Dell Avamar Reviews

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 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 primarily use the solution the database replications in web hosting, mostly.

The duplication capabilities are very helpful.

The native data protection capability and remote data protection capabilities make it a unique solution. It makes it possible so that it will fit with any kind of vendor the customer needs.

The backup features. for example, the exclusionary statement, are excellent.

Overall, the solution offers some really great reporting.

It's very flexible when it comes to the end-user device backup.

In general, the product has been extremely easy to use. It's one of the best aspects.

The solution is very stable.

The solution does not scale. It would be nice if there were much more scalability capabilities.

The solution could get better at data process managing. It can take more than three or four hours for supporting images. It's critical to do this faster.

It would be helpful if the product could support Linux patches. It's my understanding it only offers HTML.

The product could offer more integration capabilities. 

We've been using the solution for a few years at this point. It's been a while. I personally have been dealing with the solution for four years or so.

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

The product does not scale. If a company needs something that can scale, they need something else.

We have three customers that are currently using the solution.

Typically, we handle support-related queries from customers, however, we have dealt with Avamar's technical support in the past and they have been helpful and responsive. The response time in particular has always been very good.

The installation process is not complex at all. It's very straightforward. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the process. It's easy.

Deployments typically take about one and a half hours or so.

Currently, we have five technical engineers. Each one has its own specialization that they are capable of deploying Avamar. We can deploy the solution for our clients.

Customers do have to pay for a professional license in order to use the solution.

We are integrators.

We tend to work with relatively new versions of the solution. It may not always be the latest version. Typically the versions we use have been released in the last six months or so.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations and especially to end-users.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.