Dell Avamar Reviews

My primary use case is backend storage for our VMs. We are fully virtualized, using VMware for our virtualization layer, and we use multiple VMs for our applications, so we have multiple workloads for the education school information systems. Then we have our ERP and HR systems, and our infrastructure monitoring the networking solutions, and so on. All these VMs are backed up using Avamar.

By bringing in Avamar and keeping the repository on the data domain, we got a very high DDU and high compression and reduction in data size.

The most valuable features are data deduplication and compression, backup and replication, and instant backup, which allows us to restore our data at any given point in time.

There are two areas for improvement I would suggest. First, some integrations are not in place, such as the email alerts, which are not compatible with Office 365 SMTP gateway. Secondly, Avamar has no APS for monitoring or alerting.

I've been using this solution for three years.

Avamar is very stable - we've hardly seen any issues with it. We have had some problems with the virtualization layer but not with the product itself.

It's very scalable. We did face some issues with using multiple applications, but we added a couple of proxies, and it's gone very well since then.

Dell's support is excellent - if any issues occur, we open the case, and the maintenance gets done. The only problem is that sometimes they can be slow to respond.

I previously used Veeam Backup & Replication, but it wasn't very reliable or cost-efficient because there was no deduplication or compression, so we switched to Avamar.

The initial setup was very straightforward and took about a week.

I used a partner involved by the principal vendor, from a company called MDS. They were really professional and were experts on the product.

We have seen huge data reduction and data deduplication and compression, which is very cost-effective and cost-reducing for the company. Overall we've saved around $200,000 when it comes to storage.

Avamar's pricing is quite competitive compared to other vendors. We don't pay any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated Veritas and had previously used Veaam, but when we compared overall cost, integration, stability, and agility, we found Avamar was one of the best.

Before choosing any backup solution, run a use case so that you can evaluate the product and have proof of concept. I would rate Avamar as nine out of ten.

Dell Avamar is a source-based backup solution. It is the best backup solution for people with laptops and desktops from various offices with a small bandwidth. We also use it for remote office backup tasks.

It is one of the best solutions for backing up Oracle and other servers. Our virtual environment backup experience has been good. One of the best features of the solution is that we can integrate it with Data Domain. We can store backups in Data Domain and replicate the data from one Avamar box to another. If one appliance fails, we can get the data from the other Avamar box. The product provides in-line deduplication at the source level. It is very good. I have used the product on VMware and Hyper-V. The tool integrates well with other solutions.

The recovery is a bit slow. There are some security gaps when we take backups of the client machines through the internet in cloud environments. The gaps must be fixed. If I use the tool to take backups through the internet, I have to open ports. It makes the entire IT environment vulnerable.

I have been using the solution for 11 years.

The stability is good.

I rate the product's scalability a five or six out of ten. I bought a license for 1 TB. The pricing was very high when I wanted to expand it to 2 TB or 3 TB. I had to consider alternate solutions to meet my requirements. The scalability is a challenge because of the price. Our clients are medium and enterprise-level businesses.

The support was very good when Avamar was handled by EMC. Since Dell acquired EMC, the support has been very bad.

Neutral

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. For an experienced person, the deployment takes a few hours.

The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a six to seven out of ten.

I will recommend the solution to others. The appliance is good. There are hardly any solutions that can match up to Avamar. It has always stood up to the test whenever we have used it. Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We're using Dell Avamar for data and endpoint protection.

Dell Avamar has many features, and I like that it meets my company's requirements.

I also like that you can use it for client servicing and transmission, plus it has a push upgrade feature that lets you simultaneously push updates to thousands of clients.

I also found the self-service part of Dell Avamar helpful.

Dell Avamar needs improvement on its remote configuration and the recommended action for a particular endpoint, particularly when it has no protection for X number of days.

I want to see a more user-friendly and administrator-friendly Dell Avamar. The solution also needs a better UI and dashboard.

I've been using Dell Avamar for almost seven years.

Dell Avamar has ninety-nine percent stability and reliability. It's the most reliable solution, and I rate its stability as eight out of ten.

Dell Avamar is scalable, so I rate its scalability as eight out of ten.

Dell Avamar provides good technical support, so it's a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

The initial setup for Dell Avamar in terms of complexity is fifty-fifty. The process is not so easy, and it's not so tough. It's a six out of ten, setup-wise.

Deploying the solution took seventy-two hours.

The contract with Dell Avamar included implementation, so my company implemented the solution with the vendor's help.

Dell Avamar, including its virtual add-ons and cloud-based offerings, is cheaper than other solutions, but in the end, the price still depends on your use case.

Price-wise, I'm rating Dell Avamar as six out of ten.

We evaluated NetBackup, Commvault, and Barracuda, but we can't compare Dell Avamar with those other three solutions because we use them for protecting different workloads. For example, we use Dell Avamar for endpoint protection, while NetBackup and Commvault are for server protection.

I'm using Dell Avamar version 19.2.

Four to five people deployed the solution.

Dell Avamar requires regular maintenance. My company has a dedicated team for maintaining the solution daily.

My company has more than sixty thousand Dell Avamar users.

I recommend Dell Avamar to businesses and teams with smaller workloads and accounts. You can use the solution to protect endpoints and servers. Still, Dell Avamar works well on small to midsized environments rather than environments with heavy workloads and complex infrastructure where using it would become more challenging. Dell Avamar now has cloud-based offerings, but I have yet to test the solution on heavy workloads. I'd recommend Dell Avamar for small to midsized environments.

I'd rate Dell Avamar as seven out of ten.

My company is a Dell customer.

The main use of Dell Avamar is as a backup and storage solution. 

Its deduplication technologies are the best in the market, currently. It helps organizations to reduce the storage requirements by eliminating redundant data.

One issue that can be highlighted is the migration challenge. If there is a need to move the data from one backup solution to another, it might be difficult since there is no option for a straightforward migration.

In this company, I've been using this solution for more than five years, but I have previous experience with it as well.

The stability is good. 

It offers scalability for both medium and large enterprises as it is able to handle growing data volumes. I would rate it eight out of ten. 

The initial setup and configuration is a bit complex and it may require vendor support and technical expertise.

I would recommend this solution as a good choice for medium to enterprise-level companies. It might not be beneficial to smaller businesses due to its high cost.

It is a great fit for enterprise-level businesses that are operating with large volumes of data. Compared to other solutions, it provides the best value for the cost.

Overall, I am highly satisfied with Dell Avamar. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Centralization is Avamar's biggest advantage. It moves data to a central location from various geographical locations. 

Avamar needs a greater emphasis on storage targets. If it's going to keep pace with the times, it needs more ability to leverage cloud storage.

We've been using Dell EMC Avamar for 10 years or more.

Avamar is stable.

Avamar is scalable.

Dell EMC support used to be outstanding, but lately, they seem to have dropped the focus, I've noticed. In the past year, the support hasn't been quite the same. I think they're focusing more on other products. In my opinion, they're not giving the same level of focus in terms of support and development to the Avamar-type products.

Installing Avamar is complex. It is complicated to install, configure, and get it working in a complex network. However, it's the same with most data protection products. 

Avamar is expensive.

I would rate Avamar five out of 10 because it lacks cloud capabilities. Two years ago, I would've rated it nine, but these days, I give it a five. Avamar is a good product with a lot of potential, but if Dell isn't willing to put more effort into developing it, my advice would be to look elsewhere. Look at Veeam, Rubrik, or other products in the industry. There are products more suitable for enterprises, especially if they're migrating to the cloud. If they're traditional and have their own data center, I would recommend Avamar. Avamar is a stable, good product if you can justify the cost. If they need something that integrates with the cloud, they should look elsewhere.

I'd recommend Veeam, which does a better job of integrating cloud assets with native storage. It isn't locked into its own specific storage, like your data domain or that sort of thing. The configuration is more straightforward, and it's more cost-effective. Still, the primary reason is that Veeam is ahead of Dell products in the cloud space. These days, most organizations are moving to the cloud, and Veeam seems to be ahead of the game in that space. Dell EMC needs to lower Avamar's price and add more features to stay competitive.

My clients use Avamar to back up VM solutions on VMware's infrastructure.

The fast backup and recovery and the Full Backup features are valuable. When our customers have issues with data loss, Avamar helps them recover data within a few minutes.

Some customers need to back up to tape, but Avamar lacks support, so it costs a lot.

I would like to see backup for container-based applications. Avamar doesn't support container-based backup right now. Dell has a new product called PPDM that they just announced last year, and it has a feature for container-based backup solutions. However, PPDM doesn't support legacy applications like Notes and Domino and some of the high-end databases. Avamar supports all these, including Unix and Linux.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

I rate Dell Avamar's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate Dell Avamar's scalability a ten out of ten. There are over 100 servers, and I have ten companies as clients. One is an enterprise-level business, and the rest are medium-sized businesses.

The initial setup is easy. I rate it a ten out of ten. The time taken to deploy the solution depends on the end customer's environment. If it's complex, we'll need about one day to deploy. The price is quite low because right now, most of the Avamar appliances, like the DP4400, which comes together with Avamar, are ready to use. We just need to put the required IP addresses in the initial stages. After that, it's ready to use. We then just add a host to back up to Avamar. In this case, completing the implementations takes about two to three hours.

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten because it is expensive. I don't think small companies would choose Avamar because the price is high but reasonable for medium-sized companies. Normally, there are no additional costs when we choose the DP4400.

If the customer is a small business, I would not recommend Avamar because of the price. If the customer only wants a simple platform for data protection, though, Avamar is a really good option.

I rate Dell Avamar a ten out of ten.

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.

We use the tool to create backups of every system we have in the infrastructure.

The solution works well. The tool’s ability to restore files discretely is useful. We can restore specific files of a specific server. We do not have to restore everything.

The licensing price must be reduced.

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

The tool is stable.

We have never had any problem with scalability. We have backed up many terabytes of data. We have more than 1000 users. We have a lot of servers and VMs in the company.

When we have any issues, we receive professional support. We get the optimal level of engineering support we require.

Positive

When we moved to PowerProtect, we were very pleased with the performance of the backups of the VMware infrastructure. It was disappointing when we faced difficulties using PowerProtect with SQL. We also faced problems with the infrastructure. We had a lot of files, and PowerProtect could not handle it. So, we switched to Dell Avamar.

The solution is costly. Competitors are less expensive. However, Dell Avamar is the right tool if we want to protect our critical systems and receive proper engineering support.

I will recommend the product to organizations that are providing critical services. The solution requires maintenance. The maintenance is not complex, but we must apply all the required fixes. We must follow the things recommended by the vendor to guarantee that we are aligned with the service provider's guidelines.

People who want to use the solution must find a good partner. The product is good. It must be implemented well. The tool protects us against risks that could cost us millions if we have a problem. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.