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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 …
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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…
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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
I can say that it effectively meets our virtual server and file backup needs. With its easy-to-manage interface, we can quickly create backup scenarios and get results. The restore process seems simple and fast. Compression and deduplication properties are good. It is a product that will meet our backup needs in the long run. With the flexibility of growth and expansion, we can better manage our capacity.
- 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.
September 06, 2019
Dell EMC's new Avamar VE and front end!
Dell EMC Avamar is being use as a front end backup scheduler and restorer device. It schedules backups of our VMs across multiple environments, deduplicates them, then sends them to the data domain device for storage. Once there, the data domain ages the device to our AWS instance, reducing our on-prem footprint and satisfying our need for a hybrid model.
- 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
We have been using Avamar as a simple cloud backup solution for our customers, considering that it does only files and folders and it does a good job with deduplication, so the backups get well compressed when sent offsite. That flexibility makes it easy to set up and inexpensive for our customers because they can control the amount of data they send to the cloud and what they pay.
- 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.
At the time of its purchase, Avamar was used to replace a variety of products. This was a mix of BackupExec, NetBackup, PureDisk, and vRanger. The idea was to be able to monitor and manage all enterprise backups with a single tool and from a single console. Currently, Avamar backs up the production servers and network attached storage in our primary data center. This includes not only physical servers, but the entire virtual environment as well. The Avamar agent is also installed on the physical servers located at our remote plants. As technology has changes, we have started to deploy VXRail as an HCI at some of our remote plants. Avamar allows us to perform the same image-level backup of these virtual machines as the ones in our primary data center. This allows the backup to perform deduplication on the remote server and only send the needed data back to the grid. The greatly reduces network traffic over the WAN. In addition, the NDMP accelerator nodes were purchased two years after the initial purchase. This was to enable us to backup the new network attached storage where our primary file shares were going to be migrated.
- 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".
Our organization is currently using Dell EMC Avamar to backup all our assets around the globe (Linux, AIX, Virtuals, Windows, Mac, AS400). We presently have 22 individual systems deployed internationally to provide backup and replication protection using deduplication. We have two sites running the new IDPA (Integrated Data Protection Appliance) with a combined capacity of over 150TB and a virtual tape library. Data protection is provided by backup/restore of critical files for data loss prevention. Business data is growing at an exponential rate where storage and recovery processes are vital to speed to market. Initial installation is simple and straightforward. Backup schedules adhere it time zones across the globe and are easy to set up. Before purchasing Dell EMC Avamar other backup solutions were vetted and cost to storage and feature options were compared. The final decision came down to cost of storage and ease of setup and technical support, which of course Del EMC Avamar won us over.
- 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
Avamar was used here for over 6 years. It was the primary backup system for all file-based backup and recovery operations across Vmware (Windows and Linux), Physical Windows, Physical Aix, and Physical Linux. This addressed backup and recovery for the entire organization. Initially, it was a stand-alone collection of Avamar nodes that was eventually upgraded to nodes plus Data Domain.
- 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.
February 23, 2016
Ding Dong the Tapes are dead - Avamar backups just work!
We used Avamar for both image level and file level backups for VMs, most of which were Windows 2008 servers. We were able to set retention policies that satisfied SOX requirements for financially relevant servers. General file server backups were also taken and restored on a regular basis as requested by end users.
- 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.
October 09, 2015
Avamar, Tape Robot Terminator!
Avamar is our primary backup system, backing up over 40 servers, including those over the WAN. We partner with another organization for our offsite push and we are their offsite location. Avamar would allow us to get up and running to quickly deploy our systems in another area of the country quickly is a natural disaster. We also use it for one off restores on file issues. The bare metal restore works well and quick in an all out server corruption.
- 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.