Dell Avamar Reviews

We use Dell EMC Avamar for our critical servers backups.

The solution is easy to use and has high performance.

The solution could improve by having better integration and more flexibility.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have hundreds of users using this solution.

There is a license required for this solution.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

We use it as a backup and restore solution for our customers. For replication, we use the Data Domain application. We replicate from our primary site to the DR site.

Its stability and deduplication capabilities are most valuable.

Avamar is dependent on the hardware. It can't be implemented with ordinary storage. It can only be implemented with an EMC product. We want to have a backup solution that allows us to use independent storage and other hardware. It would be good if they can simplify its technology and make it possible to implement it with another storage. This is probably not possible because Avamar is an EMC product, and EMC would like to sell its own products.

It should be simplified because currently if we want to upgrade Avamar, it requires us to assemble too many EMC products. For upgrade, we have to ensure compatibility with Data Domain, proxy, and firmware for storage. There are many dependencies and many steps that we have to take if we want to upgrade the services, which is a weakness of Avamar.

It should also have support for reporting. We have too many reporting challenges. We cannot get information from the console about how big is the data of customer A, customer B, and customer C. EMC should think about providing reporting for the backup solution. Our customers use the basic reporting, but inside our infrastructure, we should be able to see and then analyze the data consumption by different customers. We should also be able to split information and see data consumption within our organization. Such analytical reporting will help us in planning our usage for the future, such as for the next two years. It will be useful for customers and service providers.

Its price should be reduced, and it should have a flexible and pay-per-use licensing.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is stable.

We have had their tech support until now. There is no problem with their tech support. They provide good support.

Its initial setup is complex. 

Its price should be reduced. It would be good if you could pay as per usage, and there is a subscription model like VMware. There should be some flexibility because sometimes, the customer only uses the backup for one month or three months. Currently, I have to pay whether I use it or not. Its licensing should be flexible and based on consumption. 

Currently, we are evaluating Veeam to see if it is possible to switch to Veeam. Veeam has an issue of deduplication failure. With Avamar, we use Data Domain, and the deduplication ratio is 26 or 25 times, whereas, with Veeam, the ratio is only half. We are thinking of using Avamar for archive backup and using Veeam for short retention.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

Our company is Dell EMCs largest partner in Egypt and the Middle East. We have a titanium partnership with them and I'm the senior infrastructure solutions specialist.

Avamar is a very effective product when it comes to protecting the virtualization system and end points. Data Protection Suite has three recovery and backup protection solutions and Avamar is one of them. It's a very effective product and can be used for replication and high-end enterprise applications. The solution doesn't require a specific backup admin in the environment, every application admin will perform their own backup and data protection process. It's very easy to use. 

I believe they need to improve the interfaces. Without official training it's harder to deliver the marketing and the reviews over shared media.

This is a very stable and easy to use program. 

Dell offers us good technical support. 

Data Protection Suite has Avamar as one of its components and comes with a license that covers a limited number of virtual machines, capacity, and end points. It's not sold as a separate product. I believe $1000 may cover a single socket and covers the whole data center including the endpoint, the replication, the CD and data protection. It's very cost effective and affordable when compared to other solutions. 

I need to rate the Data Protection Suite as a whole, given that Avamar is no longer sold as a separate product. 

I rate the whole solution a nine out of 10. 

We are using Dell EMC Avamar for backing up our virtual environment.

The most valuable feature is the virtual backup.

The reporting should be improved, as we currently have to use another tool for that purpose.

We have been using Dell EMC Avamar for two years.

This has been a stable solution, so far.

This is a scalable product. We have three people who administer it.

The technical support from EMC is quite good.

Prior to Avamar, I have worked with Veem and with IBM Spectrum Protect.

All of these are specialty tools and from my point of view, all of them are good. For the needs of my organization, EMC Avamar is the preferred option.

The initial setup is of average difficulty. It is not very easy and not very complex.

I did not evaluate other solutions.

My advice is that this product covers all of your needs as far as backup is concerned.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this product for Windows and Linux servers, and we have both file and database backups stored on them. We use them at smaller sites, which are small offices that are located around the world.

The most valuable features are image backups and file backups.
Image backups are very good to use, since they don´t require a backup agent.

Technical support should be more knowledgeable.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for more than 10 years.

The newest version is not very stable, which is something that should be improved.

We have perhaps 70 clients/server and have not tried to scale beyond that. We have about 40 users in total and do not plan to increase our usage at this time.

The quality of technical support varies. Sometimes they are very good, and sometimes they are not. They should be faster and more knowledgeable.

We also use Dell EMC NetWorker.

I was not involved in the initial setup but from what I understand, it's pretty simple.

There are five of us in the technical team who deploy and maintain our solutions.

The price of this product should be cheaper.

This is a product that I can recommend for small sites without anything special.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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 primary use case of this solution was for projects to backup customer laptops for the application capabilities.

The product could be easier to troubleshoot. When I had a problem with the software, I invested a lot of time to find out what the problem was. Once I found the problem, I realized that it was a simple solution, but there were no helpful indications.

As an example, with Avamar, you have a different storage node and if one of these nodes had a problem with an NTP server and there was a different time on the node, nothing would work. Finding the solution to this problem involved many steps, which was not easy to determine.

I have been using the solution for 5 or 6 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, but I prefer a solution like NetBackup when I am networking.

When we used the solution, it was still new, and so the customer service/technical support was not the best.

The installation of the solution is easy.

The cost of the solution is very expensive.

Dell transformed disk-based backups. Basically, we moved from tape to disk-based backups. We moved from IBM PSM on tape, to Dell-based backups using an appliance. These appliances are purpose-built backup appliances. Avamar and DataDomain are both purpose-built and they are extremely popular — soon to be number one in the backup appliance market. Avamar is associated with compliance, and DataDomain is more of our target. They are extremely reliable and scalable — they provide the best de-duplication on the market. They are very easy to use, set up, and manage. 

They have come up with Data Protection Central. We have multiple different management layers. For each product, we have a different management interface, so if they could merge all of them into one single-pane view of management, that would be extraordinary. Technically, they've done that but it's still not a single-pane view like in Commvault or in Rubrik, or another one of these new-age unit products. With a single pane, you can manage everything.

If you have to manage your network, it's a different console — It's not easy to manage. They've introduced a Data Protection Center to basically make it easier to manage everything from one console, or at least to report everything on one console which is very good. All the statistics appear, the health and the scheduled services, all of that appears on one screen. Still, to manage it, you have to click and invoke each separate console. If they could just integrate all of that into one console, one HTML Sybase console, then our lives would be much easier. There also needs to be single sign-on support.

We need single sign-on support to access all these different tools instead of having to login individually, which is the current problem — it takes too much effort. You have to go into each one and authenticate separately. You need to enable LDAP authentication for each of these and then proceed to what they need. They don't have role-based access, which is another problem. For example, if you want one person to have less access compared to another person, you can't do that easily.

Management and data analytics could be improved. I would like to see a lot more customizable reports, without coaching professional services regarding the Data Protection Advisor — it's not that simple to do. Also, I'm looking for analytics, for instance, something that tells us about the structure of the data.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for six years.

The support from Dell is exceptionally great. They offer support for almost all of the products on the market — all of the main operating systems, applications, databases, everything. That's a big plus for them.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Dell EMC is definitely one of the top three to four solutions. I'd recommend it because I think the cost of ownership and the return on investment are both extremely good — very low. 

It's very stable, reliable and very fast. The backup center stores information extremely fast, the de-duplication is great. All of this is available under one hood. The complexity is hidden from you. With Dell, everything has been done for you.

Out of the box, it's ready to go, and it's very, very fast. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.