Dell Avamar

Score6.7 out of 10

83 Reviews and Ratings

What is Dell Avamar?

Dell Avamar is a hardware and software data backup and deduplication product. It provides protection and recovery through a complete software and hardware solution when paired with Dell Data Domain for virtual environments, remote offices, enterprise apps, NAS servers, and desktops/laptops.

Categories & Use Cases

Recovery verification
Recovery verification is automated testing and verification of backups
Category average: 8.7
Incremental backup identification
Incremental backup identification is the ability to identify incremental changes since last backup
Category average: 9.1
Instant recovery
Instant recovery is the ability to restore operations very rapidly
Category average: 8.4

Multiple backup destinations
Multiple backup destinations is the ability to backup data to more than one location
Category average: 8.4
Platform support
Product supports multiple operating systems and applications
Category average: 8.7
Backup to the cloud
Ability to store and back up data to the cloud
Category average: 8.5

Ivan Sytchev

Supervisor, Information Technology in Information Technology at Real Estate Council of Ontario (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

Integrates with vCenter very well

Cons

[I think] The appliance is terrible at doing steady backups
does not work with vCenter 7
[I feel] support is awful
configuration is very complex
[I think it is] unreliable

Most Important Features

[I think] it does not have any good features
It's supposed to integrate with vCenter but it fails at that

Return on Investment

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

Other Software Used

Citrix ADC (formerly NetScaler ADC), VMware vCenter Server, Microsoft Teams

Ratnodeep Roy

Senior System Analyst in Information Technology at Stratogent (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

Variable length block level deduplication.
Always incremental.
Easy integration with data domain.
Backup and recovery speed.

Cons

Cannot do the restore of a individual large file from VMs as timeout occurs.
Cannot browse more than 14999 files for restore.
Database backups are clumsy.

Return on Investment

Very cost effective.
Can back up huge amount of servers.
For huge environment we can deploy multinode.

Alternatives Considered

Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication, Carbonite Server Backup and Commvault

Other Software Used

Carbonite Server Backup, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication

Rodney Barnhardt View profile

Server Administrator in Information Technology at Charlotte Pipe and Foundry Company (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

Avamar performs data deduplication on the remote host. This greatly reduces the amount of traffic that each backup requires. This even applies to the virtual environment through change block tracking. Backup times are reduced from hours to minutes.
The management interface makes it easy to configure and maintain data retention periods. Many times certain data must be kept for an extended period of time. There is a specific menu for managing retention periods.
The system is able to recover itself from a hard failure with virtually no loss of backups. There is a checkpoint taken each day that provides a recovery point in the event of a catastrophic failure. Since this is a node based system, the loss of more than one node could require a recovery be performed.
While another grid must be purchased, the replication utility allows all backups to be replicated to another grid at a remote location. This ensures the resilience of the backups in the event there is the loss of the primary data center.
Also works on HCI devices performing image-level backups as in our primary data center environment
There is also now an All-in-One appliance for smaller locations

Cons

The upgrade process is rather complicated. It needs to be performed by EMC support, and there are a lot of diagnostics and test that must be performed ahead of scheduling the upgrade. Some additional modules such as the NDMP accelerator must be upgraded as part of a separate process.
Interoperability with other EMC products is not always seamless or immediate. An upgrade may require another EMC product be upgraded before there full interoperability returns.
Maintenance renewals can be a headache if different modules were purchased at different times. You need to make sure your new purchases are aligned with the renewals of your existing hardware. This is referred to as "co-terming".

Return on Investment

The fact that all backups can be monitored and maintained from a single product has greatly simplified my life. Where I used to spend a lot of time in the mornings going from system to system to check the backups, now I can just check everything in one place.
The data deplication greatly reduced the amount of time and bandwidth required to complete the backups. For example, one backup that used to take over two hours to complete, now finishes in about 20 minutes.
There has been a reduction in the amount of time spent on support calls. It was not uncommon to spend countless hours on a support call with Symantec when we were using their products.

Alternatives Considered

CommVault

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi, Varonis Data Security Platform

Brian Munn View profile

Network Services Manager in Information Technology at M. J. Electric, LLC (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

Avamar's deduplication technology is extremely efficient. Each backup of a server is considered a full backup but only changed bits for data are copied.
The backup process is almost as easy as set it and forget it. Once the policy and schedules are created Avamar works and works without issues. It is very rare we have any failed backups.
Avamar offers a wide range of backup agents and a very customizable backup configuration

Cons

Initial purchase cost is on the high end.
After initial support package has expired the cost to renew is extremely high.
Media export option is lacking on features and then using exported media for restore is a cumbersome process.

Return on Investment

Much less time spent managing backups (Configuration and tape changes).
Successful backups. 99+% of all our backups are successful

Alternatives Considered

Symantec Backup Exec

Other Software Used

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager), Ipswitch MOVEit, Microsoft SQL Server

Usability

William Pavlock

Sr. Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Marchon Eyewear, Inc. (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

Ease of setup
ROI storage to cost
Technical support

Cons

Renewing Avamar contracts internationally should be more integrated
More simplified technical support portal
Price of additional storage

Return on Investment

Return on investment has been achieved
End of life for hardware is approaching which is going to be costly
Has met our business objectives overall, but will need to reassessed during EOL transition

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, MobileIron, VMware ESXi

Dell Avamar

What is Dell Avamar?

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Top Performing Features

Recovery verification

Incremental backup identification

Instant recovery

Areas for Improvement

Multiple backup destinations

Platform support

Backup to the cloud

Reviews

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Cons

Most Important Features

Return on Investment

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