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Dell Avamar pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

3.8 out of 5

89 reviews
87% willing to recommend

3,244 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Dell Avamar offers robust source-based deduplication and scalability, effectively reducing backup windows and bandwidth needs. High compression ratios ensure reliable enterprise-level operations, while integration with Data Domain enhances capabilities for VM stacks. Instant recovery and centralized automation streamline processes. However, improvements in desktop-laptop backups, flexibility in licensing, compatibility with Hyper-V, and integration with third-party platforms are needed. The discontinuation of the hardware version impacts appliance-based users.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Source-based deduplication drastically reduces the backup window.

High compression ratios with integration to Data Domain enhance performance compared to other backup software.

Backups and recovery are extremely fast and reliable.

Excellent integration capabilities with Unix, Windows, Hyper-V, and VM environments.

Push upgrade feature allows simultaneous updates to thousands of clients.

CONS

Desktop-laptop backups and backup over the WAN need improvement.

Licensing model is not very flexible and requires an upgrade with increased storage size.

Configuration and expansion are complicated and don't integrate well.

Lacks support for tape backups, increasing costs.

Reporting features need significant improvement and are too basic.

Dell Avamar Pros review quotes

Administreator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Aug 16, 2024

It is a cost-effective solution.

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RO

Unix Architect at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 2, 2021

Every product is good and bad, but its claim to fame is that it is scalable. We're doing more than 3,000 VMs. Every single night a complete image backup to disks and replication are easily done in under four hours.

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Rahul Sarangdhar

Senior Specialist at LTI - Larsen & Toubro Infotech

Jan 30, 2023

For the on-prem backup, it has all the necessary features that we require. They keep coming up with new scripts and new updates.

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Manager IT at Shriram Pistons

Feb 22, 2024

Easy to configure and highly reliable for backup.

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reviewer1688637

Senior Engineer, Disaster Recovery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2021

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.

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Cloud and Data Center Consultant at MUNISYS

Dec 16, 2022

It is a very complete product.

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Manager IT at Shriram Pistons

Oct 28, 2021

The product has a proven track record of good backups without much of a failure ratio. It also has a good backup in terms of the compression ratio.

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reviewer1645866

VP Global Infrastructure at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 13, 2021

The most valuable features are scalability and integration.

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Group Technology Services Senior Manager at a hospitality company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 3, 2024

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.

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AP

Project Engineer at Concept Information Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.

Dec 8, 2022

The setup is very easy.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 81)

Dell Avamar Cons review quotes

Administreator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Aug 16, 2024

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

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RO

Unix Architect at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 2, 2021

It is very scalable, and that's its claim to fame, but that also makes it hard to make changes. Anytime there is a large piece of software, changing that piece of software is harder. You've got a larger install base, so you can't just rapidly change. We also use another product called Veeam, and it has this new feature called Continuous Data Protection, which basically lets you get very close to the way the system was in time. We have a system or two up there on which we have set 10 minutes Continuous Data Protection. So, we can roll it back to whatever it was 10 minutes ago, 20 minutes ago, or 30 minutes ago. This feature doesn't exist in Avamar Data Domain. That's the one feature I'd like to see first.

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Rahul Sarangdhar

Senior Specialist at LTI - Larsen & Toubro Infotech

Jan 30, 2023

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.

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Free Report: Dell Avamar Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell Avamar. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Manager IT at Shriram Pistons

Feb 22, 2024

The UI is quite old. We've been using this UI since last year, and they haven't changed it. It would be better to update the UI periodically and create attractive dashboards from an administrative point of view.

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reviewer1688637

Senior Engineer, Disaster Recovery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2021

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.

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Cloud and Data Center Consultant at MUNISYS

Dec 16, 2022

We'd like to see something that could also work with Unix servers and physical servers to have a unified solution that works with everything.

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Manager IT at Shriram Pistons

Oct 28, 2021

The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive.

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reviewer1645866

VP Global Infrastructure at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 13, 2021

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

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Group Technology Services Senior Manager at a hospitality company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 3, 2024

Reporting in Dell Avamar needs improvement. The current reporting tool is very basic, and you have to dig deep into each function to get the information you need. For example, getting the status of failed and succeeded backups is very difficult in Avamar compared to Veeam. As for additional functionality, I would suggest improving WAN optimization. It's very important for getting offline or off-site backups. It should also include a tool to check for ransomware which would be beneficial. If a backup is vulnerable to ransomware, there should be a way to detect it, like using ARR rules to ensure your backup is ransomware-free. I haven't had any experience integrating Dell Avamar with AI solutions. It’s also a good point that Avamar doesn't offer such integrations, which is an area where Dell could improve.

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AP

Project Engineer at Concept Information Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.

Dec 8, 2022

The support is very bad.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 82)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Backup and Recovery

Deduplication Software

Popular Comparisons

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Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Avamar

Commvault Cloud vs Dell Avamar

Rubrik vs Dell Avamar

Zerto vs Dell Avamar

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