Dell Avamar Reviews

We use it for our desktops and laptops end-users. We have a network in place for server backup and archive.

I have not yet explored this solution in its entirety. Maybe six months down the line, I will be able to tell you about this solution with more confidence.

I believe it is a good backup and recovery solution based on our limited experience in the short period we have been using it.

It is easy to use.

More integration would be helpful, as well as the addition of more applications.

The technical support should be improved. They could be more responsive in the future.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for six months.

I assume we're using the most recent version because it was just installed by our implementation team.

In order to make an opinion, we must compare the performance to established benchmarks. We are still working on it, and we're still evolving.

Scalability is determined by the number of licenses purchased. Only a few have been accepted.

We have approximately, 100 users, but we have plans to expand very soon.

We may have some remote offices set up, in the near future.

We experienced a problem with the network backup installation, so we called technical support. One of the backups failed continuously.

We were not exactly satisfied with the turnaround time. It was an issue that was unique for them to resolve, but we were not able to assistance instantly.

The support could be better.

When you consider the hardware involved, the initial setup was not straightforward.

In the beginning, there were a lot of trials and errors to suit our exact requirements. Our installation was the standard that most normally have.

This solution was not installed by us. We agreed that the implementation team would complete the installations.

Licensing fees are paid annually.

I am not sure if the fees are comparable; I would like to compare them to other solutions.

We have Data Domain and network backup software.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar, an eight out of ten.

The implementation is very easy. It's not difficult to set up at all.

The product is very powerful and offers very good performance.

Compared with Cohesity or Rubrik, which have some continuous data protection for backup and replication, this solution tends to lack in this area. 

When we propose this solution to a customer, the customer always asks us "Okay, can I have backup plus replication as well?". The performance backup, I know it's good, however, some customers ask about the backup plus replication, continuous data protection, or something like that. That's where it falls short.

Avamar should help protect against ransomware or maybe offer some sort of monitoring. It would be great if they had monitoring protection from the ransomware added into the overall offering.

Some customers are asking about an appliance model. It would be nice if they offered that.

I've been using the solution for the last two years. I have a bit of experience with the solution at this point.

The solution is quite stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. We've found the stability to be very good overall.

The solution scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to do so quite easily. It's not a problem.

We've used technical support quite a bit and have always been satisfied with the level of support that they've provided to us. They're very helpful and responsive.

We also use Dell NetWorker.

The implementation is very simple. It's not complex. A company shouldn't have any problems setting up the solution.

We're Dell partners. We have a business relationship with the company.

While we work with newer versions of the solution, we tend not to use the latest one. We try not to deploy the latest so we can avoid any issues. We're likely on version 19.1 which we've used since last year. We upgraded from 7.5.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's been a pretty good experience overall.

This product is very easy to use. The interface is easier to use than other backup solutions. The product is mature and can handle all of our data protection.

The simplicity of use and the ease of updating physical client software is one of the best features.

• Image level backups
• Replication for DR
• Almost instant access restores
• The access to the logs for each backup allows for easy troubleshooting.

It would be nice to have a truly native SQL backup solution. All of our DBAs are looking for a truly native solution. They are satisfied with the current solution but would really like a truly native solution like the Oracle RMAN solution. What we mean by true Native solution, is that no Data Protection product has a true MS Native solution to protecting data. What we have been doing for years is have the DBA script in the Native MS to do a dump of the DB to a file. Then the backup solution would come behind and pick up those dumps. Then the DBA would have to request a restore of the dump files, and then use a script to pull that information. Where with RMAN, the DBA can write a script to backup and restore directly to the Avamar. It is a much cleaner and less costly solution. With the SQL dump and scape, we need so much MORE storage space to help them keep all of their data protected.

This product is very stable. We have never had any outages and the support for this product is very good.

This product can grow with your company. We selected this solution as it allows us to keep the existing data domains that we used for our previous solution. We have the ability to add more storage to the existing DDs or to add another as needed.

Like any other company, many of the support calls go to places on the other side of the world. It is sometimes difficult to understand them. I found that the support that was given was very good. I usually choose to receive support via Webex and email due to the communication challenges you get with offshore support.

We used to have Veeam and NetBackup. We moved to Avamar as it had more features; it helped reduce the number of environments we had to support. It also reduced the amount of time we spend on upgrades. It simplified our total data protection and reduced the number of clients that were required to be installed.

The initial set up was very straightforward.

We used a combination as we have some people who are new to the Avamar product.

The set up is really easy. They have a virtual edition for smaller environments, and the documentation for doing the install is really good. For larger environments, the PS group works directly with you on the install and setup for new customers. The cost was actually cheaper than any of the other solutions we looked at.

We looked at a variety of other products. One of the main reasons we selected Avamar was the fact that they have support for physical servers running Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX. We have a large enough physical environment that we needed the ability to protect them.

Our primary use case for Dell Avamar is for backup purposes.

The most valuable feature for me in Dell Avamar is the automation, which is good for completion.

In my opinion, the user interface and the user friendliness could be improved. The specific thing I have in mind are the graphics, which are not quite user-friendly.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

My impression is that this product is quite stable.

I think this is not an easily scalable solution as it's on-premises for us and adding more space would cost a lot of money.

I would rate the technical support of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

My impression is that the initial setup process is difficult.

We had people from Dell do the installation for us.

Regarding other people trying to use this solution, I'd say that it all depends on their budget as it's too expensive for small environments.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Dell EMC Avamar is a very complex product. It took a lot of time for the IT admins to get trained on how to use it. It is not very user-friendly, and we won't be using Avamar anymore.

It needs a lot of improvement in terms of how the backups have been configured, and the reporting is too complex. There are a lot of improvements that should be done in the reporting feature and how the endpoints are getting added to the console. These processes need to be a little more simplified. It is not that easy to get an immediate report based on our requirements. It is too complex. We have to write some scripts and things like that. There are predefined scripts, but they aren't very user-friendly for the customer.

We have been using this product for more than six years.

The stability is okay.

If you want to scale up again, you have to buy a complete appliance. There is no option for just scaling up for the mid-phase entities. Only the larger entities would be able to afford that kind of complete appliance scalability. In terms of scalability, I'm not a fan of Avamar.

We haven't used Veeam before, but we are currently replacing Avamar with Veeam now. We are still in the process of switching.

The cost is high.

I would rate this product 5 out of 10.

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. 

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.