Dell Avamar vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Dell Technologies Logo
12,632 views|8,894 comparisons
IBM Logo
7,719 views|5,477 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 20, 2023

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Avamar vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution is very stable.""The solution is easy to use and has high performance.""The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable.""It's stable and offers good performance.""The product has a proven track record of good backups without much of a failure ratio. It also has a good backup in terms of the compression ratio.""It is one of the best solutions for backing up Oracle and other servers.""We've found the product to be stable.""Centralization is Avamar's biggest advantage. It moves data to a central location from various geographical locations."

More Dell Avamar Pros →

"It is a very stable product. The cost is similar to that of other enterprise solutions.""Scalability is pretty much unlimited.""The best part of this solution is that it just works.""The solution is mostly stable.""High availability (HA): It is one of the best features.""The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature.""The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup.""What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines."

More IBM Spectrum Protect Pros →

Cons
"It would be helpful if the product offered more integration potential.""The challenges we do face typically revolve around aligning specific features with our accustomed tool usage.""The solution should improve its tape-connectivity features.""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.""Avamar is not the best tool when it comes to taking Azure backups. Like Commvault, if Avamar can support VM-level backups for the cloud, that would make it a bit better.""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 support is very bad.""It was challenging to back up our Exchange database, which is one of the reasons we did not continue using this solution."

More Dell Avamar Cons →

"I need two separate solutions for virtual and physical systems. I need IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for virtual systems and Spectrum Protect for physical systems and that's a pain. It would be an improvement if they were combined.""The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure.""It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts.""Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business.""This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment.""Ease of use.""RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us.""The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."

More IBM Spectrum Protect Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It is very expensive. It's a trust based licensing. So that's an ethical challenge."
  • "This solution is less expensive than Veeam for us, although it depends on the customer because we get a great discount."
  • "I'm not sure, but perhaps the pricing could be done better at the moment."
  • "The price is the main thing I'd like to see them change. If they can come down in price, that would be a good thing. It's very cost competitive in the entry level range, because Veeam pricing is much cheaper than Avamar."
  • "It was approximately $70-80,000 when it was under support, but right now EMC has not been supporting this product for two years."
  • "Licensing was generally on a per VM or terabyte basis. They changed their licensing model a couple of times and turned it into socket-based licensing, which is an improvement in their licensing model."
  • "When it comes to competition the price is not what is important, it's not the problem."
  • "The price of this product should be lower."
  • More Dell Avamar Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it."
  • "Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
  • "At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."
  • "Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."
  • "We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
  • "We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."
  • "Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."
  • "It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
  • More IBM Spectrum Protect Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly… more »
    Top Answer:It's stable and offers good performance.
    Top Answer:The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a six to seven out of ten.
    Top Answer:The platform’s most valuable feature is its ability to verify the recoverability of backups.
    Top Answer:The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.
    Top Answer:The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement. There could be an agent-less backup and recovery mechanism. In the next release, I would recommend the inclusion of a… more »
    Ranking
    13th
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    12,632
    Comparisons
    8,894
    Reviews
    21
    Average Words per Review
    467
    Rating
    7.6
    17th
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    7,719
    Comparisons
    5,477
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    522
    Rating
    7.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Avamar
    IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
    Learn More
    Overview

    Dell Avamar data protection software delivers flexible and efficient backup and recovery operations that can scale from daily backup protection for endpoints to high-performance protection for large enterprises with diverse applications and workloads. With application consistent recovery, automation and fast backup and restores, Avamar can help you meet your SLAs and optimize your backup and recovery processes

    If you are deploying all or part of your backup environment to the cloud, Avamar enables you to make the most of your cloud investment, enabling replication, disaster recovery and long-term retention for customers using AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

    Avamar is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. Avamar is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

    IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.
    Sample Customers
    Dodge County, St Laurence's College, FieldCore (a GE Company), Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Getronics, Lewisville Independent School District, EnvisionRxOptions, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions
    CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Retailer13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company13%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Insurance Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Retailer8%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise62%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell Avamar vs. IBM Spectrum Protect
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Avamar vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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.

    See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.

    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.