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Dell Avamar is a versatile backup solution that has been adopted by organizations across various industries. Many users have found that …
Overview
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…
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Popular Features
- Incremental backup identification (21)9.393%
- Deduplication and file compression (22)8.686%
- Universal recovery (20)8.585%
- Multiple backup destinations (20)6.060%
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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.
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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 EMC Data Domain for virtual environments, remote offices, enterprise apps, NAS servers, and desktops/laptops.
Dell Avamar enables backup and recovery by reducing the size of backup data at the client–before it’s transferred across the network and stored. Avamar's variable-length deduplication reduces network traffic by only sending unique blocks, compressed and encrypted over local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs). Blocks that were previously stored are never backed up again.
Deployment Options
Avamar Data Store – According to Dell, Avamar Data Store is the easiest and fastest way to deploy this solution. It combines a Dell EMC-certified purpose-built backup appliance and Avamar deduplication backup and recovery software in a fully integrated, scalable, prepackaged solution.
Avamar Business Edition –Dell Avamar Business is a deduplicated backup solution designed for midmarket companies, featuring simplified management, making it ideal for organizations with limited IT resources.
Avamar Virtual Edition – Avamar deduplication backup software and virtual appliances deployed in AWS, Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS.
Integration with Dell EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems – Utilize Avamar with Data Domain devices sold directly through Dell
Dell Avamar Video
Avamar Fundamentals Free e-Learning
Dell Avamar Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Recovery verification highest, with a score of 9.4.
The most common users of Dell Avamar are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Dell Avamar is a versatile backup solution that has been adopted by organizations across various industries. Many users have found that Avamar allows them to consolidate their backup infrastructure, making it easier to monitor and manage all enterprise backups with a single tool and console. With Avamar, users are able to back up a wide range of assets including physical servers, virtual machines, network attached storage, and even cloud environments. The flexibility of Avamar has made it an ideal choice for businesses with diverse IT architectures.
One prominent use case for Avamar is its ability to simplify backup operations for remote plants and offices. By installing the Avamar agent on physical servers located at remote sites, users are able to perform image-level backups of the virtual machines in those environments. This not only reduces network traffic over the WAN, but also ensures that critical data from remote locations is protected. Additionally, Avamar's deduplication technology helps optimize storage usage, allowing organizations to efficiently manage their capacity and scale as needed.
Managed service providers have also found great value in Avamar as it enables them to effectively manage backup and restore operations for their clients. Leveraging Avamar's deduplication technology and always incremental method, service providers are able to offer reliable and efficient backup services while minimizing storage costs. The easy-to-use interface of Avamar allows these providers to quickly set up backup scenarios and achieve desired results, ensuring the continuity of their clients' business operations.
The compression and deduplication properties of Avamar have received positive feedback from customers, highlighting the effectiveness of the software in optimizing storage utilization. Users appreciate the simplicity and speed of the restore process with Avamar, enabling them to quickly recover important files or entire servers when needed. Furthermore, customers have confidence in Avamar's long-term reliability, knowing that it will continue meeting their backup needs as their infrastructure grows and expands.
Overall, Dell Avamar serves as a valuable backup solution for organizations seeking to streamline their backup operations, protect critical data, and optimize storage efficiency. Its wide range of use cases, from consolidating backup infrastructure to simplifying remote site backups and supporting managed service providers, has made it a trusted choice for businesses around the globe.
Data deduplication greatly reduces backup traffic and backup times: Users have stated that Avamar's data deduplication feature has significantly reduced the amount of backup traffic, even in virtual environments with change block tracking. This has resulted in a considerable decrease in backup times, transforming hours-long backups into mere minutes.
Ease of use in configuring and maintaining data retention periods: Reviewers have praised Avamar's management interface for its ease of use when it comes to configuring and maintaining data retention periods. The specific menu dedicated to managing retention periods has been particularly helpful for users who need to retain certain data for an extended period of time.
Highly resilient system with minimal loss of backups: Users value Avamar's ability to recover itself from hard failures with virtually no loss of backups. The daily checkpoints provided by the system ensure a recovery point in case of catastrophic failures, instilling confidence in the resilience and reliability of their backups.
Complicated Upgrade Process: Some users have found the upgrade process for Dell Avamar to be complicated and requiring support from EMC. They mention that there are diagnostics and tests that need to be performed before scheduling the upgrade, and upgrading additional modules can be a separate process.
Issues with Client Interface: Several reviewers have expressed frustration with the client interface of Dell Avamar. They report constant JAVA issues, slow performance, and a cumbersome user experience. The interface tends to break when using current versions of JAVA, rendering it non-functional.
Expensive Renewals: Many users have mentioned that renewing Avamar contracts after the initial support package expires is extremely expensive. This has been a concern for customers as they find the cost of maintenance renewals to be high.
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Reviews
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December 28, 2021
Avamar Experience
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Creating fast backup profiles.
- Compression and Deduplication performance is nice
- Restore operations are easy and fast
- Datadomain dependency is not a good feature.
- Compression ratios are not good for 2nd time compressed data
- A lot of integration is required during the setup phase.
- Extremely reliable and scalable.
- The source site replication feature is valuable.
- The initial setup is easy.
- It would be helpful if there was cloud support.
- It lacks support for certain plugins, like SAP HANA, for example.
May 02, 2021
Dell EMC Avamar Review
- Integrates with vCenter very well
- [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
December 13, 2019
EMC Avamar: A boon for backup fraternity.
- Variable length block level deduplication.
- Always incremental.
- Easy integration with data domain.
- Backup and recovery speed.
- 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.
December 04, 2019
The downside to Dell EMC Avamar
- System-level backups.
- File-level backups.
- Replication.
- Time to recover is lengthy.
- The user interface is not user-friendly.
September 06, 2019
Dell EMC's new Avamar VE and front end!
- 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.
- Dell EMC has solved the bloated management software installation plaguing the install for years.
- Dell needs to move the Virtual Edition piece into their hardware platform, to allow for better management and daily use of the product.
- Using VMware for snapshoting a VM is older technology, holding back larger VM's from being backed up, to allow for a file system copy only. Real innovation would allow for better methods of snapshoting a VM.
August 02, 2019
A cloud tool that needs to evolve
- It has a variety of plugins to backups different types of applications or to do only files and folders, so you can be very specific about what to back up and how much data you would like to send to the cloud.
- The deduplication feature is very efficient, especially when the datasets are created with specific plugins, so the system knows how to process the backups.
- The restore option is user-friendly.
- The Avamar Client and Administrator are desktop applications, easy to install and set up.
- The application is not secure enough to be compliant. It does have basic encryption for the transfer of the backups but it doesn't allow to encrypt the backups itself to make them more secure.
- The creation of users is very simple, doesn't have password restrictions and doesn't have strong user profiles that can allow restricting the access based on specific options.
- The management of the application is not cloud, it requires to install Java and a Console to access the settings and perform restores.
- Is not intuitive to configure the datasets, schedules, alerts, among other things. You have to go to different options to finish the configuration of these features.
- The software requires you to have proprietary hardware for the cloud that is always up to date on the generation, otherwise, it could easily reach its end of life in several years, which would require a new big investment, which makes it expensive.
July 29, 2019
EMC Avamar
- Faster Backup and Recovery
- Flexible Deployment
- Interface is old
- Managing space is difficult
- Training is difficult
July 29, 2019
Avamar Backup System Review
- Great deduplication.
- Fast backups.
- Super reliable.
- It is expensive.
- Initial setup of clients is a little clunky.
July 25, 2019
Enterprise Level Backup Solution
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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".
- Ease of setup
- ROI storage to cost
- Technical support
- Renewing Avamar contracts internationally should be more integrated
- More simplified technical support portal
- Price of additional storage
July 06, 2019
Avamar: Chosen by evolution for natural de-selection
- Data compression/deduplication across all backup targets.
- Extremely quick at recovering data.
- Low overhead on the network.
- Low overhead on the host.
- It's supported all of our various platforms.
- 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.
January 29, 2019
Avamar on my mind
- Avamar uses two cache files to speed the backup process which works very well.
- Avamar is an object-oriented backup tool and has a very good granularity.
- Works fine with virtual servers and VDSL.
- Avamar agent upgrade is tedious. Avamar needs to work to create something like RedHat Satellite to upgrade all the agents with one unique process.
December 10, 2018
Avamar backup solution
- Creation of retention policies which can be applied to multiple backup sets. This eases administration as you can apply the retention policy across the board.
- Creation of data sets which can then be added to backup policies.
- Ability to easily manage backups and restores.
- The system is a little complicated at first, getting to know the terminology is important as it will help to make you an efficient administrator of Avamar.
- RTO can be slow depending on what system you are using in the background and how much data you are moving.
April 19, 2017
Avamar review
- It is scalable
- It is effective at managing storage volumes
- Very easy to use.
- Less complex setup
- Integration with VMware needs some attention
July 14, 2016
EMC Avamar Backup appliance review.
- Avamar is very reliable when it comes to backing up servers. I rarely have a backup fail, where as with Backup Exec, we had backups fail every night.
- Avamar is also very reliable when it comes to restoring data. I have never had a restore fail.
- Avamar backs up and restores data very quickly.
- User interface is terrible and it takes a while to figure out where to find what you need.
- If something goes wrong you just get an error code instead of any kind of explanation of error.
- Most issues have to be solved by EMC support, so you always have to keep a support contract on Avamar.
- Avamar's deduplication and compression rate of data in transit and on disk was impressive. Once everything was going I was able to backup my entire enterprise in a 12 hour window. Prior to that backups that were only getting one site were taking 5 days.
- Avamar is the only product that I have found that can backup data that is replicated by Microsoft DFSR.
- Cost. Avamar is too expensive.
- The tape out feature is garbage. It's repackaged Legato Networker and while I never worked with Legato Networker before, I can say it didn't take much for it stop working with Avamar.
February 23, 2016
Ding Dong the Tapes are dead - Avamar backups just work!
- File level recovery is quick and easy. No more searching for sets of tapes to restore incremental backups.
- Backup speed is excellent due to de-duplication.
- The user interface is fairly intuitive and is easy to train junior level technicians on basic functions.
- End user perception of data integrity is improved and confidence is high.
- Avamar is scaleable but expansion is expensive.
- Storage management could be improved regarding checking real-time available space. Nodes seemed to always be out of sync.
- Corrupt snapshots were sometimes a problem. Not always, but at least once a quarter.
December 28, 2015
Avamar is key when raising the bar for Data Protection.
- Backs up and restores quite easily. This is a huge benefit for our team members that come in green to the software as it is easy to use.
- It is versatile in [the ways in] which you can expand and improve performance by adding proxy servers to help with the load of backups within different departments within the company.
- Installation is a breeze! This also helps when a need for expansion or proxy servers occur, it's a simple template that can be deployed within VCenter to have it up and running in no time at all.
- Interaction with the VMware software products. We've noticed quite a few glitches with failed backups where when they fail they leave snapshots out there with files that are locked by the proxy server still having the disks attached to it from certain VMs which causes the need to manually disconnect those disks and then perform a consolidation on the VM that failed. This can prove to be a great inconvenience as the machine will continue to fail until the problem is rectified.
October 09, 2015
Avamar Backup
- Accurate Backup
- Best Support Team
- Never Broke Down
- Slow Performance
- Better UI
October 09, 2015
Avamar, Tape Robot Terminator!
- Data deduplication is the best feature. The amount of data backed up to space used has been impressive.
- Ease of backing up whole VMs with vCenter integration makes a bare metal restore really easy.
- Because of the deduplication, the backup times are really quick and don't heavily impact the servers. Also makes it really light over the WAN.
- 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.