Dell Avamar Reviews

Dell EMC Avamar is a very complex product. It took a lot of time for the IT admins to get trained on how to use it. It is not very user-friendly, and we won't be using Avamar anymore.

It needs a lot of improvement in terms of how the backups have been configured, and the reporting is too complex. There are a lot of improvements that should be done in the reporting feature and how the endpoints are getting added to the console. These processes need to be a little more simplified. It is not that easy to get an immediate report based on our requirements. It is too complex. We have to write some scripts and things like that. There are predefined scripts, but they aren't very user-friendly for the customer.

We have been using this product for more than six years.

The stability is okay.

If you want to scale up again, you have to buy a complete appliance. There is no option for just scaling up for the mid-phase entities. Only the larger entities would be able to afford that kind of complete appliance scalability. In terms of scalability, I'm not a fan of Avamar.

We haven't used Veeam before, but we are currently replacing Avamar with Veeam now. We are still in the process of switching.

The cost is high.

I would rate this product 5 out of 10.

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.

We primarily use the solution as a backup. Avamar is used to back up our production workloads. Production workloads include Oracle, EBS, SharePoint, file and print service, other application services.

The stability is good. We have found that the performance is excellent.

The product is easy to use.

The installation process is pretty straightforward. 

The solution could be a bit easier to use in the sense that they need to make it simpler to backup products and restore items.

I've been using the solution for more than three years. 

The solution is very stable and the performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Whether or not we will scale the solution depends on the business. If we have a requirement to do so, then definitely we'll expand it. If there will be year-over-year growth and if it will be 10%, we're likely to expand and will need to scale.

If you need to add more capacity, you will need to pay for it.

The installation process is straightforward. That said, it would require an engineer from Dell to do it. We ourselves cannot do it. We don't have the knowledge necessary.

We needed two engineers to handle deployment. 

Installation was quite fast. It took about four to five hours. After that, the configuration and other policies, that took about two days.

We had Dell assist us with the implementation process. 

This is a capacity-based license, it's a one-time payment.

In order to increase capacity, you need to pay more. You also can expect more maintenance.

The pricing of the product seems to be less expensive than other options, however, I can't speak to the exact cost of the product.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

This product is for production users. We do not backup user backups; it's only for the production workload.

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.

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.

The primary use case is for remote office or branch office type protection.

We don't have a current instance. It is pretty old. We have tried desperately to decommission Avamar.

Quick incremental backups and product replication are the two highlights of the product. Once you capture a full backup, incrementals are pretty quick. It is fairly efficient from that perspective.

It is expensive. It is more about cost than it is about anything else. 

If you need to pull data out of it to offload to tapes, that's messy. You have a mechanism for it, but it is painful.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

Once you're in the product, and the product is running, it does a really good job.

It is node-based, so you can add nodes as you need. It is pretty scalable.

The people who supported it did a very good job. If it gets messed up, it is not easy to fix, but on a day-to-day basis, it just runs like a tank of gas.

They were all set up when I got here.

It is expensive. Its cost is the main thing.

My advice would be to compare costs to other solutions and also look at the virtual appliance version of it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a six out of 10.

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.

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. 

The implementation is very easy. It's not difficult to set up at all.

The product is very powerful and offers very good performance.

Compared with Cohesity or Rubrik, which have some continuous data protection for backup and replication, this solution tends to lack in this area. 

When we propose this solution to a customer, the customer always asks us "Okay, can I have backup plus replication as well?". The performance backup, I know it's good, however, some customers ask about the backup plus replication, continuous data protection, or something like that. That's where it falls short.

Avamar should help protect against ransomware or maybe offer some sort of monitoring. It would be great if they had monitoring protection from the ransomware added into the overall offering.

Some customers are asking about an appliance model. It would be nice if they offered that.

I've been using the solution for the last two years. I have a bit of experience with the solution at this point.

The solution is quite stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. We've found the stability to be very good overall.

The solution scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to do so quite easily. It's not a problem.

We've used technical support quite a bit and have always been satisfied with the level of support that they've provided to us. They're very helpful and responsive.

We also use Dell NetWorker.

The implementation is very simple. It's not complex. A company shouldn't have any problems setting up the solution.

We're Dell partners. We have a business relationship with the company.

While we work with newer versions of the solution, we tend not to use the latest one. We try not to deploy the latest so we can avoid any issues. We're likely on version 19.1 which we've used since last year. We upgraded from 7.5.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's been a pretty good experience overall.

The most valuable feature of Avamar would have to be the way it works over needing very little bandwidth to move data across a WAN or LAN.

The interface has room for improvement. It's not ideal right now.

The product needs to have compatibility with more advanced systems such as Oracle ASM files.

The automation and orchestration features need work. Other products like Vain, for example, lend themselves to better automation and orchestration. 

If you want to set up integration with a cloud environment, for example, it's very difficult to do that. Avamar doesn't work very well in the cloud environment.

The solution requires better ease of use and compatibility. It would be ideal if it could work with Oracle on an ISM environment.

There needs to be better iintegration into the public cloud environments. 

It would be better if the cost of the product was less.

I've been using the solution for about ten years now. It's been at least a decade at this point. I've worked with it in various companies as well.

Technical support, from my experience with the vendor, has been good. We're satisfied with the level of service Dell offers. They seem to be knowledgeable and responsive.

I personally have a lot of experience in the space. For example, I've worked with Looker, NetWorker, Commvault, and other competitive technologies, including Dell's own NetWorker.

The initial setup is okay. It's a little complex, however, overall, it's not too bad to implement.

The price of the product could be lower. It's actually probably one of the more expensive products, at least in the enterprise-class. Other technologies are cheaper, and other vendors are adding more features. Therefore, it's falling behind a bit in what other vendors are doing. They need to catch up.

I'm just a customer and don't have a professional relationship with Dell.

Whether or not, I'd advise a new user to implement this product depends on their environment. It's very good. It's a very well distributed environment and it's probably the best product on the market. However, most companies today are engaging in leveraging the cloud, and in that case, my advice to them is to look at other technologies.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it a seven. If it offered better orchestration and cloud capabilities, for example, it would push it up to a nine. A cost reduction in their pricing model would push it up there as well.