Dell Avamar vs ExaGrid EX Series comparison

Dell Technologies and ExaGrid are both solutions in the Deduplication Software category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8, while ExaGrid is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell Technologies holds a 8.9% mindshare in DS, compared to ExaGrid’s 9.4% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ExaGrid users who would recommend it.

Dell Avamar

Read 87 Dell Avamar reviews

3,119 Views
2,197 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

ExaGrid EX Series

Read 6 ExaGrid EX Series reviews

2,788 Views
2,156 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell Avamar

ExaGrid EX Series

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Dell Avamar and ExaGrid EX Series compete in the data backup and recovery market. Dell Avamar often holds an edge in pricing and support, while ExaGrid EX Series stands out for its advanced features and rapid recovery capabilities, appealing to businesses with significant data volume needs.

Features: Dell Avamar offers source-side deduplication, integration with VMware, and efficient data protection, reducing network bandwidth requirements. ExaGrid's features include a landing zone technology for faster backups, an adaptive deduplication for optimal storage use, and scalability that grows with the organization.

Room for Improvement: Dell Avamar can improve by expanding its plugin support, enhancing performance in non-VM environments, and refining its user interface for more intuitive navigation. ExaGrid could enhance its dashboard functionality, improve data deduplication for long-term storage, and streamline processes for even faster initial deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell Avamar is praised for its smooth integration into existing environments and responsive customer support. ExaGrid boasts a straightforward deployment process, facilitated by pre-configured appliances, with customer service noted for its proactive and hands-on approach, ensuring efficient implementation and support.

Pricing and ROI: Dell Avamar is attractive for its lower initial costs, appealing to budget-conscious buyers, with ROI enhanced by storage efficiency and deduplication. Conversely, ExaGrid, with a higher initial investment, justifies its ROI through significantly reduced backup times and enhanced scalability, suitable for businesses focused on long-term growth and performance optimization.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Dell Avamar

Ranking in Deduplication Software

3rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Backup and Recovery (12th)

ExaGrid EX Series

Ranking in Deduplication Software

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Deduplication Software category, the mindshare of Dell Avamar is 8.9%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ExaGrid EX Series is 9.4%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Deduplication Software

Featured Reviews

Sebastien Chene

Senior Business Development Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Sep 30, 2022

Stable, integrates well with other solutions, and has a good price, but its UI needs a refresh

What would make Dell Avamar better is if it can do faster backups because right now, PowerProtect Data Manager is better in this area with its new UI and a new way to implement backups. Customers nowadays also expect more up-to-date solutions, and this is another area for improvement in Dell Avamar. It's not as up-to-date, so I'm counting on PowerProtect Data Manager, but customers who have Dell Avamar don't want to switch because you don't have as many backup problems in Dell Avamar compared to other solutions. What I'd like to see in the next release of Dell Avamar is an updated UI and a different way to manage backups because currently, backup management is a bit heavy for customers using Dell Avamar.

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Daan Lieshout

Server and Storage Specialist at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

Aug 18, 2023

With great features like deduplication and landing zone, the tool also provides stability and scalability

Speed-wise, ExaGrid is much faster than the other solutions in the market. When you choose between or from several different manufacturers, you need to understand a little bit about how the product exactly works and why its speed can be so high while being able to compare it to other solutions, allowing you to know of the backup window if you ever need it. You have to understand how it works and the product's preferences, even though the price may be slightly higher. Learning about the solution is not at all a problem, but when you open a console, you see so many things, and in the beginning you don't understand it all. Later on, it becomes more usable when you start understanding it. In general, ExaGrid provides you with a lot more information than any other system in the market. It is difficult to say what is additionally required in the solution because, presently, it has a lot of things like immutability, anti-hacking, and retention. The solution does put efforts towards improvement. The product's interface provides you with a proper overview of the deduplication rate and the status of how many storage systems you are left with through a visual screen, which is more than enough. When you go deeper, you can access all the enhanced consoles. The product can easily be integrated with third-party products because ExaGrid has all its best practice documents for integrating it with many other products. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"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."

"Dell EMC Avamar has many valuable features. It's very stable and it's easy to manage."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The solution integrates well with Unix, Windows, Hyper-V and VM."

"The function I find most valuable in Dell Avamar is its ability to take differential backups for users. This feature is very effective for both backup and restore operations. We've had multiple cases where we needed to restore files directly from Avamar, and it worked perfectly. The Delta feature, which captures changes in user files, is particularly useful."

"We are talking about a complete end-to-end solution which comes with its own hardware storage to back up the data on tape-less."

"So far, Avamar covers everything we want. We are replicating to other sites for disaster recovery, so it's working well for us."

"The solution is very stable."

More Dell Avamar pros

"It is a solid and a quite simple solution, which is a good combination. The customers like the simplicity and its scale-out capacity. They like the support pricing, and even the extension capacity pricing, a fixed price, which the executive is offering in Czech market."

"The solution easily integrates with the backup targets, such as Veeam."

"The most valuable features of the solution are deduplication and landing zone."

"The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the process is fast, ensuring smooth backup and recovery operations at high speeds. However, the process becomes slower for long-term backups moved to the retention zone due to fragmentation. So, if the data is older than a few days, the speed may be limited, especially for non-deduplicated data in the landing zone."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and data deduplication. It's extremely easy to use and does a very good job of data deduplication and compression."

"One of the main features is the landing zone, it is a particular space where the information is not duplicated."

Cons

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

"It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms."

"Dell hasn't done a good job at handling these upgrades, or the way EMC used to handle them."

"Avamar is not the best tool when it comes to taking Azure backups. Like Commvault, if Avamar can support VM-level backups for the cloud, that would make it a bit better."

"It's very slow to backup and store information. It has two consoles and an application which are more difficult to use than a solution like Veeam."

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

"Technical support should be more knowledgeable."

"The tool's interface is very much in a spreadsheet format...reporting is an area with shortcomings requiring improvement."

More Dell Avamar cons

"The product's documentation can be made more precise."

"When speaking about a scale-out, you want to have better equipment. You cannot just add a disc to the foreign equipment. You have to buy another one and put it together, like parallel."

"I would like for them to develop direct cloud integration with a third-party cloud. Direct integration with AWS and other cloud providers."

"The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against ransomware attacks. As a result, the retention zone with duplicated data is experiencing more demand, leading to space constraints. This necessitates using higher-end, more expensive models to address the issue."

"The one place where we are sometimes losing the opportunity with ExaGrid is that a few customers still require a fiber channel connectivity, which is not always possible."

"The solution could improve by switching to a flash-type solution rather than the spinning drives that they currently use. However, we have not had any failure with the spinning drives. The flash-type drives are more up-to-date and are something that is in their roadmap."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not sure, but perhaps the pricing could be done better at the moment."

"It might not be beneficial to smaller businesses due to its high cost."

"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."

"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."

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

"This solution is less expensive than Veeam for us, although it depends on the customer because we get a great discount."

"Dell Avamar is a moderately priced solution."

"Dell's pricing structure is not overly expensive."

More Dell Avamar pricing and cost advice

"The current agreement has 21 terabytes of free space and it cost approximately $35,000."

"In comparison to other solutions, it's affordable. They're all too expensive."

"The previous solutions I have used both included the Backup Software and the Appliance making it hard to compare to this solution. However, overall the solution is reasonably priced for the features you receive. ExaGrid EX Series is priced better than HP, Dell, and possibly Commvault which I have compared in the past."

"My company had to pay 1,60,000 EUR for the system we use, and the payment was made just once for the system and five years of full support."

"I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC Avamar?

The pricing from Dell Avamar and Dell NetWorker side has been based predominantly on front-end terabytes. That is the option that we have been dealing with, and the front-end terabytes basically sa...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell Avamar?

Easy to configure and highly reliable for backup.

See all answers

What do you like most about ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ExaGrid EX Series?

I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against r...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Avamar

Compared 29% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Avamar

Compared 17% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Avamar

Compared 13% of the time

Rubrik vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs Dell Avamar

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell Avamar Competitors

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 51% of the time

HPE StoreOnce vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 28% of the time

Quantum DXi Series vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 9% of the time

Veritas NetBackup Appliance vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs ExaGrid EX Series

Compared 4% of the time

More ExaGrid EX Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar

November 2024

Download Dell Avamar product report

Buyer's Guide

ExaGrid EX Series

November 2024

Download ExaGrid EX Series product report

Also Known As

Avamar

EX Series

Learn More

Dell Technologies

Video not available

ExaGrid

Overview

Dell Avamar data protection software delivers flexible and efficient backup and recovery operations that can scale from daily backup protection for endpoints to high-performance protection for large enterprises with diverse applications and workloads. With application consistent recovery, automation and fast backup and restores, Avamar can help you meet your SLAs and optimize your backup and recovery processes

If you are deploying all or part of your backup environment to the cloud, Avamar enables you to make the most of your cloud investment, enabling replication, disaster recovery and long-term retention for customers using AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Avamar is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. Avamar is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

The ExaGrid EX Series hyper-converged secondary storage for backup product line consists of eight appliance models. Each appliance is sized for a full backup and for long-term retention. Any ExaGrid appliance can be mixed and matched in the same scale-out system with any other size or age appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need as they need it. This pay-as-you-grow model allows up to 25 appliances in a single scale-out system.

Sample Customers

Dodge County, St Laurence's College, FieldCore (a GE Company), Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Getronics, Lewisville Independent School District, EnvisionRxOptions, Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions

NCI Group, North Attleborough Public School, North Kingstown School Department, NPS Pharmaceuticals, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Rathbone Brothers PLC, Rio Hondo College, Ruder Finn, Sarah Lawrence College

Buyer's Guide

Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

October 2024

Free Report: Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Avamar vs. ExaGrid EX Series and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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