What needs improvement with Dell Avamar?

The only concern is the cost. The price is a little bit higher than we would like. Many people prefer to use something like Veeam as it is cheaper compared to Avamar.

In terms of manageability, I would like to improve the product. The tool's interface is very much in a spreadsheet format. It doesn't have a subsystem structure around it with its own command sets and subshells that it works with. To tell you the truth, Dell Avamar is used as a backup, and the way it is currently used in our environment is very static. We have a subset of clients for it, so we actually outsourced to another subsidiary of the business to do it for them on their behalf. If I think widely about it, reporting is an area with shortcomings requiring improvement.

Without the proper setup, we cannot perform immediate or virtual machine backups; only high-level backups are possible. If Avamar could be upgraded to support immediate backups, it would be a significant improvement. Compared to other solutions, like Teams, which enables virtual machine-level backups, Avamar handles these tasks with more limitations.

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.

The licensing price must be reduced.

A huge storage space needs to be bought with Dell Avamar, even when it's unnecessary for an organization. The upgrades of the solution are highly time-consuming; it takes 10 to 12 hours to upgrade Dell Avamar or Dell IDPA. The aforementioned upgrade arrives once a year, but it takes an entire day in our company.

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.

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.

The solution used to freeze sometimes while taking a snapshot backup. The team had to do some back-end work to fix those issues.

The only missing component is the option for bare-metal backup. Performance can sometimes be affected when tools are utilized for tasks like backup or deep archiving.

The challenges we do face typically revolve around aligning specific features with our accustomed tool usage.

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

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.

This solution could improve by introducing daily verifications and another repository.

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.

The bare-metal restores could be improved. The scalability could also be improved, but Avamar is going to be phased out soon.

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.

The product could be improved by simplifying the components available. Currently, there are many endpoints and GUIs to run.

Dell Avamar could improve by adding more backup features.

It cannot replicate the backup, it can only do the backup. If you want to replicate you need RecoveryPoint. Avamar cannot back up Nutanix as a virtual solution.

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.

If you don't have DPA, the reporting features are not as user-friendly, so reporting is something that they can improve on.

The performance takes up a lot of resources, unfortunately. We'd like it to be less heavy.

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. For future releases, Avamar should improve on the compression speed of their backups. This is a core feature of a backup and restore solution. The interface of Avamar could also be improved but this is something they are working on. In comparison, you don't need to wait three hours to restore Veeam.

We have had a lot of problems with the Dell EMC Avamar solution. The snapshots are not being erased after backup. The solution could improve by having better reports about the errors in the software.

Setup and deployment of Dell EMC Avamar is complex. It requires expert engineers. Making its setup easier is something that could be improved.

Avamar's user interface could use some work. When we open a ticket, they are working with Linux commands. It's not easy to manage everything through the web interface. I would like to do everything through the interface that you can do with Linux commands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution could be a bit easier to use in the sense that they need to make it simpler to backup products and restore items.

Overall, the solution is good right now. I can't think of where I have seen any missing features. The solution, in the future, should offer support for mobile.

The user interface still needs to have some level of improvement. It could be more user-friendly and intuitive. The reporting aspect of the product could be better. For example, I'd like to have reports on the daily failure of systems. If I have more than 1000 systems, if I want to know that how many systems failed yesterday, I'd like to be able to pull that information in a single click.

Avamar does not offer the tape-out, meaning that what a person backs up can only be kept on a disc based appliance, one which is supplied by Avamar. The tape lacks connectivity, which means that if a customer wishes to take tape-out, Avamar is not a fit. He must look for a networker which offers up to tape. The solution should improve its tape-connectivity features.

The UI is a complete mess. It is graphic, but it might as well be a CLI considering how difficult it is to work with. It takes an entire person and a significant amount of time to manage backups within the company. It really shouldn't be that hard. 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. There should be some kind of greater granularity in the way it is storing backups. The reason why we're using things like Zerto and going to Cohesity, at least in the DR environment, and this will work in terms of backups as well, is that we need to be able to have a recovery point objective with some kind of granularity, such as every 15 minutes, every half hour, or every hour in case of a disaster recovery scenario, ransomware scenario, etc. We're pretty much allowed to do our once-in-a-day backup every 24 hours or however we schedule them. In most cases, we don't do anything different for basic backups, but it seems very difficult within Avamar to do anything if we want to have an image of a system every so often or at least an incremental point of reference or an RPO point. The other thing is that the way that it locks files seems to make those systems unavailable while it is operating the backup. So, we have to very carefully schedule our backups after hours or over periods of time when there is low bandwidth of the transactions happening. With the other products we have, we don't have this problem. I certainly don't have that problem with Zerto. I've got a recovery point of every few seconds, and it doesn't seem to take a lot of storage room to do that. Storage is a big thing for us. It is very expensive, and that's always an issue for us. So, things like deduplication would be really nice to have.

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.

The initial setup could be a bit simpler. An offload to tape would be a great additional feature. The audit people ask for data to be put somewhere else in another location to have a gap between backup data and tape, but the Avamar solution only backs up on Avamar store.

The solution could improve by having better integration and more flexibility.

The problems are, that it has issues with support. Dell has issues in that area. I think the other problem is, that when we've had to do upgrades, it's a bit problematic. Dell hasn't done a good job at handling these upgrades, or the way EMC used to handle them. EMC was very thorough and if you got a piece of software that you had to upgrade, you knew that it had been thoroughly tested and it was going to work well. We have had issues with the consistency and the reliability of the code that is coming out for upgrades and enhancements.

The solution should offer a better data domain. It would be helpful if the product offered more integration potential.

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. It can maybe have customized automatic routing. We have a Cisco ACI network. It is like a point-to-point network for everything, even multiple locations. It is flat, and that confuses Avamar Data Domain because it changes underneath Data Domain. It has some problems. They could do a little bit more on having an adaptable network or what's called a dynamic route network where it can be given a route and not care about it, as opposed to having to predefine it.

Avamar is dependent on the hardware. It can't be implemented with ordinary storage. It can only be implemented with an EMC product. We want to have a backup solution that allows us to use independent storage and other hardware. It would be good if they can simplify its technology and make it possible to implement it with another storage. This is probably not possible because Avamar is an EMC product, and EMC would like to sell its own products. It should be simplified because currently if we want to upgrade Avamar, it requires us to assemble too many EMC products. For upgrade, we have to ensure compatibility with Data Domain, proxy, and firmware for storage. There are many dependencies and many steps that we have to take if we want to upgrade the services, which is a weakness of Avamar. It should also have support for reporting. We have too many reporting challenges. We cannot get information from the console about how big is the data of customer A, customer B, and customer C. EMC should think about providing reporting for the backup solution. Our customers use the basic reporting, but inside our infrastructure, we should be able to see and then analyze the data consumption by different customers. We should also be able to split information and see data consumption within our organization. Such analytical reporting will help us in planning our usage for the future, such as for the next two years. It will be useful for customers and service providers. Its price should be reduced, and it should have a flexible and pay-per-use licensing.

The user interface needs to be improved. It's not as good as it could be. There are certain bugs in terms of support. It's too slow. It needs to be more responsive. We've found the product to be a little costly.

I believe they need to improve the interfaces. Without official training it's harder to deliver the marketing and the reviews over shared media.

The solution does not scale. It would be nice if there were much more scalability capabilities. The solution could get better at data process managing. It can take more than three or four hours for supporting images. It's critical to do this faster. It would be helpful if the product could support Linux patches. It's my understanding it only offers HTML. The product could offer more integration capabilities.

The reporting should be improved, as we currently have to use another tool for that purpose.

Technical support should be more knowledgeable.

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.

The product could be easier to troubleshoot. When I had a problem with the software, I invested a lot of time to find out what the problem was. Once I found the problem, I realized that it was a simple solution, but there were no helpful indications. As an example, with Avamar, you have a different storage node and if one of these nodes had a problem with an NTP server and there was a different time on the node, nothing would work. Finding the solution to this problem involved many steps, which was not easy to determine.

It would be better if we could integrate easily with other platforms. I would like to see better integration with VMware vCenter. We normally integrate Avamar with VMware vCenter Server and virtualize Avamar within the VM. Once, we wanted to backup only a few VMs within the vCenter, without integrating it to the vCenter. But we come across some problems. Without adding the vCenter directly, there was some difficulty in adding the VMs. When we replaced more clients in the OS, this problem was solved.

The screen design is a bit back-dated. The reports are not very presentable. The price of this product should be lower.