Dell EMC Avamar Reviews

It is a backup solution. So, we do daily backups of around 3,000 VMware guests. That is normally just an image backup where it goes to the VMware API, backs up the image file, and then puts it on the backend to Avamar into Data Domain. It has a specialized storage system that does dedupe and compression, so we can get more on a single disk array. We have more than one site. We have a primary site and a secondary site.

At the Data Domain level, we replicate site to site every backup every day so that we have the availability in our secondary site for every VM. The replication is done with the architecture of the Data Domain itself. 

We have the rapid recovery solution that allows you to stand up any box at either location and have it come up online within just a minute or two. That's done via NFS. It becomes a data store into VMware, and then you vMotion it out. So, it has got rapid recovery at both locations as well.

We are using its newest version. We keep it up to date.

There are occasions where we have a problem with the system, and we can either try to fix it or recover it. With rapid recovery, we can get the system operational where people can get access to it in less than 10 minutes. So, we can have a problem with a system, and instead of messing around with it, we can bring up the copy. If it is a system that doesn't allow you to have a lot of daily change rate in the data, we can bring up yesterday's copy or last night's copy and have it up and running online in less than 10 minutes.

Every product is good and bad, but its claim to fame is that it is scalable. We're doing more than 3,000 VMs. Every single night a complete image backup to disks and replication are easily done in under four hours.

It is stable, and it ties very well with VMware API. If you've got VMware in-house, it is a very solid product.

It is very scalable, and that's its claim to fame, but that also makes it hard to make changes. Anytime there is a large piece of software, changing that piece of software is harder. You've got a larger install base, so you can't just rapidly change. We also use another product called Veeam, and it has this new feature called Continuous Data Protection, which basically lets you get very close to the way the system was in time. We have a system or two up there on which we have set 10 minutes Continuous Data Protection. So, we can roll it back to whatever it was 10 minutes ago, 20 minutes ago, or 30 minutes ago. This feature doesn't exist in Avamar Data Domain. That's the one feature I'd like to see first.

It can maybe have customized automatic routing. We have a Cisco ACI network. It is like a point-to-point network for everything, even multiple locations. It is flat, and that confuses Avamar Data Domain because it changes underneath Data Domain. It has some problems. They could do a little bit more on having an adaptable network or what's called a dynamic route network where it can be given a route and not care about it, as opposed to having to predefine it.

It has been in this shop for seven years.

It is very stable.

It is unlimited. Basically, it is great.

Being a backup solution, there are no users. We have the backup administrators to operate it, and if a user or a system administrator makes a request for our system, we restore that for them, but there are no users on it, per se. For our three locations, we have one backup administrator. Oklahoma City has two physical locations, and we have one location in LA.

It is currently being used extensively. We're going to the system as a software model where basically everything is deployed like the Kubernetes model. You basically have a few systems, and then everything is layered on top of it. It is sort of like a hypervisor but without the hypervisor layer. If we truly go that way, we'll probably have to go for a different backup solution that manages that better. We're testing that right now, and we're not sure how it's going to work for our shop, but that's what we're looking at.

I have interacted with them several times. We've had problems where we've got to have their help. They're average. It takes a while to get to the guy who knows what he's doing, but they've got support 24/7. You can call anytime day or night. So, they're average or a little better.

We used to use HP Data Protector. It was a nice product. It was an old-school kind of roll the tape, and we don't do tapes. We used Data Protector directly to tape. That was a nice product for physical boxes if you had a few. At that point, we had 200 or 300 physical boxes, and we backed them up. It took about a 10-hour cycle from about the time we quit work to about the next morning. We would run through this whole cycle and get that done.

It was complex. You have to have proxies. You can't just have one piece of hardware to back up all the systems in two facilities. You have to deploy proxy servers to every single VMware cluster. We've backup on a private backup network that had to be configured because we fundamentally do web service and financial targets out front, and we didn't want it to cramp that network. So, it is not simple; it is complex.

To do the primary site, it took very long. At that point, we were doing physical and virtual machines. We had some HPX physical, and we also had a mini mainframe seven years ago. It probably took a solid week to get it installed and get it completely operational. There were a few more details to it, but basically, we were up and running within about a week, but it is not going to happen in a day.

The first time we deployed it, they came out and set it up like a demo or a proof of concept. We took the model that they provided in that proof of concept, and we installed it ourselves, but we did have a proof of concept before we ever bought it. It was in-house for 90 days, and it included one Avamar, one Data Domain, and a couple of proxies in one of our clusters.

I had to mash a vendor. EMC is out to make money, and then they want to capitalize their ability to make money. That's not necessarily a negative thing in the business world, but I don't care for a lot of that. Once a product is in-house, I want to talk technical, and they technically knew what was going on. They were good and very professional. They knew their products.

Its licensing is weird. It is not just the licenses; we also purchase hardware. With most software products, such as Veeam, Commvault, and Data Protector, there is no hardware purchase at the same time. Because Avamar and Data Domain are tied together, they have an integrated pipe. You can separate them, but basically, they're designed to work as a couple. Because the Data Domain backend is designed to do dedupe and compression, we get 60:1. When you count it, you count it as a straight compression, but of course, that's with dedupe and some other stuff. You have to buy the hardware, the licensing, and the software at the same time. So, it's not just software.

It is expensive. The maintenance comes with it for five years. So, you buy the whole thing for five years, and your maintenance is included with it, but it's a big chunk of change upfront. We like capital expenses because we can CapEx them. We pay once every five years, so we spend a big chunk of change. You'd have to divide that out by the five years to come up with how much it costs. It's just about three-quarters of a million dollars for five years.

Be sure it is what you need. We bought it simply because we're a VMware shop, and we knew we were going to grow that particular core from our business and discontinue using physical hardware altogether. If that's a model that you're doing, it's a nice product. If it's not, you don't need it. 

I would also upfront negotiate the licensing model with them so that you know what to expect before you get into it. What we did not do is buy the cloud extension or an archive solution, and that is now becoming a fairly predominant piece of the pie that we don't have any licensing for. So, make sure it fits your environment, and you get the pieces that we didn't—the more modern archive and cloud control—so that you can have part of your environment out in the cloud. Many people are doing that. We're doing that. We just don't back it up that way.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar an eight out of 10 simply because it is stable. It does a very good job of tying into the VMware API. EMC owns VMware, so they are more or less the same company. So, they're not going to make a change in VMware that adversely affects their software products. I've got to give it an eight just for that. 

It is our main backup system while we're in the middle of switching over to Cohesity.

Scheduling is valuable. It does a good job of backing up, and it does a good job of restoring. Nobody has got a problem with that. The agents are well supported. 

In terms of functionality, it is rock solid. It does its job.

The UI is a complete mess. It is graphic, but it might as well be a CLI considering how difficult it is to work with. It takes an entire person and a significant amount of time to manage backups within the company. It really shouldn't be that hard.

When you get down to doing certain things, such as somebody wants a particular file restored, the process by which you do that is stupid. You kind of have to know exactly where to look for in order to find it. Even on older backup products that I've used, I didn't have that kind of problem. If we were looking for a file with a particular kind of a name, the solution would find that file anywhere irrespective of where it resides within the backup system. So, we didn't have to know the name of the specific server, the specific timeframe, almost all the characters of the file name, and all kinds of data in order to find a file. In Avamar, we got to know these details. We've gone around and around with them on that, and their attitude seems to be that it is working just fine. There is nothing for them to improve. The organizational system of other products that I'm working with, such as Zerto and Cohesity, seems to be centered around the tasks that you would most commonly do and want to do, as opposed to we've laid it out in a really neat technical hierarchy. 

There should be some kind of greater granularity in the way it is storing backups. The reason why we're using things like Zerto and going to Cohesity, at least in the DR environment, and this will work in terms of backups as well, is that we need to be able to have a recovery point objective with some kind of granularity, such as every 15 minutes, every half hour, or every hour in case of a disaster recovery scenario, ransomware scenario, etc. We're pretty much allowed to do our once-in-a-day backup every 24 hours or however we schedule them. In most cases, we don't do anything different for basic backups, but it seems very difficult within Avamar to do anything if we want to have an image of a system every so often or at least an incremental point of reference or an RPO point. 

The other thing is that the way that it locks files seems to make those systems unavailable while it is operating the backup. So, we have to very carefully schedule our backups after hours or over periods of time when there is low bandwidth of the transactions happening. With the other products we have, we don't have this problem. I certainly don't have that problem with Zerto. I've got a recovery point of every few seconds, and it doesn't seem to take a lot of storage room to do that. Storage is a big thing for us. It is very expensive, and that's always an issue for us. So, things like deduplication would be really nice to have.

I have been using this solution for at least six years.

It is rock solid. We don't ever have any problems with backups being lost or anything like that.

All of the data in the company is used by one person or another, so there are a couple of thousand users.

Their technical support is excellent. We've never had any problem dealing with Avamar in terms of technical support. We've had some nasty instances too where they've not been able to drill down on things and support their own product.

I've only been with the company for about five years, and it was present when I came on board.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a six out of 10. It is a pretty basic backup system in terms of features. It does its job. However, its UI is just ridiculous.

I'm using the solution for our entire daily data backup for laptops and desktops. We also use it for some of our virtual machines and some of our databases systems.

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. 

Overall, my experience with Avamar is very good.

Technical support has been helpful.

The performance of the solution is excellent.

The product scales easily.

The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive. 

The reporting aspect of the product could be better. For example, I'd like to have reports on the daily failure of systems. If I have more than 1000 systems, if I want to know that how many systems failed yesterday, I'd like to be able to pull that information in a single click.  

I've been using the solution for the past ten years.

I'm very happy with this product and the performance of this product is good. For the purposes of backups and restoring, it is very smooth and proven for the last 10 years. The failure rate is low. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

While, on the admin side, we have two to three people as administrators for Avamar. However, in the case of how many systems are to be backed up through Avamar, it's around 1,000 or more.

Right now, the current product is Dell DP4400 and it's a very scalable product. I have purchased the license for 8 TB only, however, the box itself already comes with a 64 TB hard disk. At any point, we can increase it. We just have to put in a license and we can increase it very easily.

We use the solution on a daily basis. 

Technical support is good. I get support in a timely manner. Since our last installation, which was in March, we have just logged two calls and both were closed in a very timely manner. We are quite satisfied with the support.

In the past, we've used Arcserve and Commvault.

In terms of differences, Arcserve and Commvault, are both Windows-based systems. They do not have their own hardware, which means that they are only software-based backups. It's your own decision in terms of which type of hardware you want.

There is nothing like a complete product with these two options. You are buying software from the vendors, and then you have to buy the hardware from another vendor. The issue is, when you need support, sometimes the software vendors tell you that problem is with hardware and the hardware vendors tell you that problem is with software. That can become an issue.

Also, due to the fact that both are Windows-based systems, there are some performance-based issues. I found that the Avamar system is better than Arcserve and Commvault for these reasons.

The initial setup is somewhere in between straightforward and difficult. 

The deployment takes between four and six hours. 

The maintenance required is quite minimal. It's based on a Linux setup, which makes it pretty easy.

I have set up the solution with an expert from Dell. With the help of an expert from Dell, the setup is straightforward.

The pricing of the solution is okay.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. It's an iteration of version 17.

I'm very happy with this product. I recommend it to everyone who is searching for any complete backup for an entire infrastructure, for example, for a virtual server, a database server, or a laptop or desktop. This is a single product that can handle a complete infrastructure backup. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use Avamar for all of our backup and data management solutions in our co-location facility. I have two co-location facilities with one in Carrollton, Texas, and one in Austin. 

I have data domains, Avamar platforms, and Avamar software that we use across our enterprise. 

I manage a global technology team and a global infrastructure team. We use those platforms across all of our data centers, as well as on our sites where we have on-premises storage for either our Burrtec solutions or Isilon solutions that we have in territories, where we have to have data remain in the country due to the compliance requirements. We use it globally.

The most valuable features are scalability and integration.

The problems are, that it has issues with support. Dell has issues in that area.

I think the other problem is, that when we've had to do upgrades, it's a bit problematic. Dell hasn't done a good job at handling these upgrades, or the way EMC used to handle them. 

EMC was very thorough and if you got a piece of software that you had to upgrade, you knew that it had been thoroughly tested and it was going to work well. 

We have had issues with the consistency and the reliability of the code that is coming out for upgrades and enhancements.

I have been working with Dell EMC Avamar since 2017.

We are working with the most recent version. We recently updated it.

The stability has been okay. It hasn't been on par with what we would have expected, based on the fact that this would have been considered an EMC solution. 

With Dell purchasing EMC, there has been some degrading in their capabilities in that area.

The scalability of this solution is one of the best features.

I manage the global infrastructure team. My team is responsible for all the storage and backup infrastructure globally. It's my team that uses it, all around the world.

The technical support needs improvement.

I last used Commvault in 2017.

Dell EMC solution is much more scalable. It is built for an enterprise environment where you have high-end requirements for the movement of data. 

Commvault is not as advanced. It doesn't have all of the features and functionality.

When you talk about data management, storage management, comparably you're talking about companies like Rubrik, Cohesity, and Dell EMC, who are the major players out there.

The Avamar solution has a lot of the same features and functionality that Cohesity and Rubrik have, and is a very high-end enterprise solution for data management, data recovery, and  Commvault isn't quite at that level.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is a true enterprise solution. It has a lot of configurable options that you may or may not use based on your environment.

I have engineers that are all over the world, and I have those that are global to manage this solution, and a storage and backup team.

We have 10 people globally. There is a director who manages that group as well as a principal storage lead or principal storage engineer who does a lot of design and architectural work.

It's a very high-end solution and comparable to Rubrik and Cohesity.

You have to be really concerned about the Dell support model, the quality of their upgrades, and their support team's knowledge because they have issues in that area.

When you consider rating this solution, there are two parts to consider. There is the physical platform, the data domain, and the Avamar software. There is support for both of those. 

The physical platform is pretty reliable. I would rate it an eight, and for the support and the software, I would give it a six because of the issues that we've experienced with it.

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

In Romania, more customers own their enterprise software. But the new wave wants to also try cloud data centers and cloud backup and so on.

Dell EMC Avamar has many valuable features. It's very stable and it's easy to manage. It can be used instead of NetBackup or HP Data Protector backup.

Customers like it exactly like it is. They don't want new features from Avamar. Dell EMC is linked appropriately to VMware and they can implement some mechanisms from VMware more deeply than other vendors. This is one of the keys with Avamar.

The implementation is very simple. And, of course, EMC has a complex dashboard that can integrate all their backup solutions for the clients. They can use this software tool for backup and another one for disaster recovery and they don't need a complex dashboard.

Everything is pretty simple in this product.

It's based on HTML5 which allows for dashboards to have the maximum integration. It is up to date technology.

It also allows you to make a robot backup from a remote site to a central site with a very good compression

Its use case is for the VM machines because Avamar is not integrated with the backup and it's much more useful for the bare-metal VM server backup and recovery. It is integrated with the databases but it's not the best solution for big databases.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for more than 10 years.

Maintenance is needed everywhere and EMC is not so cheap for support. Our customers are very proficient and they need that support from the vendor. They also have an opportunity to buy our services because it's a little cheaper than the manufacturer.

The level of scalability depends. It's easy, but it depends if they are also a multiplier. If they have a lot of domains then it is the best in the market and the backup appliances are easy to expand. On the other hand, it needs a lot of money. If you have your own, not so expensive storage, you can backup on it and save some money.

Customer support begins with a phone call depending on the level of support. It is often 24 hours or the hourly rate. The support line is open but they ask if you bought the support or not.

Usually, they know the product the best and can solve the problem between two to four hours. If the problem is because of another software or hardware, it might take two days to solve.

Setup takes a maximum of one hour from documentation until it is finished. All software solutions need to be clearly documented. 

I think that after one hour we can start backup.

The initial licensing is usually for two or three years. After that they can buy a yearly license.

In Romania we have a lot of enterprises. That means more than 200 servers and maybe hundreds to thousands of clients. If they have a lot of VM machines it's one of the best solutions. If they have over 30 percent of their database on other applications is not recommended. It's working, but it's not recommended.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell EMC Avamar based on the environment. If they have a cloud implementation of virtual machines then I would rate it ten out of ten.

Our company has more than 5,000 employees, and we use the Avamar solution for the protection of our rear environment, we are protecting 1,500+ VMs using this solution.

We have Avamar Gen4 right now, which is already end-of-life, which is to be replaced this year with a better solution from either EMC or IBM.

We are going to replace the overall data solutions for our enterprise. Already the project is in a negotiation stage with EMC, IBM, and Huawei.

Avamar's source-side deduplication is very strong, it can easily back up remote sites' data, and not much bandwidth is required on the Avamar side.

EMC has discontinued their Avamar hardware version. They only advertise the Avamar virtual edition. I think it would be hard to deploy Avamar in the future with the virtual edition as we are protecting our large environment. We would not like to protect our environment in the virtual edition of the Avamar. We would like to protect our environment in a physical version of a new data protection suite that EMC offers - a server solution in the physical form.

They should bring back the physical implementation of the Avamar. In addition to that, they should also add the BMR for Linux that includes AIX and Solaris because right now the BMR for AIX and Solaris is not available.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for eight years. 

I am the administrator. I am personally using the solution.

Right now, although the product is now two years past EOL it's supporting our infrastructure quite well. There were some failures of the hardware which we resolved ourselves. Overall, the product is very solid and it supports all the virtual and physical infrastructure, the databases, and all the stuff. It's quite a solid product.

Currently, our model is scalable, but the scalability of Avamar requires physical nodes to be added to the box. EMC has already said that it is the end-of-sales for this product. So they do not provide additional nodes for it. It is possible to scale the product more, but the nodes are not available.

I rarely contact Dell EMC technical support.

But when I do, they are very good, very responsive. They get back to you in 10 to 20 minutes and resolve the issue. They are very much a steady provider.

The initial setup is complex.

For example, we have approximately eight-node clusters of Avamar servers on the primary site and we have five node clusters of Avamar on the other site. Integration was a bit difficult. I am supporting the product myself, without the help of any EMC support, for two years now.

There are some issues because this is an appliance. The administration of Avamar is quite simple but there are underlining things that need to be supported and are quite difficult because this is an appliance.

It was approximately $70-80,000 when it was under support, but right now EMC has not been supporting this product for two years.

Because of the EOL issues, I would not recommend to anyone to use this product anymore. They have a newer virtual edition of Avamar. But Avamar is not available on the physical servers, as of now.

I would give Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of 10.

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. 

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.