Dell Avamar Reviews

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.

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.

I recently stopped using this product because my work moved away from operations and I'm now a patents director, so I generally do the designing. My client was looking for backups and for an application along with a desktop backup. We are partners with Dell and I'm the deputy general manager of the company. 

The best feature is the duplication and the speed of backup, which really made the difference for us. 

Everyone is now talking about hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google, so I guess Data Domain and others are coming in a native format, but the pricing is really expensive compared to the rest of the competitors' software. Beam and maybe Commvault are providing cheaper solutions compared to Avamar and Data Domain on software hyperscalers. They should really move to cloud and reduce the price. It's not a portal service, so we have to buy the devices along with it. That was the problem we kept facing in the market.
Nowadays every backup solution has more features compared to this, but I can't think of anything that needs improving in Avamar because it's already an enterprise tool. 

I've used this solution for the past three years. 

The stability is good. 

The scalability is good. 

Dell EMC is pretty good in terms of customer support. We use our own team for maintenance. 

In the  case of Commvault, you should have a drive or your DVD engine, key machines which you have to start because you need to have the ability for the machine. That is the only difference I've seen between Avamar and Commvault. Commvault seems to have the upper hand because of the computation and duplication services. That said, Avamar is used mainly  for enterprise and Commvault is good for SMB and smaller customers.

The initial setup was a bit complicated, it's not a simple setup. There are a lot of challenging networks to deploy. It's not related to the software, it's more from a customer network point of view. The deployment took me about one or two days, not more than that.

If you're enterprise, you are definitely going to use Avamar because it can save a lot of space because of its duplication feature, which is great. Just the backup speed is tremendous compared to other backup solutions. If you're enterprise and having issues with set up, then I'd definitely recommend Avamar.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Our company has more than 5,000 employees, and we use the Avamar solution for the protection of our rear environment, we are protecting 1,500+ VMs using this solution.

We have Avamar Gen4 right now, which is already end-of-life, which is to be replaced this year with a better solution from either EMC or IBM.

We are going to replace the overall data solutions for our enterprise. Already the project is in a negotiation stage with EMC, IBM, and Huawei.

Avamar's source-side deduplication is very strong, it can easily back up remote sites' data, and not much bandwidth is required on the Avamar side.

EMC has discontinued their Avamar hardware version. They only advertise the Avamar virtual edition. I think it would be hard to deploy Avamar in the future with the virtual edition as we are protecting our large environment. We would not like to protect our environment in the virtual edition of the Avamar. We would like to protect our environment in a physical version of a new data protection suite that EMC offers - a server solution in the physical form.

They should bring back the physical implementation of the Avamar. In addition to that, they should also add the BMR for Linux that includes AIX and Solaris because right now the BMR for AIX and Solaris is not available.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for eight years. 

I am the administrator. I am personally using the solution.

Right now, although the product is now two years past EOL it's supporting our infrastructure quite well. There were some failures of the hardware which we resolved ourselves. Overall, the product is very solid and it supports all the virtual and physical infrastructure, the databases, and all the stuff. It's quite a solid product.

Currently, our model is scalable, but the scalability of Avamar requires physical nodes to be added to the box. EMC has already said that it is the end-of-sales for this product. So they do not provide additional nodes for it. It is possible to scale the product more, but the nodes are not available.

I rarely contact Dell EMC technical support.

But when I do, they are very good, very responsive. They get back to you in 10 to 20 minutes and resolve the issue. They are very much a steady provider.

The initial setup is complex.

For example, we have approximately eight-node clusters of Avamar servers on the primary site and we have five node clusters of Avamar on the other site. Integration was a bit difficult. I am supporting the product myself, without the help of any EMC support, for two years now.

There are some issues because this is an appliance. The administration of Avamar is quite simple but there are underlining things that need to be supported and are quite difficult because this is an appliance.

It was approximately $70-80,000 when it was under support, but right now EMC has not been supporting this product for two years.

Because of the EOL issues, I would not recommend to anyone to use this product anymore. They have a newer virtual edition of Avamar. But Avamar is not available on the physical servers, as of now.

I would give Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of 10.

Dell Avamar is integrated with data protection and data domain. We have integrated it with vCenter and a couple of virtual machines from Dell Avamar to the data protection sources.

I found the most valuable features of Dell Avamar are the user-friendly interface and ease to use. Our clients have administrated this software and there is no additional training required.

We ordered training materials for the solution and it has been very helpful for installation, troubleshooting, and upgrading.

Dell Avamar could improve by adding more backup features.

I have been using Dell Avamar for approximately one year.

Dell Avamar is stable.

The scalability of Dell Avamar is good.

There is a Dell EMC partner that we use for support. When we have a problem we create a support case for the Dell EMC support team and they help us promptly.

The initial setup of Dell Avamar was easy. We deployed the data protection, we the configuration for the IP address. After the deployment, we only had to configure the vCenter, add vCenter to systems, and configure policies for backup jobs.

Dell Avamar is free when we deploy the data protection. When we order data protection, this software is included in the hardware.

The solution is not difficult to maintain.

We have integrated all backup solutions into the Dell Avamar system. It's very easy and when we have a problem we always communicate with Dell EMC. 

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell Avamar a ten out of ten.

When I was working for a company we used Dell EMC Avamar to backups of the system's data.

Dell EMC Avamar is easy to work with and is user-friendly.

We have had a lot of problems with the Dell EMC Avamar solution. The snapshots are not being erased after backup.

The solution could improve by having better reports about the errors in the software.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for approximately nine years.

The support from Dell EMC Avamar is good.

I have previously used Veritas NetBackup which I found to be a better solution. However, we were using Dell EMC Avamar because of the work circumstances.

The initial implementation was simple.

Dell EMC did the implementation of the solution for us.

I have evaluated Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection and it has Avamar, Data Domain, and DPA in one solution. It is impressive.

I rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

Dell EMC Avamar is used for backups and data recovery.

Setup and deployment of Dell EMC Avamar is complex. It requires expert engineers. Making its setup easier is something that could be improved.

Dell EMC Avamar is stable, especially because it's been around for a very long period of time.

We are preparing ourselves for a big project for the Ukrainian Railways, and I found that a lot of railways worldwide, e.g. in the US, England, and other countries in Europe, use Dell EMC Avamar as their backup solution. It is stable.

Dell EMC Avamar is a scalable product.

Technical support for this product is good.

Installing this solution was not easy. It requires engineers with expertise for a successful setup.

Deployment of Dell EMC Avamar is not easy.

We sell Dell EMC Avamar, but we have not sold that many, just several. We've been partners of Dell for a long period of time, so we have the partnership for Dell EMC Avamar, and we can sell it at anytime, but we don't have much expertise on the product. We sell it worldwide and it was not so difficult to sell because it met corporate standards, e.g. for companies in the same level as Ernst & Young, Xerox, Proctor & Gamble, Philips, etc.

We have not been certified to deploy this solution on the Cloud, but we're looking into this.

In general, when you look at the spec sheet for Dell EMC Avamar, it's a very good product.

We're looking forward to trying this product's isolated backup feature.

For the deployment and maintenance of this product, at least two engineers are required. We only have several clients using it, and they received the product from us, but it didn't require installation because the installation was provided remotely by the headquarters.

We sell backup software from Symantec, Dell, and Commvault. Our company doesn't have engineers certified in Dell EMC Avamar, however, because it is a difficult product. There's a lack of customers as well, so we didn't train and we didn't have our engineers certified for it.

Dell EMC Avamar is a product I can recommend to others.

I don't remember exactly the licensing policy for this product. You have to pay for it for three years, then you also have to pay for support after a certain period of time, but I'm unsure.

I'm giving Dell EMC Avamar an eight out of ten, because it's very good, but it's not easy to deploy.