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 fast backup and recovery and the Full Backup features are valuable."
"It's stable and offers good performance."
"It is one of the best solutions for backing up Oracle and other servers."
"The entire system operates seamlessly, with minimal hands-on involvement, allowing us to focus on monitoring rather than constant adjustments or deployments, as seen in larger, more dynamic environments."
"It was very simple to deploy the solution to the client that you wanted to backup."
"The stability is okay."
"The performance of Dell EMC Avamar is good."
"Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable."
"Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore."
"You can scale the product."
"It is a very mature product."
"Regarding stability, it's been rock solid."
"IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution."
"It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to."
"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."
"The backup of Sybase databases is the most valuable feature in the existing environment. They have got the most documentation out there on the internet for its software protection. The documentation is excellent, and there are a lot of blogs, websites. Because it's still one of the oldest products out there for data protection, there are also lots of people who have a lot of experience in using this solution."
"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."
"Backup image browse times should be faster."
"It's not the best solution for big databases."
"EMC has discontinued their Avamar hardware version. They only advertise the Avamar virtual edition."
"The initial setup is a bit complex and could be simpler."
"When we used the solution, it was still new, and so the customer service/technical support was not the best."
"A benefit would be support for either Azure Cool Storage or AWS Glacier."
"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."
"Enhancements are required for backing up our virtual environment."
"The solution should have better integration with VMware and with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus."
"There could be various client systems and process integration included in the product."
"Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind."
"The solution's initial setup process wasn't easy...The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market."
"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."
"It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection."
Dell Avamar is ranked 13th 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 7.8, 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 NAKIVO Backup & Replication. See our Dell Avamar vs. IBM Spectrum Protect report.
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