Dell Avamar Reviews

My clients use Avamar to back up VM solutions on VMware's infrastructure.

The fast backup and recovery and the Full Backup features are valuable. When our customers have issues with data loss, Avamar helps them recover data within a few minutes.

Some customers need to back up to tape, but Avamar lacks support, so it costs a lot.

I would like to see backup for container-based applications. Avamar doesn't support container-based backup right now. Dell has a new product called PPDM that they just announced last year, and it has a feature for container-based backup solutions. However, PPDM doesn't support legacy applications like Notes and Domino and some of the high-end databases. Avamar supports all these, including Unix and Linux.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

I rate Dell Avamar's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate Dell Avamar's scalability a ten out of ten. There are over 100 servers, and I have ten companies as clients. One is an enterprise-level business, and the rest are medium-sized businesses.

The initial setup is easy. I rate it a ten out of ten. The time taken to deploy the solution depends on the end customer's environment. If it's complex, we'll need about one day to deploy. The price is quite low because right now, most of the Avamar appliances, like the DP4400, which comes together with Avamar, are ready to use. We just need to put the required IP addresses in the initial stages. After that, it's ready to use. We then just add a host to back up to Avamar. In this case, completing the implementations takes about two to three hours.

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten because it is expensive. I don't think small companies would choose Avamar because the price is high but reasonable for medium-sized companies. Normally, there are no additional costs when we choose the DP4400.

If the customer is a small business, I would not recommend Avamar because of the price. If the customer only wants a simple platform for data protection, though, Avamar is a really good option.

I rate Dell Avamar a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for Dell Avamar is for backup purposes.

The most valuable feature for me in Dell Avamar is the automation, which is good for completion.

In my opinion, the user interface and the user friendliness could be improved. The specific thing I have in mind are the graphics, which are not quite user-friendly.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

My impression is that this product is quite stable.

I think this is not an easily scalable solution as it's on-premises for us and adding more space would cost a lot of money.

I would rate the technical support of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

My impression is that the initial setup process is difficult.

We had people from Dell do the installation for us.

Regarding other people trying to use this solution, I'd say that it all depends on their budget as it's too expensive for small environments.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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. 

We are using Avamar as support for the VMware Virtual Machine Backup. The chain blocking is very good. With Dell Avamar, we have integrated with Dell EMC Data Domain. It has a 97% completion ratio. That's the reason we are using Dell EMC Avamar.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery. 

Instant recovery is there and it is quite useful. If anything goes wrong, we can initiate troubleshooting within our end, our area, and use it instantly. 

The SQL and Oracle database backup is very user-friendly with the Dell Avamar backup.

It has lots of features, and it's very easy to use.

The setup is very easy.

All of the features we need are there. I don't have a point of contention with the solution. 

That said, the log analysis facilities are very, very bad in Avamar. The backup log analyzer gives us issues. If any backup fails, we can't analyze through logs. The log reading is very difficult with Dell Avamar. Only Dell, their support guys, can access and read the logs. We really need them to add a log analyzer. 

The support is very bad.

We've used the solution for four or five years.

The solution is extremely stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten in terms of scalability and reliability.

Right now, we have 250 customers on the solution, and they have been using it for the last ten to 12 years. 

We have two techs here, however, in a year, if you calculate 365 days in a year, we've hardly had one or two times where we needed support. The product is very stable.

The support is not good at all. It really needs to be better. When you actually need help, they are very poor at assisting. 

Negative

Currently, we are using Commvault and looking at Avamar for clients.

We have experience in Commvault, Veritas, Avamar, Net Protector, and Networker, among others.

The initial setup is very easy. I have had a lot of experience in Avamar, so it is very, very easy to set up for me. If you are a beginner, you may need to take some training first. Once you understand it, then you can install it easily.

The deployment is quick and easy. It's a one-click installation and it only takes two hours. 

Maintenance is easy since no physical presence is required. This setup can be built remotely also.

The solution is expensive. However, there is not any real competitor with the Dell Avamar Data Domain storage type of a feature. It's very unique. Competitors cannot make the same claims about their products.

While it is costly, it's good value and worth the price. 

We are proposing Avamar to our customers and looking for other solutions to compare it to build the case for it. Currently, customers are using Commvault, and we are pushing to Avamar.

We are users and have recommended the solution to clients. We're also a partner and in sales. 

We use both on-premises and public cloud deployments. Depending on the customer's requirements, we can deploy either option. We can use various clouds, including Google, AWS, and Azure. We can use the Dell EMC cloud as well. However, it is more costly.

We wouldn't recommend the solution to everyone since it is pricey. A small or beginner-level customer likely wouldn't be able to afford this type of solution. It's not an entry-level solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I would rate them higher if the log analyzer and customer service were better.

My primary use case is backend storage for our VMs. We are fully virtualized, using VMware for our virtualization layer, and we use multiple VMs for our applications, so we have multiple workloads for the education school information systems. Then we have our ERP and HR systems, and our infrastructure monitoring the networking solutions, and so on. All these VMs are backed up using Avamar.

By bringing in Avamar and keeping the repository on the data domain, we got a very high DDU and high compression and reduction in data size.

The most valuable features are data deduplication and compression, backup and replication, and instant backup, which allows us to restore our data at any given point in time.

There are two areas for improvement I would suggest. First, some integrations are not in place, such as the email alerts, which are not compatible with Office 365 SMTP gateway. Secondly, Avamar has no APS for monitoring or alerting.

I've been using this solution for three years.

Avamar is very stable - we've hardly seen any issues with it. We have had some problems with the virtualization layer but not with the product itself.

It's very scalable. We did face some issues with using multiple applications, but we added a couple of proxies, and it's gone very well since then.

Dell's support is excellent - if any issues occur, we open the case, and the maintenance gets done. The only problem is that sometimes they can be slow to respond.

I previously used Veeam Backup & Replication, but it wasn't very reliable or cost-efficient because there was no deduplication or compression, so we switched to Avamar.

The initial setup was very straightforward and took about a week.

I used a partner involved by the principal vendor, from a company called MDS. They were really professional and were experts on the product.

We have seen huge data reduction and data deduplication and compression, which is very cost-effective and cost-reducing for the company. Overall we've saved around $200,000 when it comes to storage.

Avamar's pricing is quite competitive compared to other vendors. We don't pay any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated Veritas and had previously used Veaam, but when we compared overall cost, integration, stability, and agility, we found Avamar was one of the best.

Before choosing any backup solution, run a use case so that you can evaluate the product and have proof of concept. I would rate Avamar as nine out of ten.

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. 

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.

We've been using this solution to backup our servers. It is a simple backup and restore data application.

It's very slow to backup and store information. It has two consoles and an application which are more difficult to use than a solution like Veeam. 

For future releases, Avamar should improve on the compression speed of their backups. This is a core feature of a backup and restore solution. The interface of Avamar could also be improved but this is something they are working on. In comparison, you don't need to wait three hours to restore Veeam.

This is a stable solution but does not offer fast performance. 

In certain scenarios, the support for this solution has been good. Often, the team take too long to resolve issues. 

Neutral

I have previously used Veeam at a different company. It is very good as a backup and restore solution. For example, I could restore a server on Veeam that has two terabyte storage used and it took approximately 20 minutes. On Avamar, it would take three hours. 

Veeam has a support team is very good with good technical skills.

This is a fairly expensive solution. It cost approximately 21,000 each year. 

I would advise others to use Veeam over Avamar. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.