We're a managed services provider, and we've developed a custom version of Avamar. It is intended to be a product for single customers, but we transformed it into a multi-tenant platform.
Avamar is a hybrid solution. We can deploy Avamar as a direct-to-cloud service, or we can deploy agents onto customers' endpoints at their branches, and they can then back up straight into our mobile attendant platform and update centers. We also offer customers on-premise appliances.
Avamar has long been the best in its class, but that's changing as new solutions emerge. However, Dell has traditionally been a leader in deduplication and compression. Avamar enabled us to shift data from on-premise local appliances to data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure. That's a powerful feature. because customers can back up to the cloud without upgrading o high-capacity links or congesting their backups.
Another valuable feature is Avamar's support for endpoints and workstations. Businesses want to back up their company laptops, and they can't get that functionality from many solutions. Avamar can provide clients a multi-tenant portal, which isn't something other solutions can do.
Continuing our long-term relationship with Dell, we will likely switch to Dell PowerProtect, but cybersecurity is one area of improvement for Avamar. Dell should add some more components to its Cyber Recovery vault.
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.
We have used Avamar for more than a decade.
I rate Dell Avamar nine out of 10 for stability. It's a stable and highly resilient platform.
Avamar wouldn't be as scalable the way it is traditionally deployed, but we are using it as a multi-tenant platform, ensuring that capacity is always available. The platform is fairly elastic for us. Typically, you would deploy infrastructure for the customer and allocate storage, so your ability to increase that storage would be limited by infrastructure procurement and deployment within a data center. It isn't a cloud-native or software-based solution. It doesn't have out-of-the-box scalability.
We regularly contact Dell for remote technical support and to replace hardware in our data centers or customer sites. We're Dell Titanium partners, so we get top-tier support.
I am not directly involved in deployment, but we've used Avamar for so long that it's likely effortless for our engineers to deploy it. The infrastructure is already there.
We don't have dedicated engineers for the Avamar platform, but we have a team of 15 to 20 administrators who manage and maintain our backup technologies.
I rate Dell Avamar seven out of 10. It's fantastic for on-prem infrastructure workloads, but it doesn't cover the SaaS, Microsoft 365 and the public cloud infrastructure that many customers are using. While we benefit a lot from Avamar as a managed service provider because of our unique deployment, I would recommend Dell PowerProtect for most use cases today.