Avamar is still competitive because of the way we have deployed it, but we need to diversify and shift away from specific technologies. In addition to hypervisors, virtual machines, and bare metal servers, our customers need protection for Microsoft 365, SaaS, and the public cloud, so we need other technologies in the business to cater to those customers' needs. Those are the enhancements we would want from the Avamar platform, but that's not likely to happen. Dell has PowerProtect and Apex backup services. There are other Dell solutions that we'll use to fulfill our customers' requirements."
"The product could be improved by simplifying the components available."
"Avamar is dependent on the hardware. It can't be implemented with ordinary storage. It can only be implemented with an EMC product. We want to have a backup solution that allows us to use independent storage and other hardware. It would be good if they can simplify its technology and make it possible to implement it with another storage. This is probably not possible because Avamar is an EMC product, and EMC would like to sell its own products."
"Backup image browse times should be faster."
"It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms."
"It would be helpful if there was cloud support."
"The challenges we do face typically revolve around aligning specific features with our accustomed tool usage."
"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."
"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."
"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."
"Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past."
"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."
"We are still using TSM Manager for many of our projects to administer our platform because the gap was not resolved with the new Operations Center."
"This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment."
"Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures."
"They need to do a better job on Windows, because if you are running Windows, the scalability is more limited than AIX and Linux."
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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