Dell Avamar Reviews

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.

We are system integrators. We resell, we deploy, and we support our clients.

Dell EMC Avamar is very good with endpoint backups.

This solution is approximately 10 to 20 years old. The technology behind it is very good but the trends are increasing and Avamar and NetWorkers are outdated.

They brought in vProtect solutions, called it PPDM, and rebranded it.

In my opinion, they should destroy all of their products and create them from scratch.

The technology is behind and they have millions of codes. I think that it should be recreated or they should hire another backup and archive company.

The UI is not easy to use. There are other products such as Veeam that are easy to use for the end-user, which is why they are moving away from Avamar or Networker.

Recently, they recreated the HTML 5 interface, and it has abilities but it is not mature yet.

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

The technical support was great.

I created a ticket and it was resolved.

Previously, I used Acronis, Veeam, and Commvault.

Most use Veeam because it's a new product with cloud capabilities and the interface is easy to use.

When it comes to competition the price is not what is important, it's not the problem.

Our company is competent in Dell products. My colleagues and I have over ten years of experience with NetWorker and Avamar.

I used to be an assistant consultant. Now, I'm working as a solution architect. I'm a bit far away from technical solutions.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

It was initially used for remote office, branch office backups, but eventually, it started to be used for small and large data centers.

The data reduction feature and the ease of enabling a server in a DR location are the most valuable. 

Its ability to back up very large objects can be improved. In terms of new features, they can include the ability to use cloud services, like S3, more natively.

I have been using this solution for 15 years. 

It has good stability.

It has good scalability, which is a good thing for VMware infrastructures. I see it mostly being used in midsize environments or focused on VMware infrastructure backups. It does a great job there. The negative of this solution is that it certainly wouldn't cover a super large enterprise where they have other tool needs. You probably won't use it for the entire data center or for large Oracle or SQL backups.

I don't interact with them a lot. I would summarize them as being average.

Initially, it was pretty complex to install, but it got easier over the years. It is still not the easiest of all tools to install. It certainly is not as easy to install as Veeam. It is probably comparable to a Commvault in terms of installation difficulty.

Licensing was generally on a per VM or terabyte basis. They changed their licensing model a couple of times and turned it into socket-based licensing, which is an improvement in their licensing model.

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

We deal with data that has compliance requirements for long-term retention, which is like 10 years plus the life of the client. As long as they're in our program, we have to keep anything related to them for that time period, which can run up to 30 years. We deal with all things related to that. I'm a storage management specialist and we are customers of Dell. 

I like that the solution integrates well with the different platforms that we have. Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM. Not all the solutions do that. 

My biggest thing for improvement would be support for either Azure Cool Storage or AWS Glacier. Right now they don't do that. They don't have official works for those peer solutions. It should go hand-in-hand with the solution. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

We've used up the space quicker than intended. We do have some growth available in the existing appliance. We're still in the process of migrating some of that data into the cloud. The big benefit of the cloud is that you can have it stored in disparate data centers that are in different regions of the country and it meets compliance requirements because it's in two physical locations that are apart. So it allows us then to totally remove it from our local copy. I do the deployment and maintenance. 

Technical support has been good, occasionally there are issues with the accents so a lot of times it's better with a chat session or typing messages versus a call. It's a very formalized process. It's virtualized now. So it's a little different than the old two physical boxes.

Moving from old to new was not as smooth as I would have expected, simply because we had to upgrade our local storage. Going forward we won't have those issues. We had just the formats and Avamar supports their own format and stores it locally. They also have the data domain which doesn't really migrate from app bar to data domain so you have to basically hydrate it and then we re-back it up to go on the data bank, which was our issue. They use their ADME product do that migration. Basically, they get their technicians involved and it took several months.

The system was sold on the premise that it was going to reduce man-hours and not require having to work with tape. I don't think it was a cost saving. Now with the cloud tier implemented, there are some long-term benefits, but I don't know if there was ever a cost benefit associated with it. It's just anytime you're having to have a dedicated internet connection or net for just simple tap operations, that's something that adds costs.

The old version didn't have a comprehensive search. It was one of my pain points with the product when it came to restores. That has now been included so I'd recommend this solution with the all-in-one solutions that they have with their data protection units - that's how I'd recommend it be deployed.  

With the DP 4,400 which includes Avamar, data domain search, and backup management, I'd rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for virtual infrastructure.

The duplication is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is actually moving over to a new PowerProtect solution. I'm not sure, in terms of the roadmap, how long they'll have Avamar and NetWorker as they have now launched a new PowerProtect backup solution.

Therefore, the concern really is what the future will be with another product. Will we have to migrate, for example, and will it be easy or hard to do so?

It would be helpful if there was cloud support.

I've been using the solution for about eight years now. It's been a while.

We've been happy with the stability. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy. It's been good.

The scalability is limited right now. A company shouldn't expect to be able to expand it too much. That may be just the case in general for the kind of software it is.

We typically work to size accordingly to avoid having to make upgrades.

The support is okay. They are pretty knowledgable and prompt. I'd rate them seven out of ten overall. We're mostly satisfied with their level of service.

We actually used to use Veritas. We got rid of Veritas Symantec NetBackup because it couldn't do all the deduplication we needed and didn't have all of the features that Avamar has. The support was also very bad. We were happy to switch to something else.

The initial setup is not complex. Implementation is pretty straightforward.

We had Dell assist us a bit in the implementation process.

I'm not sure how to calculate the cost. It's a hard question to answer. I do know that we pay for support upfront for five years.

I'm not sure how to compare costs, however, I can say that based on what we're seeing we get very good deduplication rates with the data domain on the backend.

We did briefly look at another solution, however, we decided not to move forward with it.

We're currently just customers with Dell. We don't have a business relationship with them.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the solution as there's a new solution that will be replacing it. However, it's not a bad solution as it stands.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a pretty decent product.

As solution providers, we provide solutions to meet the objectives and goals of customers. We provide a general global architecture and the right solution that will solve a customer's problem and meet the goal at the fixed cost. If the customer doesn't mention a specific provider, then to meet the goal, we use the provider that we have to.

It's a good solution.

The management of this solution is a little bit difficult for IT administrators. They have to be trained before going through the system. 

We have been using Dell EMC Avamar for two to three years. 

We haven't worked on the extension or scalability of Dell EMC Avamar. We didn't find it fairly straight forward. When we have to upgrade or scale it, a lot of things don’t fit.

Dell EMC Avamar is hard to manage because of the support. It’s very difficult to get support. Our solution is complex which makes it more difficult to get an answer from them. We have multiple vendors in our environment. Support only looks at their own solution and not the solution as a whole. It would be easier if our whole infrastructure was Dell EMC. It’s very difficult to get help with troubleshooting. When you have an architecturally multiple-vendor solution, like we do, it’s hard to find a solution to the problem. It’s normal that they only focus on the part that corresponds to their company, but I would like for them to look at the environment as a whole.

I did not find the setup to be fairly straightforward. There are a lot of things that don’t fit when we try to upgrade or scale it. We have to break every chain and reduce it from scratch.

It's difficult to manage the Dell EMC Avamar template, so we try to avoid that program. The return process, when there was no space and we had to create some space, was very time-consuming. There are solutions that are simpler than Dell EMC Avamar.

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

From my IT experience, there are much simpler solutions than Dell EMC Avamar for management and recovery. Dell EMC Avamar would not be my first choice.

The deduplication feature is the best aspect of the solution.

The solution is always coming up with new features year over year. They are consistently updating their offering to continuously offer better and broader functionality in their product.

By using a single software you can do a back up of all of your servers as their products have several virtual servers. That's the benefit of going with the Dell EMC set up.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability of the solution is very good.

Technical support has always been very helpful.

The solution is not very strong on the Cloud. They should work out how they can use this as a backup as a service.

I've been using the solution for seven years now.

The solution is quite reliable. The stability is good. We haven't had any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't seem to crash or freeze.

The solution is very scalable. It's not a problem to grow the solution out if you need to.

Multiple people in our firm are using it.

Technical support is excellent. We're very satisfied with the level of support we get. They're great at responding.

We previously used a variety of other solutions before landing on EMC.

The initial setup is not complex. It's very straightforward. I'd describe the process as simple. It doesn't take to long to set up.

We're partners with Dell EMC.

We are using the latest version of the solution, although I don't know what the version number is.

I would recommend the solution. The solution is great. There are very little improvements needed on the solution, aside from better cloud improvements. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

The integration with host domains is very good.

The backup and recovery speed is very fast.

We have had issues with performing backups in our hybrid environment.

I would like to see better integration with third-party applications and platforms.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for one year.

Stability seems good, where you can extend to the cloud from the computer.

I think that Avamar is a scalable solution. We have four people in the company who use it.

We are satisfied with technical support from Dell EMC. There is also support available in the community.

It will take a few hours to deploy, including the configuration.

This is a good product and I recommend it. Overall, I would say that Avamar is great for me.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.