Dell Avamar Reviews

Our use case for this solution is robust and involves backing up various systems.

The solution is very user-friendly.

The product could be improved by simplifying the components available. Currently, there are many endpoints and GUIs to run.

We have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is scalable. Currently, only three employees utilize the solution in our organization, and thousands of clients use it.

The initial setup was complex. It took about a week to complete the deployment, and we required an engineer to assist.

The solution costs approximately 20,000 annually.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Dell EMC Avamar is a very complex product. It took a lot of time for the IT admins to get trained on how to use it. It is not very user-friendly, and we won't be using Avamar anymore.

It needs a lot of improvement in terms of how the backups have been configured, and the reporting is too complex. There are a lot of improvements that should be done in the reporting feature and how the endpoints are getting added to the console. These processes need to be a little more simplified. It is not that easy to get an immediate report based on our requirements. It is too complex. We have to write some scripts and things like that. There are predefined scripts, but they aren't very user-friendly for the customer.

We have been using this product for more than six years.

The stability is okay.

If you want to scale up again, you have to buy a complete appliance. There is no option for just scaling up for the mid-phase entities. Only the larger entities would be able to afford that kind of complete appliance scalability. In terms of scalability, I'm not a fan of Avamar.

We haven't used Veeam before, but we are currently replacing Avamar with Veeam now. We are still in the process of switching.

The cost is high.

I would rate this product 5 out of 10.

We use it as a backup and restore solution for our customers. For replication, we use the Data Domain application. We replicate from our primary site to the DR site.

Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable.

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.

It should be simplified because currently if we want to upgrade Avamar, it requires us to assemble too many EMC products. For upgrade, we have to ensure compatibility with Data Domain, proxy, and firmware for storage. There are many dependencies and many steps that we have to take if we want to upgrade the services, which is a weakness of Avamar.

It should also have support for reporting. We have too many reporting challenges. We cannot get information from the console about how big is the data of customer A, customer B, and customer C. EMC should think about providing reporting for the backup solution. Our customers use the basic reporting, but inside our infrastructure, we should be able to see and then analyze the data consumption by different customers. We should also be able to split information and see data consumption within our organization. Such analytical reporting will help us in planning our usage for the future, such as for the next two years. It will be useful for customers and service providers.

Its price should be reduced, and it should have a flexible and pay-per-use licensing.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is stable.

We have had their tech support until now. There is no problem with their tech support. They provide good support.

Its initial setup is complex. 

Its price should be reduced. It would be good if you could pay as per usage, and there is a subscription model like VMware. There should be some flexibility because sometimes, the customer only uses the backup for one month or three months. Currently, I have to pay whether I use it or not. Its licensing should be flexible and based on consumption. 

Currently, we are evaluating Veeam to see if it is possible to switch to Veeam. Veeam has an issue of deduplication failure. With Avamar, we use Data Domain, and the deduplication ratio is 26 or 25 times, whereas, with Veeam, the ratio is only half. We are thinking of using Avamar for archive backup and using Veeam for short retention.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

I recently stopped using this product because my work moved away from operations and I'm now a patents director, so I generally do the designing. My client was looking for backups and for an application along with a desktop backup. We are partners with Dell and I'm the deputy general manager of the company. 

The best feature is the duplication and the speed of backup, which really made the difference for us. 

Everyone is now talking about hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google, so I guess Data Domain and others are coming in a native format, but the pricing is really expensive compared to the rest of the competitors' software. Beam and maybe Commvault are providing cheaper solutions compared to Avamar and Data Domain on software hyperscalers. They should really move to cloud and reduce the price. It's not a portal service, so we have to buy the devices along with it. That was the problem we kept facing in the market.
Nowadays every backup solution has more features compared to this, but I can't think of anything that needs improving in Avamar because it's already an enterprise tool. 

I've used this solution for the past three years. 

The stability is good. 

The scalability is good. 

Dell EMC is pretty good in terms of customer support. We use our own team for maintenance. 

In the  case of Commvault, you should have a drive or your DVD engine, key machines which you have to start because you need to have the ability for the machine. That is the only difference I've seen between Avamar and Commvault. Commvault seems to have the upper hand because of the computation and duplication services. That said, Avamar is used mainly  for enterprise and Commvault is good for SMB and smaller customers.

The initial setup was a bit complicated, it's not a simple setup. There are a lot of challenging networks to deploy. It's not related to the software, it's more from a customer network point of view. The deployment took me about one or two days, not more than that.

If you're enterprise, you are definitely going to use Avamar because it can save a lot of space because of its duplication feature, which is great. Just the backup speed is tremendous compared to other backup solutions. If you're enterprise and having issues with set up, then I'd definitely recommend Avamar.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Dell transformed disk-based backups. Basically, we moved from tape to disk-based backups. We moved from IBM PSM on tape, to Dell-based backups using an appliance. These appliances are purpose-built backup appliances. Avamar and DataDomain are both purpose-built and they are extremely popular — soon to be number one in the backup appliance market. Avamar is associated with compliance, and DataDomain is more of our target. They are extremely reliable and scalable — they provide the best de-duplication on the market. They are very easy to use, set up, and manage. 

They have come up with Data Protection Central. We have multiple different management layers. For each product, we have a different management interface, so if they could merge all of them into one single-pane view of management, that would be extraordinary. Technically, they've done that but it's still not a single-pane view like in Commvault or in Rubrik, or another one of these new-age unit products. With a single pane, you can manage everything.

If you have to manage your network, it's a different console — It's not easy to manage. They've introduced a Data Protection Center to basically make it easier to manage everything from one console, or at least to report everything on one console which is very good. All the statistics appear, the health and the scheduled services, all of that appears on one screen. Still, to manage it, you have to click and invoke each separate console. If they could just integrate all of that into one console, one HTML Sybase console, then our lives would be much easier. There also needs to be single sign-on support.

We need single sign-on support to access all these different tools instead of having to login individually, which is the current problem — it takes too much effort. You have to go into each one and authenticate separately. You need to enable LDAP authentication for each of these and then proceed to what they need. They don't have role-based access, which is another problem. For example, if you want one person to have less access compared to another person, you can't do that easily.

Management and data analytics could be improved. I would like to see a lot more customizable reports, without coaching professional services regarding the Data Protection Advisor — it's not that simple to do. Also, I'm looking for analytics, for instance, something that tells us about the structure of the data.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for six years.

The support from Dell is exceptionally great. They offer support for almost all of the products on the market — all of the main operating systems, applications, databases, everything. That's a big plus for them.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Dell EMC is definitely one of the top three to four solutions. I'd recommend it because I think the cost of ownership and the return on investment are both extremely good — very low. 

It's very stable, reliable and very fast. The backup center stores information extremely fast, the de-duplication is great. All of this is available under one hood. The complexity is hidden from you. With Dell, everything has been done for you.

Out of the box, it's ready to go, and it's very, very fast. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

We deal with data that has compliance requirements for long-term retention, which is like 10 years plus the life of the client. As long as they're in our program, we have to keep anything related to them for that time period, which can run up to 30 years. We deal with all things related to that. I'm a storage management specialist and we are customers of Dell. 

I like that the solution integrates well with the different platforms that we have. Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM. Not all the solutions do that. 

My biggest thing for improvement would be support for either Azure Cool Storage or AWS Glacier. Right now they don't do that. They don't have official works for those peer solutions. It should go hand-in-hand with the solution. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

We've used up the space quicker than intended. We do have some growth available in the existing appliance. We're still in the process of migrating some of that data into the cloud. The big benefit of the cloud is that you can have it stored in disparate data centers that are in different regions of the country and it meets compliance requirements because it's in two physical locations that are apart. So it allows us then to totally remove it from our local copy. I do the deployment and maintenance. 

Technical support has been good, occasionally there are issues with the accents so a lot of times it's better with a chat session or typing messages versus a call. It's a very formalized process. It's virtualized now. So it's a little different than the old two physical boxes.

Moving from old to new was not as smooth as I would have expected, simply because we had to upgrade our local storage. Going forward we won't have those issues. We had just the formats and Avamar supports their own format and stores it locally. They also have the data domain which doesn't really migrate from app bar to data domain so you have to basically hydrate it and then we re-back it up to go on the data bank, which was our issue. They use their ADME product do that migration. Basically, they get their technicians involved and it took several months.

The system was sold on the premise that it was going to reduce man-hours and not require having to work with tape. I don't think it was a cost saving. Now with the cloud tier implemented, there are some long-term benefits, but I don't know if there was ever a cost benefit associated with it. It's just anytime you're having to have a dedicated internet connection or net for just simple tap operations, that's something that adds costs.

The old version didn't have a comprehensive search. It was one of my pain points with the product when it came to restores. That has now been included so I'd recommend this solution with the all-in-one solutions that they have with their data protection units - that's how I'd recommend it be deployed.  

With the DP 4,400 which includes Avamar, data domain search, and backup management, I'd rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution as a backup. Avamar is used to back up our production workloads. Production workloads include Oracle, EBS, SharePoint, file and print service, other application services.

The stability is good. We have found that the performance is excellent.

The product is easy to use.

The installation process is pretty straightforward. 

The solution could be a bit easier to use in the sense that they need to make it simpler to backup products and restore items.

I've been using the solution for more than three years. 

The solution is very stable and the performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Whether or not we will scale the solution depends on the business. If we have a requirement to do so, then definitely we'll expand it. If there will be year-over-year growth and if it will be 10%, we're likely to expand and will need to scale.

If you need to add more capacity, you will need to pay for it.

The installation process is straightforward. That said, it would require an engineer from Dell to do it. We ourselves cannot do it. We don't have the knowledge necessary.

We needed two engineers to handle deployment. 

Installation was quite fast. It took about four to five hours. After that, the configuration and other policies, that took about two days.

We had Dell assist us with the implementation process. 

This is a capacity-based license, it's a one-time payment.

In order to increase capacity, you need to pay more. You also can expect more maintenance.

The pricing of the product seems to be less expensive than other options, however, I can't speak to the exact cost of the product.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

This product is for production users. We do not backup user backups; it's only for the production workload.