Dell Avamar Reviews

The primary use case is for remote office or branch office type protection.

We don't have a current instance. It is pretty old. We have tried desperately to decommission Avamar.

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.

It is expensive. It is more about cost than it is about anything else. 

If you need to pull data out of it to offload to tapes, that's messy. You have a mechanism for it, but it is painful.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

Once you're in the product, and the product is running, it does a really good job.

It is node-based, so you can add nodes as you need. It is pretty scalable.

The people who supported it did a very good job. If it gets messed up, it is not easy to fix, but on a day-to-day basis, it just runs like a tank of gas.

They were all set up when I got here.

It is expensive. Its cost is the main thing.

My advice would be to compare costs to other solutions and also look at the virtual appliance version of it.

I would rate Dell EMC Avamar a six out of 10.

We are system integrators who are selling backup solutions, and Dell EMC Avamar is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

I had come across it for backing up laptops and VMware but previously, I have had clients using it to backup system machines like AIX, Solaris, and others. Slowly, people are moving away from those.

Using Avamar for VM backup is pretty good, but we've used it for other purposes as well.

It works quickly and is very stable.

The screen design is a bit back-dated.

The reports are not very presentable.

The price of this product should be lower.

We have been working with Dell EMC Avamar for a few years.

This is a very stable product.

Avamar is quite scalable.

With respect to technical support, sometimes you get a good technician or a good engineer, and you can get the problem resolved pretty fast. If on the other hand, you get someone with a very heavy accent then you can speak for three hours and not understand what the other is trying to say.

We work with quite a number of backup products including Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Backup Exec, Dell EMC Networker, Dell EMC Avamar, and Rubrick.

The choice of product that I recommend depends on the situation and what the customer is saying. If they are not happy with one then I can suggest others that are good, too.

If my customer is already using an existing product then I will not recommend that they switch unless there are serious problems. If there is some heavy restructuring, for instance, because a previous person knew the environment very well, it will be difficult to take over. It is best if they have something very simple to manage.

In general, it is not easy to switch from one backup platform to another because of incompatibility.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Dell EMC Avamar is that it's always good to have a plan first. You want to know exactly what you have on-hand that you need to back up.

Overall, this is a good product. The stability and backup speed are very good but the GUI and reports are not something that a new user can get used to.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Data backup is our primary usage of the solution. 

I am impressed by the ease of troubleshooting due to the internal database. You can get a lot of information from the backup jobs and that is very useful. For example, the program has a very nice importer called Clientele Activity.

Sometimes when you run backups for products, you will get the information about the backups - some successful some unsuccessful. You also often get information about some clients who don't run any data backups. So from a troubleshooting point of view, it offers valuable information that you can work on. 

There are some limitations on the backups and the databases so I think that needs a little improvement. The client caches and deduplication system have a few problems.

The solution is stable as long as you are very careful when you shut down and start up. If you will do everything according to the rules, everything will be okay. But if you make a mistake or shut down the wrong way, or install something the wrong way, you will have some problems. The system is a little sensitive about things that are not done correctly. If you follow the rules, the system will pay you very well. If you do not follow the rules, you will have some troubles.

The program has something called RAIN, and RAIN is the head of the systems, that hosts computers that work together. This RAIN has some limitations on the number of nodes you can put it together to make something like the cloud computer for which something can be seen as a great computer. The second thing is that Avamar has many internal things checking the consistency of the data.

And from this point of view, you sometimes get some mutations on the performance miles and the composite. You can overcome this by using Data Domain. If you add the Data Domain to the system, then you'll see stuff that can be seen as a kind of management system by Avamar, stored back in the Data Domain. It's a beautiful component.

Because I am the inspector at our company I simply call my global instructor or another linked instructor if I need something checked. So I've never used the technical team.

We used Omniverge for some time, but at that time the cost became too high so we switched to Avamar. If you look at the backup and database of Avamar, it stands out above the rest. 

The initial setup was complex and it was very hard to implement that in Avamar itself because there were about 500 pages you had to go through. It was a nightmare. It was 18 years ago so it will probably be easier now. I did the deployment myself but I can't remember how long that took.

Before you start using this program, you must know that you can't do everything with Avamar. There are some limitations like the size of the database. 

One lesson I've learned from working with Avamar is that you must follow the rules. Often people do not follow the rules for different products. Some products are very forgiving and you don't need to strictly follow the rules, but with Avamar, you have to follow the rules. You have to read the manual, you have to really know what you are doing, especially when you do the first implementation.

The product is good for backups but if you look at the analytics, I would like to say that there is a possibility to improve the caches or to do something with the application process on the clients' side, and back-ups for the bigger objects like the databases of the processing systems. 

I rate this product 8.5. It could be nine, but it has a few limitations. 

We use Dell EMC Avamar for backing up the data on the endpoint devices of the users.

The performance of Dell EMC Avamar is good.

I have been using Dell EMC Avamar for approximately 

The stability could improve, a lot of scheduled backups failed at one time.

We have approximately 5,000 users using the solution in my organization.

The support from Dell EMC Avamar was decent.

The initial setup is complex.

We used a consultant to do the implementation of the solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell EMC Avamar a seven out of ten.

We sell Avamar with Data Domain. Data Domain and Avamar work really well together and their compression ratios are very high compared to Veeam, Commvault, and all the other backup software on the market.

The price is the main thing I'd like to see them change. If they can come down in price, that would be a good thing. It's very cost-competitive in the entry-level range because Veeam pricing is much cheaper than Avamar.

I think they could also move more towards cloud solutions. It already has some cloud tiering, but I think that could be more extensive. They should work with all cloud providers and I think in the future they will be on all cloud platforms.

The stability is really good. We have no complaints. Everybody who has Data Domain with Avamar sticks with it. We have not seen anybody leave once they go in.

Scalability is good. Data is getting expanded rapidly, so it really needs scalability and it was scalable. Of course, it did not support the data explosions that we had because of unstructured stuff and other complications. Now, there's a new product called Data Protector for that, which is scalable as well. It can scale out as well. The only thing with this solution is 60 terabytes is the starting point, which is a good high-end solution. I hope they will come back with an entry-level version for that as well.

Technical support was announced a few months ago and we are still on the learning curve.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

You need to work with a specialist and EMC is a very huge company now. If, however, you go and talk to the right person who knows Avamar and data protection stuff, they can help you price the solution perfectly. That's not something that you should take for granted. There are so many tools available to do a proper sizing.

I would rate Avamar as six out of ten. I would like to give it a seven or eight, but the price is too high. It depends on who wants this solution. For enterprise companies, I can rate it as eight or nine. For entry-level companies, I would say it's a six, or perhaps even lower, like a four, because the price point is very high compared to other companies.

File level, backup and recovery of data stored on AIX, Linux, and Windows server to Data Domain storage.

The product works. It does, however, require a significant amount of handholding from support. The support is good, but we should not have to reach out to them so often. 

File level, SQL Server and NDMP (NetApp) backups. Both backup and recovery work well for all three types of data.

• Stability has improved since we first started using it, but it still has a ways to go. The systems also collect metadata that builds over time. It will build until it cannot build anymore and fills up your nodes. I have plenty of space on my Data Domain, but I'm running out of space on the nodes due to metadata creep.
  

• It could also benefit from a web-based UI. The Java UI is clunky at best.
  

The tool's most valuable features are backup management and speed. 

We don't trust the product 100 percent. Kaspersky has many features Dell Avamar doesn't support, such as granular backup and history. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

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

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. 

Getting support in Portuguese is difficult. We have to speak to the team in English. Not everyone on our team speaks English. 

Neutral

We used Kaspersky before Dell Avamar. 

Dell Avamar's deployment is easy. 

We don't deploy the product ourselves. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. It saves time than money. 

Dell Avamar is expensive. 

I rate Dell Avamar an eight out of ten. 

Dell Avamar is integrated with data protection and data domain. We have integrated it with vCenter and a couple of virtual machines from Dell Avamar to the data protection sources.

I found the most valuable features of Dell Avamar are the user-friendly interface and ease to use. Our clients have administrated this software and there is no additional training required.

We ordered training materials for the solution and it has been very helpful for installation, troubleshooting, and upgrading.

Dell Avamar could improve by adding more backup features.

I have been using Dell Avamar for approximately one year.

Dell Avamar is stable.

The scalability of Dell Avamar is good.

There is a Dell EMC partner that we use for support. When we have a problem we create a support case for the Dell EMC support team and they help us promptly.

The initial setup of Dell Avamar was easy. We deployed the data protection, we the configuration for the IP address. After the deployment, we only had to configure the vCenter, add vCenter to systems, and configure policies for backup jobs.

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

The solution is not difficult to maintain.

We have integrated all backup solutions into the Dell Avamar system. It's very easy and when we have a problem we always communicate with Dell EMC. 

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell Avamar a ten out of ten.