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.
"Source based deduplication is the most attractive feature as it drastically reduces the backup window."
"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."
"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."
"It's stable and offers good performance."
"The stability of Dell EMC Avamar is very good."
"It's a good solution."
"The solution is easy to use and has high performance."
"I like Dell EMC Avamar's compression of data."
"The deduplication and compression features are the most valuable features."
"With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site."
"Our performance is better."
"Good deduplication and compression features."
"Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates."
"One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"The solution can back up every kind of workload in the environment."
"A benefit would be support for either Azure Cool Storage or AWS Glacier."
"There are limitations when trying to use this solution with Hyper-V."
"The product could offer more integration capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"Setup and deployment of this solution is complex and requires expert engineers."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It's not as good as it could be."
"There also needs to be single sign-on support."
"The solution could be more user-friendly and provide better monitoring. The monitoring should be improved first since it is a higher priority."
"The administration interface should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line and needs improvement in how some reports are created."
"I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"Anytime you are not very current and call in with an issue, it is hard to get it resolved. It will depend on how far back you go though."
"Better integration with other tools and databases is needed."
"We cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment."
"There needs to be a bit more automation."
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.
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.