Barracuda Backup vs. Dell Avamar

If you are a small business with a few machines and your backups aren't of servers that are public facing. If you had to restore a server from backup, it would take a day at least. So, if the server being restored was public facing, that may impact customer relations.

Incentivized

It's well suited when you are looking for something to keep your on-premise environment safe and you don't want to spend a lot of time doing the setup. It's easy to scale and a very reliable solution. I think it is not a really nice solution in terms of pricing, so the challenge here is to check if the value [is] worth it.

Incentivized

• The cloud control is great!! I'm able to restore files and folders from basically any machine on the Internet. I can restore either the local machine I'm using at the time, or directly to the server from which it came.
• The user interface. Very easy to use and understand. Loads of options and configurations you can optimize for your particular needs.
• Instance replacement. We have had an issue with one unit due to some hardware failure. Barracuda was amazing on getting this replaced quickly and getting us back on track.

Incentivized

• New and improved interface no longer requires separate program to run on a management server.
• The avamar interacts with the data domain device to allow for cloud storage.
• The Avamar AVE footprint is much easier to install and use, given the new GUI.

Incentivized

• You can't define backup systems to just go to the cloud, it has to be stored locally as well, which eats up the local storage.
• These appliances are high-priced for a small amount of storage and if you want to upgrade, you buy a new appliance. There's no replacing hard drives, you basically move up $5K for each 2Tb and replace the entire appliance each time. It's not a healthy model for growth.

Incentivized

• The technology is stagnant. It's had the same basic interface and feature set over all of the years we used it.
• A clunky java based management GUI.
• It only supports RedHat for the management console under Linux.
• Meta-data continues to grow even when backup sets do not cause nodes to fill, requiring professional services to clean it up.
• Fork-lift upgrades.
• It requires a lot of care and feeding with a lot of time on the phone with support.

Incentivized

Love the units

Incentivized

I have been using the product for over five years. This has performed so well that with the current system reaching its End-of-Life with EMC next year, I have proposed replacing it with the latest version of the product. Now that it integrates with Data Domain, the cost has been greatly reduced. Instead of the need to purchase many nodes, one Data Domain can replace them creating a significant cost savings.

Incentivized

Dashboards and interfaces within Barracuda Backup are very easy to navigate, with clear success/warnings shown. Setting up backup jobs is probably one of the most simplest tasks - compared to competitors we trialed. Trouble shooting backup issues is also simple due to clear errors (VSS errors shown in a understandable format for example)

The system overall is easy to monitor and see your backup/restore status. The user interface could use updating as it relies on Java and any updates to Java cause the interface to stop working need to be reinstalled

Incentivized

They are always quick to get you routed to a tech support person and always get follow up after contacting them. Last experience was amazing, she adjusted my boxes and they perform even better. I cannot say enough about the support. We had some trouble with one of the windows servers leaving the volume shadow copy out there and would fail. They worked with us to adjust and get working. After that it has been months since I have had to do anything with the server to keep the backups running.

Incentivized

Support is very convincing, always eager to solve issues from the root rather than workaround, don't hesitate to take webex, describe the issues to the core and recommend configuration to avoid further issues. We can ask few questions other than the main issue. They don't hesitate to answer.

Incentivized

Work on a backup agent for Mac OS X or any Apple OS.

Incentivized

The time necessary to manage Barracuda Backups is leaps and bounds superior to Backup Exec. Backup Exec has tons of great features but required constant maintenance. In the end we just wanted the ability to easily schedule, set retention periods and the ability to backup and restore. Barracuda does this exceptionally well.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, Avamar has stayed behind solutions like Solarwinds Backup and Datto in many different things, like the management of the applications being only desktop, the old fashion interfaces and configurations and specially the fact that it doesn't work as a business continuity tool, which makes it mostly and out-dated application when you compare it with how the market is evolving.

Incentivized

• It is much lower priced than the alternate solution we where thinking about purchasing.
• It was initially a much more cost-effective solution until they changed their cost model making the ROI go down over the last 2 years.
• It saved our districts, that we on-boarded, the cost of new hardware. The deduplication factor kept the total size down for new adds.

Incentivized

• Absolute Zero ROI
• This appliance does not work in its current state and to update we need to wait 2-3 months
• Can't wait to get rid of it and replace it with something else. (not even sure if we will be able to get it running before that)
• [I think] this is one of the worst mistakes we made

Incentivized