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 solution integrates well with Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM."
"Dell EMC Avamar is easy to work with and is user-friendly."
"The performance of Dell EMC Avamar is good."
"The solution is easy to use and has high performance."
"We love the instant recovery functionality. It's very useful."
"The most valuable features are scalability and integration."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Data Domain and your VM stacks."
"The stability of Dell EMC Avamar is very good."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"All other products contain the same features, but when I'm backing up an IBM Power server I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor."
"The file-restoring feature is the most valuable."
"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."
"The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable."
"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."
"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."
"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."
"The performance takes up a lot of resources, unfortunately."
"We have had a lot of problems with the Dell EMC Avamar solution. The snapshots are not being erased after backup."
"It would be helpful if the product offered more integration potential."
"The UI is not easy to use. There are other products such as Veeam that are easy to use for the end-user which is why they are moving away from Avamar or Networker."
"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."
"Some customers need to back up to tape, but Avamar lacks support, so it costs a lot."
"It lacks support for certain plugins, like SAP HANA, for example."
"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."
"I think Spectrum Protect's interface is not so user-friendly, but the interface is not so friendly. Some of the functions are too complicated. I prefer a simpler solution."
"If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program."
"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."
"The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect."
"They can include more cloud-enriching features. I would like IBM Spectrum Protect to have the functionality for backing up a VM directly in Azure. I would like to be able to back up a VM directly in Azure without spinning up a Hyper-V cluster and backing up the virtual server."
"We cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment."
"For the database side, it does not have object level recovery."
"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."
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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