Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Based on 175 reviews and ratings
Based on 58 reviews and ratings
Highlights
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery and Dell EMC Avamar are both data center backup solutions designed to help organizations secure business data. Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery includes enterprise level features for data replication and deduplication, making it a popular choice for larger enterprises. Dell EMC Avamar is similarly popular with larger businesses due to its powerful backup and management features for large amounts of data.
Features
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery both include essential data center backup tools, but they also have a few standout features that set them apart from each other.
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery provides a robust set of automation tools powered by artificial intelligence for processes like data archiving. These automation features can place less demand on your IT team. Additionally, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery can quickly transform and extract data, and is a powerful tool for consolidating siloed data into a single source that can be easily managed.
Dell EMC Avamar makes it easy to backup large amounts of virtual machines, which can make it a powerful solution for business with large amounts of virtualized data. Additionally, Dell EMC Avamar allows businesses to set up processes like data backup to be performed regularly. Lastly, the backup and recovery process using Dell EMC Avamar is very quick.
Limitations
Though Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery and Dell EMC Avamar can both be used to backup business data, they also have some limitations that are important to consider.
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery includes automation features, but provides limited support or licensing options for smaller businesses. Small-mid sized businesses may consider other options. Additionally, implementation for Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery can be complex, so businesses should expect to need support if they do not have a skilled IT team.
Dell EMC Avamar makes it easy to backup virtual machines, but doesn’t have as many advanced options for data replication compared to Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery. Some users with Windows based servers have also cited bottlenecks when using multiple windows plugins. Many users also find Dell EMC Avamar’s interface to be antiquated and difficult to become familiar with.
Pricing
Both Dell EMC Avamar and Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery do not provide exact pricing details, but interested businesses can reach out to the vendor for a quote.
Provided by the TrustRadius Research Team
Published on June 26, 2020
Likelihood to Recommend
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

Dell EMC Avamar

Feature Rating Comparison
Data Center Backup
Universal recovery
Live recovery
Recovery verification
Business application protection
Multiple backup destinations
Incremental backup identification
Backup to the cloud
Deduplication and file compression
Snapshots
Flexible deployment
Management dashboard
Platform support
Retention options
Encryption
Pros
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
- Commvault is the Swiss Army knife for data protection in an Enterprise environment. You name the environment and Commvvault has something to protect it. Very helpful in this on-prem/off-prem world that is developing into a DevOps world.
- Improves our Disaster Recovery
- Starting to utilize for data migration for VMware in places where Zerto is too expensive

Dell EMC Avamar
- 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
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
- Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery has developed the concept of plans that work great in smaller institutions but can hamstring large enterprises by the limited flexibility. There are situations where plans appear to be forced into decisions. Ideally, providing the ability to disable plans would be beneficial.
- The security model is granular in respects to permissions and ability to implement it for a single object (client, user, job). Implementing the correct collection of permissions can sometimes feel like opening a padlock. This appears to be a great place to implement a wizard for guiding administrators through desired behaviors and building the appropriate security role.
Dell EMC Avamar
- 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.
Likelihood to Renew
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

Dell EMC Avamar
Usability
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Reliability and Availability
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Performance
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Support Rating
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

Dell EMC Avamar
In-Person Training
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Online Training
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Implementation Rating
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Alternatives Considered
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

Dell EMC Avamar

Scalability
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
Dell EMC Avamar
Return on Investment
Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
- The ease of use and reliability of Commvault have enabled us to support the entire environment with less personnel than other products. We can support hundreds of clients and 500TB of protected systems with a single person.
- Their per TB pricing can get rather expensive often forcing you into an agent based pricing model and that can be less that ideal to mange.
Dell EMC Avamar
- Avamar served our organization very well for many years. It was absolutely the best solution of its day.
- We did the fork-lift upgrade twice to continue with Avamar. We could not continue to support this model of upgrades.
- Our final decision to replace Avamar was when the nodes filled with meta-data while we had plenty of data domain space for backups.
- We've spent too much engineer time babysitting the product.