Dell Avamar Reviews

It specifically caters to the backup needs of our data, ensuring secure and compliant operations.

The scale is small, yet it efficiently handles all tasks in a unified manner. The entire system operates seamlessly, with minimal hands-on involvement, allowing us to focus on monitoring rather than constant adjustments or deployments, as seen in larger, more dynamic environments.

The challenges we do face typically revolve around aligning specific features with our accustomed tool usage.

I have been using it for a year.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten.

Since it's limited to the PCI pages, it might not necessarily be scalable to serve as our enterprise-wide tool, especially when considering larger-scale environments. Focusing on the requirements outlined in the RFP and the demonstrations conducted as part of the RFP process, I find it satisfactory and that it meets our needs.

Its technical support is excellent. It stands out as a primary factor in our decision to choose Dell. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

We transitioned from using Veritas appliances to the Dell solution in the same environment.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The installation process was smooth as we transitioned from using Veritas appliances to the Dell solution in the same environment. A third-party company, Plus House, subcontracted by Dell, handled the installation remotely, working closely with our junior team members. The initial setup was completed within a day for each site, and an additional day was required to configure the clustering of backups, including SQL backups. This extra day was dedicated to finalizing the clustering and ensuring that all configurations were in place. Maintenance is handled by a team of approximately seven individuals who undergo training and manage regular tasks.

They deliver substantial value in return.

I am highly satisfied with the pricing structure provided and the discounts we get. The overall cooperation with Dell has been exceptional; they consistently go above and beyond to align with our budgets. The global transition and the impact of exchange rates, particularly the fluctuation between the South African Rand and the U.S. Dollar, have introduced some complexities, but nothing major. The current pricing is generally satisfactory. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Despite falling under Vodafone globally and dealing with VBC, the procurement company, there were instances where Dell offered superior deals in South Africa compared to what VBC could secure with other vendors. This was a key factor in our decision to stick with Dell rather than exploring alternatives like Huawei or HP.

Overall, I would rate it 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'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. 

We have three sites. We deployed Avamar on one site three years ago then added the same setup for the other sites. Following best practices, we're using Avamar with Dell Data Domain for data compression and deduplication.

Avamar is mainly for backing up the machines.

Avamar's user interface could use some work. When we open a ticket, they are working with Linux commands. It's not easy to manage everything through the web interface. I would like to do everything through the interface that you can do with Linux commands.

I've been working with Avamar for two years. 

Avamar is stable. We don't face any daily issues, and it sends clear notifications directly to your account if anything happens.

So far, Avamar covers everything we want. We are replicating to other sites for disaster recovery, so it's working well for us.

We have an annual subscription for support, so we contact them for upgrades and stuff like that. There is some inconsistency. Some of the support engineers are experienced, but others are new. It sometimes takes time at the first level of support, but all our issues get solved in the end.

Setting up Avamar wasn't so easy, and we had a partner doing the installation for us. Though it was hard at first, it's getting better. The main difficulty was finding plugins for Oracle Database. It took some time to open a ticket with Dell, but everything was fine after that. I would rate the overall deployment experience eight out of 10. We have two system engineers for deployment and maintenance as needed. They're not managing the solution full time, but they handle new bundles, fixes, etc.

We had a partner, but they weren't so experienced. It seemed like we were the first customer that had implemented Avamar. 

It was a package, so I don't know Avamar's exact price. However, it was nearly $200,000 for the VxRail nodes, Data Domain, and Avamar. That includes everything for three years. Then we have to pay annually for support. 

We were looking for Veeam at the same time. It's good and has the same features, but we were buying all our solutions from Dell, like VxRail servers, Data Domain, etc. I think it's more complicated but otherwise fine. 

I rate Dell EMC Avamar nine out of 10. If you don't have Avamar experience, you need to work with a partner. It's not straightforward, but it's effective. However, Avamar only takes what has been written in a day. It takes a backup of a short time and doesn't do any duplications.

We use it for our desktops and laptops end-users. We have a network in place for server backup and archive.

I have not yet explored this solution in its entirety. Maybe six months down the line, I will be able to tell you about this solution with more confidence.

I believe it is a good backup and recovery solution based on our limited experience in the short period we have been using it.

It is easy to use.

More integration would be helpful, as well as the addition of more applications.

The technical support should be improved. They could be more responsive in the future.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for six months.

I assume we're using the most recent version because it was just installed by our implementation team.

In order to make an opinion, we must compare the performance to established benchmarks. We are still working on it, and we're still evolving.

Scalability is determined by the number of licenses purchased. Only a few have been accepted.

We have approximately, 100 users, but we have plans to expand very soon.

We may have some remote offices set up, in the near future.

We experienced a problem with the network backup installation, so we called technical support. One of the backups failed continuously.

We were not exactly satisfied with the turnaround time. It was an issue that was unique for them to resolve, but we were not able to assistance instantly.

The support could be better.

When you consider the hardware involved, the initial setup was not straightforward.

In the beginning, there were a lot of trials and errors to suit our exact requirements. Our installation was the standard that most normally have.

This solution was not installed by us. We agreed that the implementation team would complete the installations.

Licensing fees are paid annually.

I am not sure if the fees are comparable; I would like to compare them to other solutions.

We have Data Domain and network backup software.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar, an eight out of ten.

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.

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. 

In our company, we handle five different types of data from VME, Windows, SQL and other sources. The complete backup of forty lead machines is implemented daily using Dell Avamar in our organization. 

A huge storage space needs to be bought with Dell Avamar, even when it's unnecessary for an organization. The upgrades of the solution are highly time-consuming; it takes 10 to 12 hours to upgrade Dell Avamar or Dell IDPA. The aforementioned upgrade arrives once a year, but it takes an entire day in our company.

I have been using Dell Avamar for ten years. 

The product offers satisfying stability. The disc failures with the solution are usually replaced within the next way with Archwap discs, and it doesn't affect the stored data. 

The solution can be easily scaled. When your solution is running out of space, you need to apply for a new license and it can be obtained in multiples of 12 TB options. Only one professional in our company uses the solution to manage the IDPA backups. 

Our company has availed tech support, they are quite helpful and efficient. The maximum turnaround time I have witnessed, depending on the issue, is two days; otherwise, the support team sorts my issues in minimal time. I would rate the tech support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The solution isn't easy to deploy. Dell IDPA comes with numerous tools demanding several configuration requirements. Storage and index manager are inputted in separate VMs. There are multiple components during the initial deployment of Dell Avamar, but client migration and workflow onboarding can be implemented in a straightforward process. Agents need to be stored and new connections have to be found as part of Dell Avamar's deployment. 

The initial setup of Dell Avamar took about three months in our organization. The aforementioned long duration was due to the need to deploy the solution separately for backups and DR purposes and also for arranging network logistics. I deployed the solution with assistance from a Dell partner. 

It's an expensive tool. 

In my experience, Dell solutions are more user-friendly than Commvault. The deployment and management of Dell products are a lot easier than Commvault. There are a lot of complexities in Commvault, but the solution has multiple great features, including troubleshooting. 

The solution's ease of use simplifies the disaster recovery processes in our company. Once implemented, Dell Avamar performs as a complete solution. The advanced DR backup from varying locations is easy to recall using Dell Avamar.  

The backups are performed by the solution with superior stability. The product is easy to manage as frequent troubleshooting is not required and reliable backups are procured. 

The interface of the tool was quite bland previously; it was a Java console, but recently, it got upgraded to a WIP console. The WIP console is easy to comprehend and navigate in Dell Avamar. The product is more expensive when purchased as a stand-alone solution, but with Dell IDPA, the cost is reduced significantly as a suite of tools. With the IDPA bundle, a user pays for only the features used. Dell Avamar requires pre-purchase of the entire storage.

For example, with Dell Avamar, you might need to purchase 36 TB storage when you only require 16 TB. Dell IDPA offers a huge storage device, and payment needs to be made as per the license procured. I have a 96 TB storage solution with Dell IDPA, but I am licensed to use only as much as required; if I am using 12 TB, the cost for only 12 TB needs to be paid. I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Potential customers should be aware that the solution is initially provided with 96 TB storage and can possibly be scaled further. I haven't faced any downsides or setbacks with the solution; it's quite easy to use.