Control-M vs Dell EMC Avamar

• Control-M provides an easy-to-use and easy-to-interpret interface for users, with most of the screen options and field names being self-explanatory. The on-screen options provide for a full range of functionality for automating batch production requirements, with multiple options and flexibility.
• The vendor provides Control-M a wide range of utilities for extracting information from the dataset and providing with a minimal amount of training required for use.
• As the systems programmer for Control-M on the mainframe, the ease of installation is one of the nicest features. The installation is panel driven and can be used by a relatively inexperienced technician to install successfully in a matter of several hours.
• Again, as the systems programmer, I appreciate the level of expertise of the technical support personnel. Over the past 20+ years, I have come to know them well and find them to be knowledgeable and willing to provide assistance for any and all queries.
• The developers have always been willing to listen to requests for new functionality and enhancements to existing functionality and are working to have the same type of functionality across all platforms.
• We are a large mainframe shop, still heavily dependent on mainframes to support and develop new software for the mainframe.
• We have worked closely with BMC to participate in the beta testing program and have had the opportunity to have an impact on software development.

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• 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

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• The reporting provided with Control-M could have more functionality, Many users end up creating their own reporting based on the Control-M DB. I believe BMC are addressing this.
• Within the Advanced File Transfer (AFT) it would be useful to have an integrated FT server and not rely on the underlying SSH.
• All batch schedulers have issues with fully automating tasks in a Windows environment and Control-M is no exception. Userids and profiles are harder concepts to deal with in the Windows world but BMC are doing their best to address this and Control-M would be better at handling these scenarios than the alternative products.

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• 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.

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• While I cannot share specific numbers I can say that Control-M has provided a level of scheduling and integration over the system it replaced that has increased productivity and increased reliably in our system. It has reduced the number of hours spent on monitoring and troubleshooting jobs, on a per job basis.

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• 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

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