Dell Avamar Reviews

We're a solutions provider with backup and recovery software as our main focus, and my work deals with customer support for the backup domains from an architect's perspective.

Usually, it's for on-prem server backup. It's mostly virtual. We have VM backups and subsequent file backups, and we do file restores. In addition, the customer I work for has old Domino Notes, and we also provide support for that with Avamar.

We mostly work with its latest or latest minus one version. It depends on the bug fixes and vulnerabilities in a version.

For the on-prem backup, it has all the necessary features that we require. They keep coming up with new scripts and new updates. It's excellent for VMware backup, and we have no complaints. 

Everything is easy. We can do most things through the GUI. We don't have to go to the CLI for most things.

Avamar is not the best tool when it comes to taking Azure backups. Like Commvault, if Avamar can support VM-level backups for the cloud, that would make it a bit better. 

There is another Dell EMC tool called NetWorker, which is a bit centralized tool. If you deploy a storage node locally, you can use the same UI tool for central management, but in the case of Avamar, it needs to be deployed individually on a site, irrespective of whether it's small or big. So, if I have 10 sites, I have to manage 10 Avamar. That's a bit of a headache. The Dell EMC solution professionals who connect with the clients should suggest NetWorker to clients with multiple sites rather than Avamar. That's because NetWorker gives more centralized control, but they keep recommending Avamar, which isn't the best practice.

There are no free or cheaper training plans. Unless your company is a partner with Dell, you don't get the student guide training, etc. Their administrator guide does not have all the information required for a new person. It doesn't cover the basics. The student guide is good, but it's not free. If you are a partner, only then it's free. Otherwise, there is a cost of $2,000 to $3,000. For people who are new to Avamar, there should be some resources to enable them to study on their own at least 50% of the basics. If I want to study Commvault, I get so many documents and resources to study, but in the case of Dell EMC products, there aren't any free resources. Only if you're a partner, the resources are available for you to learn. The user manuals and administrator guides are just for deployment. They aren't good for learning the basics for a fresher.

I've been working with Dell Avamar for 10 years. 

Its stability is good. If I'm using the latest minus one version, it's pretty stable.

Scalability-wise, it's good. They're constantly increasing their backup size, as well as total storage size. So, we can scale it whenever we want.

We've about 1800 to 2200 servers for which we take backups. I'm not aware of the number of users, but it's an insurance company. It's an enterprise with multiple locations and businesses in most of the top countries.

I'd rate their L1 support a three out of ten. Their L2 and L3 support is good, but in the case of L1 support, for everything they have a single copy-paste response. It's like talking to a chatbot. They should improve that. Even though they're L1, they should try to understand the issue rather than just going through the SOP. There should be some SLA for L1 so that if they are not sure, they should directly transfer to L2 support rather than spending time on it. If you are stuck in a critical issue, it's painful to wait and let three or four hours pass before being transferred to L2.

Negative

We use both Avamar and native Azure Backup. The native Azure Backup has a lot of limitations, and it's still not developed, whereas Avamar is good, but it's not the best for the Azure cloud. So, we have Azure Backup for the cloud as well as Avamar for on-prem. For the VM backup, we have to use only Azure Backup. For file backup or any other backup that Azure Backup doesn't support, we use Dell Avamar.

Its initial setup is of medium complexity. It's neither too difficult nor too easy.

Usually, I'm the only one doing the deployment all the time. It takes half a day for the virtual backup.

Its ROI is good. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of ROI.

I'm not involved in its pricing. My involvement is purely technical.

There is no free training. I'd recommend this solution if the company is giving great training. Otherwise, if you have to learn it on your own, I won't recommend it.

Overall, I'd rate Dell Avamar a seven out of ten. 

We use Dell Avamar for backing up a VMware environment.

What I found valuable in Dell Avamar is the deduplication feature. I also like that the solution can be integrated with Data Domain.

What would make Dell Avamar better is if it can do faster backups because right now, PowerProtect Data Manager is better in this area with its new UI and a new way to implement backups.

Customers nowadays also expect more up-to-date solutions, and this is another area for improvement in Dell Avamar. It's not as up-to-date, so I'm counting on PowerProtect Data Manager, but customers who have Dell Avamar don't want to switch because you don't have as many backup problems in Dell Avamar compared to other solutions.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Dell Avamar is an updated UI and a different way to manage backups because currently, backup management is a bit heavy for customers using Dell Avamar.

I've been working with Dell Avamar since the EMC days, so since 2008.

Dell Avamar is quite stable as a solution.

My team didn't have an issue in terms of scalability in Dell Avamar because scaling is done on the Data Domain side most of the time.

I've never contacted the technical support team for Dell Avamar. I only contacted Dell support for another product, and I would rate the team four out of five.

The initial setup for Dell Avamar was average. It wasn't the simplest, but it wasn't the most complex.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing policy of Dell Avamar as five. The solution has a very good price, and a lot of improvements were done to it.

I evaluated a few solutions in comparison with Dell Avamar such as Veeam and Commvault as software-based solutions, then Cohesity and Rubrik as hyper-converged solutions, including hardware. My recommendation would be based on what the customer needs. In terms of functionality and in comparison with other solutions, Dell Avamar is an old product and it needs to be refreshed, which was why I was recommending PowerProtect Data Manager.

My job is to provide solutions to my customers, so I compare different products to have a clear view of the differences between products.

In terms of Dell products, I work mainly with Dell Avamar. My focus is on backup architecture, and I'm an integrator.

Dell Avamar is recommended for midsize and enterprise businesses.

My rating for Dell Avamar is seven out of ten.

It's my day-to-day job to recommend solutions, especially new solutions from Dell, for example, cyber recovery solutions. I would recommend Dell Avamar to others because not much software can work well with CyberSense. Though I find PowerProtect Data Manager to be a good solution, it's not yet at the same level as Dell Avamar on many points. It couldn't back up all that Dell Avamar could back up.

We're using Dell Avamar for data and endpoint protection.

Dell Avamar has many features, and I like that it meets my company's requirements.

I also like that you can use it for client servicing and transmission, plus it has a push upgrade feature that lets you simultaneously push updates to thousands of clients.

I also found the self-service part of Dell Avamar helpful.

Dell Avamar needs improvement on its remote configuration and the recommended action for a particular endpoint, particularly when it has no protection for X number of days.

I want to see a more user-friendly and administrator-friendly Dell Avamar. The solution also needs a better UI and dashboard.

I've been using Dell Avamar for almost seven years.

Dell Avamar has ninety-nine percent stability and reliability. It's the most reliable solution, and I rate its stability as eight out of ten.

Dell Avamar is scalable, so I rate its scalability as eight out of ten.

Dell Avamar provides good technical support, so it's a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

The initial setup for Dell Avamar in terms of complexity is fifty-fifty. The process is not so easy, and it's not so tough. It's a six out of ten, setup-wise.

Deploying the solution took seventy-two hours.

The contract with Dell Avamar included implementation, so my company implemented the solution with the vendor's help.

Dell Avamar, including its virtual add-ons and cloud-based offerings, is cheaper than other solutions, but in the end, the price still depends on your use case.

Price-wise, I'm rating Dell Avamar as six out of ten.

We evaluated NetBackup, Commvault, and Barracuda, but we can't compare Dell Avamar with those other three solutions because we use them for protecting different workloads. For example, we use Dell Avamar for endpoint protection, while NetBackup and Commvault are for server protection.

I'm using Dell Avamar version 19.2.

Four to five people deployed the solution.

Dell Avamar requires regular maintenance. My company has a dedicated team for maintaining the solution daily.

My company has more than sixty thousand Dell Avamar users.

I recommend Dell Avamar to businesses and teams with smaller workloads and accounts. You can use the solution to protect endpoints and servers. Still, Dell Avamar works well on small to midsized environments rather than environments with heavy workloads and complex infrastructure where using it would become more challenging. Dell Avamar now has cloud-based offerings, but I have yet to test the solution on heavy workloads. I'd recommend Dell Avamar for small to midsized environments.

I'd rate Dell Avamar as seven out of ten.

My company is a Dell customer.

Mainly we suggest it to our users, to our clients, when it comes to a fully virtualized environment of VMware.

The global duplication is great. The combination of those features with DD Boost from Data Domain, are the main features we suggest to our clients.

It is a very complete product.

The interface is fine.

We find the configuration capabilities okay.

It offers an easy initial setup. 

I don't have any notes for areas of improvement. 

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. The use cases we have are sometimes a fully virtualized environment and sometimes a mixed environment. When it comes to mixed environments, we have to suggest NetWorker and with NetWorker, the way it works is it's a very legacy-oriented solution. It is not very cloud-oriented. It does not have many features that are the equivalent to Veeam, for example. Avamar is limiting due to the fact that it only works with virtualized environments such as VMware.

I've used the solution for less than a year. 

The solution is relatively stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate stability eight out of ten. 

The main problem with scalability is the inability of the solution to perform backups on physical servers and cloud-oriented servers.

I'd rate the general ability to scale three out of ten. 

This solution does work for companies of all sizes. The solution is very versatile in that sense.

While I don't deal with technical support, the feedback from our deployment team is that they are pretty good. 

Positive

We've used Veritas, Dell NetWotker, and Veeam. Networker works well with legacy solutions, and Veeam does it all, including UNIX, Linux, virtualized, et cetera. 

Avamar only works with virtualized environments such as VMware.

There are also price differences.

Veeam is cheaper and more complete as a solution. It is not the most expensive. Veeam is very affordable for benchmarking financial solutions. It sits in the middle of all the other solutions. It is not very affordable when it comes to small to medium-sized enterprises, however. 

In terms of simplicity of use, I would rate Veeam as the most simple and most user-friendly when it comes to simplicity of use. It has a unique interface that can allow administrators to administer a very large scale of environments - including physical, virtual, and cloud, on the same plane. That's not the case for Dell EMC's solutions.

The solution is simple to set up. As long as an administrator has some knowledge, it's not too difficult. I'd rate the solution five or six out of ten in terms of ease of setup. 

You can deploy the solution in about half a day. 

I'm not really into deployment. We have a team that does deployment - a pre-sales team. I have very limited knowledge when it comes to deployment. That said, my understanding is only one person really needs to handle the deployment process. 

Jobs have to be set in the initial deployment, which is straightforward for recovering from older backups. After that, not much maintenance is required. 

The product is licensed by CPU. When it comes to Veeam, they switch from CPU to something they call universal licenses, which are instances. An instance can cover a VM, or an instance can cover a physical server, for example. It's a different model from CPU based licensing, and it has started to become a trend in Morocco especially.

I can't speak to the exact price of Avamar.

We sell the Dell EMC portfolio to others. We're a Dell partner. 

We're mainly using the latest version of the solution. 

I would advise potential new users to consider their environment before picking a solution. 

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. 

Dell Avamar is a source-based backup solution. It is the best backup solution for people with laptops and desktops from various offices with a small bandwidth. We also use it for remote office backup tasks.

It is one of the best solutions for backing up Oracle and other servers. Our virtual environment backup experience has been good. One of the best features of the solution is that we can integrate it with Data Domain. We can store backups in Data Domain and replicate the data from one Avamar box to another. If one appliance fails, we can get the data from the other Avamar box. The product provides in-line deduplication at the source level. It is very good. I have used the product on VMware and Hyper-V. The tool integrates well with other solutions.

The recovery is a bit slow. There are some security gaps when we take backups of the client machines through the internet in cloud environments. The gaps must be fixed. If I use the tool to take backups through the internet, I have to open ports. It makes the entire IT environment vulnerable.

I have been using the solution for 11 years.

The stability is good.

I rate the product's scalability a five or six out of ten. I bought a license for 1 TB. The pricing was very high when I wanted to expand it to 2 TB or 3 TB. I had to consider alternate solutions to meet my requirements. The scalability is a challenge because of the price. Our clients are medium and enterprise-level businesses.

The support was very good when Avamar was handled by EMC. Since Dell acquired EMC, the support has been very bad.

Neutral

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. For an experienced person, the deployment takes a few hours.

The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a six to seven out of ten.

I will recommend the solution to others. The appliance is good. There are hardly any solutions that can match up to Avamar. It has always stood up to the test whenever we have used it. Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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.

We use the tool to create backups of every system we have in the infrastructure.

The solution works well. The tool’s ability to restore files discretely is useful. We can restore specific files of a specific server. We do not have to restore everything.

The licensing price must be reduced.

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

The tool is stable.

We have never had any problem with scalability. We have backed up many terabytes of data. We have more than 1000 users. We have a lot of servers and VMs in the company.

When we have any issues, we receive professional support. We get the optimal level of engineering support we require.

Positive

When we moved to PowerProtect, we were very pleased with the performance of the backups of the VMware infrastructure. It was disappointing when we faced difficulties using PowerProtect with SQL. We also faced problems with the infrastructure. We had a lot of files, and PowerProtect could not handle it. So, we switched to Dell Avamar.

The solution is costly. Competitors are less expensive. However, Dell Avamar is the right tool if we want to protect our critical systems and receive proper engineering support.

I will recommend the product to organizations that are providing critical services. The solution requires maintenance. The maintenance is not complex, but we must apply all the required fixes. We must follow the things recommended by the vendor to guarantee that we are aligned with the service provider's guidelines.

People who want to use the solution must find a good partner. The product is good. It must be implemented well. The tool protects us against risks that could cost us millions if we have a problem. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We're using it in our company. We primarily use the solution as a backup.

The backup functionality with Data Domain is good.

Overall, it works quite well.

It's very easy to install the solution.

The product is scalable.

It's stable and offers good performance.

It cannot replicate the backup, it can only do the backup. If you want to replicate you need RecoveryPoint.

Avamar cannot back up Nutanix as a virtual solution.

I've been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. The performance is good. It's good for vSAN. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze.

We have found the solution can scale well. If you need to expand it, it's not a problem.

All of our production is backed up with Avamar.

After we buy Nutanix and an Azure Stack, since we are a service provider and in the future, we will make our service catalog on the Azure Stack and Nutanix Cloud.

Technical support is pretty good. We are pleased with their level of support.

I also work with Veeam and NetBackup.

With Veeam, the advantage is you can back up and replicate with the same product, and it is compatible with all virtual solutions.

The initial setup is simple. We buy the service from Dell. 

I was not a part of the deployment as I am a pre-sale manager. I do not handle the setup process directly and cannot speak to how long it takes. 

The cost is lower than Veeam, however, how much it actually costs depends on the customer and the use case.

I'm not sure of the exact licensing costs.

We were a partner and resellers. In my last job, I was a preferred partner.

I'm not sure which version we're using. I'm not the backup administrator.

We will stay with Avamar for this platform, however, maybe we will look into Nutanix, and that's why we are searching for another solution. Avamar cannot back up Nutanix as a virtual solution.

I'd warn potential users that it's not the best solution if you have other products other than VMware in your production. If you are just using VMware, it's a very good option.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten as it doesn't work well with every solution, only VMware.