Carbonite Endpoint vs. Dell Avamar

Carbonite Endpoint 360 is a great solution for any organization with compliance needs. Office 365 defaults to a 30 day backup of all data. Carbonite Endpoint 360 extends this well beyond 30 days and provides an all-inclusive source for retention for data in Office 365. Any small to medium business would greatly benefit from this solution as they can design their entire infrastructure in Office 365 and ensure it's all backed up.

Incentivized

This software is well suited for companies that want to be very in control of their backups but need a simple tool. It could be convenient for them to just buy their own node, locate it in a different location, and set up the jobs for their machines to backup to the cloud with the specific plugins. However, it would not be convenient for companies looking to have a tool that needs to be secure and compliant, and that need to have different other options for business continuity.

Incentivized

• It is excellent at automating your backups. You don't need to manually do it, just set it up once and let it run in the background.
• It's pretty simple to set up and use. It will automatically suggest the best options that work for most people and you can be up and running pretty quickly.
• It's safe and reliable. We have been using it for a couple of years now and had no major issues.
• Their phone support is excellent.
• It's also really easy to maintain your backed up data to reduce redundancy.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• To be honest not so impressed with the amount of time it has taken to get data backed up to the cloud.
• I have not had to do a restore at this time so I cannot comment on the restore process.
• I was not aware at time of procurement that the upload process would take so long since we were not procuring their hardware. Sales rep mad it seem like upload would only take a day or two and we are now starting week 7 hoping to be done by week 8 for 1.5 TBs of data.

Incentivized

• The client interface has constant JAVA issues and can be slow and chunky. We have often had issues with current versions of JAVA breaking it so it will not even run.
• The backup clients are split out for function. Although this makes them light, it also makes it cumbersome to upgrade clients. The naming scheme can also be confusing for the clients.

Incentivized

I found their alerting to be very poor. I missed several days of backups without knowledge of this, until I signed into the portal. I would get daily emails reporting backups were in progress or done, but nothing indicating that a backup had been stuck or paused for 3 days. For this reason alone, I did not renew.

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

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

Does what it needs to do quietly and efficiently in the background without interrupting the workflow. It offers instant automated back-ups without troubling the end user. As it is such an automated system, once it is up and running, there is little or no support needed from the service provider. From what I understand the support from Carbonite during the setup and implementation was absolutely fine.

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

We have also used Mozy Pro and Dropbox. They are all pretty similar in functionality/features of backing up data (not system state or databases as I don't think any of the 3 are well suited for that). To me, it comes down to personal preference and choosing a product that is universal for multiple users, for ease of management.

Incentivized

Avamar has simplied the back up approach in their VE edition and is much easier to use than Data Protector. Backing up multiple VMs takes minutes instead of hours now. Creating policies, retentions, and schedules, is vastly improved and much easier.

Incentivized

• Carbonite Endpoint has demonstrated value in its ability to easily restore seemingly lost files for remote users.
• While we haven't yet had to exercise it, knowing we have the option of remotely wiping endpoints containing sensitive data has brought confidence to our management team that we can mitigate data breaches through preventable means.
• The privacy issue around device tracking is costing the company in terms of employee trust and morale and needs to be mitigated with appropriate messaging and/or disabling of this feature.

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