Dell Avamar vs. Skyvia Backup

Dell Avamar used to be one of the best products on the market. And, if you already have the product or are locked to the ecosystem, it will work well for you with some effort into configuration and education on its use. However, the price point on the product and lack of innovation in regards to user friendliness has made it a product I would no longer choose.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Skyvia Backup is well suited for automatic backing up and restoring Salesforce data. It's intuitive and easy to use which saves a lot of time and requires almost no learning curve to start using.

• 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

• Automatic weekly backup - no manual intervention required once configured
• Integration with HubSpot is easy
• Auto clean oldest version to keep within space limit

• 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

• We were not able to interrupt the process of backup creation the moment it has been launched, so I guess this counts as a room for improvement. We had to wait till the backup was completed to delete it and relaunch with the correct data.

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

Easy to configure, not much technical knowledge required

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

Customer Support is quite fast to react, but they're not always available in our business hours, so I would lower the grade a little bit.

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

We evaluated Spanning Backup for Salesforce, but it didn't match our business scenario, as they create daily incremental backups without a possibility for retention.

• 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

• We cannot disclose figures, I guess, but Skyvia Backup for sure had positive impact on our ROI as it saved us a lot of money for SFDC records restoration.