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Dell Avamar

Dell Avamar

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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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Avamar Experience

9 out of 10
December 28, 2021
I can say that it effectively meets our virtual server and file backup needs. With its easy-to-manage interface, we can quickly create …
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Avamar backup solution

7 out of 10
December 10, 2018
Incentivized
Avamar is our companies backup solution. We use it to backup all servers in the environment as well as Exchange mail and file servers. A …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Incremental backup identification (21)
    9.3
    93%
  • Deduplication and file compression (22)
    8.6
    86%
  • Universal recovery (20)
    8.5
    85%
  • Multiple backup destinations (20)
    6.0
    60%
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Pricing

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Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Data Center Backup

Data center backup tools send data to a secure storage location after encryption and de-duplication

7.8
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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 SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(79)

Community Insights

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!

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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a managed service provider and therefore we are using it for two clients to manage their backup and restore operations. We are leveraging through the dedupe technology and always incremental method, EMC Avamar BMR is one of the best in the market.
  • 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.
Dell EMC Avamar is well suited for backup of DFS servers with huge amount of data and daily repeated backups, due to global dedupe less data is being transferred across the network. EMC Avamar is well suited to do physical and virtual machines BMR as less information needs to be provided and very fast.
It is less appropriate for backup of SQL database, a lot of configuration required in dataset level and very clumsy.
Data Center Backup (10)
96%
9.6
Universal recovery
100%
10.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
100%
10.0
Management dashboard
70%
7.0
Platform support
90%
9.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • Very cost effective.
  • Can back up huge amount of servers.
  • For huge environment we can deploy multinode.
EMC Avamar is always incremental and deduplication rate is higher for variable block-level deduplication, restoration is faster as compared to other tools, backups cannot be accidentally deleted as there is an option for retiring the backups, retention is straightforward. EMC Avamar BMR is faster than any tool and there is less administration than many things handled by EMC (upgrade, security patch, HFS check troubleshoot).
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.
Carbonite Server Backup, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Dell EMC Avamar is being used at 3 of the locations that I support. We used it to do system and file-level backup, database backups, as well as replication. This system works very well at backing up these items. The restore process is rather lengthy depending on what you are attempting to restore. The UI is not as user-friendly as would be expected.
  • System-level backups.
  • File-level backups.
  • Replication.
  • Time to recover is lengthy.
  • The user interface is not user-friendly.
This system is very well suited for an environment that needs a dependable backup solution that doesn't require a quick restore. If you have this system as your only DR solution and you need to be up and running in a matter of minutes this is not the right for you.
Data Center Backup (14)
47.142857142857146%
4.7
Universal recovery
70%
7.0
Instant recovery
30%
3.0
Recovery verification
70%
7.0
Business application protection
80%
8.0
Multiple backup destinations
80%
8.0
Incremental backup identification
60%
6.0
Backup to the cloud
N/A
N/A
Deduplication and file compression
50%
5.0
Snapshots
30%
3.0
Flexible deployment
N/A
N/A
Management dashboard
30%
3.0
Platform support
80%
8.0
Retention options
80%
8.0
Encryption
N/A
N/A
  • It has has a positive impact by retaining long term backups.
  • It has a negative impact if a mission-critical system goes down and take a while to restore.
  • Veeam Backup & Replication
The upside to Avamar versus Veeam is that Avamar has a machine tied to the software. Veeam is good software but it is only as good as the back-end storage.
Their support is very helpful and knowledgeable. The reason for the lower rating is because the time to respond is not the greatest.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
The new Avamar VE has a better management front end, thus allowing for faster deployments and allowing customers including myself to easily create backups and perform restores. This new VE platform needs to be retrofitted to the Avamar hardware devices as well. This is a great solution, when bundled with Data Domain and AWS cloud, to allow for hybrid model.
Data Center Backup (14)
89.28571428571429%
8.9
Universal recovery
90%
9.0
Instant recovery
80%
8.0
Recovery verification
100%
10.0
Business application protection
80%
8.0
Multiple backup destinations
90%
9.0
Incremental backup identification
90%
9.0
Backup to the cloud
100%
10.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
70%
7.0
Flexible deployment
90%
9.0
Management dashboard
100%
10.0
Platform support
80%
8.0
Retention options
90%
9.0
Encryption
90%
9.0
  • I am able to deploy multiple avamar systems much faster and remotely, which allows me to complete projects on-time or ahead of schedule.
  • The ease of the management has vastly improved and allowed a much better understanding and use case for Avamar.
  • Avamar allows for source side deduplication and is very good at providing this feature for our remote sites.
Avamar has simplied the back up approach in their VE edition and is much easier to use than Data Protector. Backing up multiple VMs takes minutes instead of hours now. Creating policies, retentions, and schedules, is vastly improved and much easier.
Their new management interface makes backups a breeze, without needing to learn about media agents, servers, complex agents, and complex licensing.
Brian Munn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Avamar as our data center backup platform. We have been using Avamar for the past 5 years and have had great success. Our environment is completely virtual and we use the backup solution to not only backup the data within a server using the backup agents but we also use Avamar to backup the VMs.
  • 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.
Size of company or data center. Avamar is well suited for larger data centers with lots of data and companies are are willing to purchase the replication grids. For smaller companies Avamar is cost prohibitive. Avamar is designed for large companies and lots of data.
Data Center Backup (14)
66.42857142857143%
6.6
Universal recovery
N/A
N/A
Instant recovery
100%
10.0
Recovery verification
N/A
N/A
Business application protection
90%
9.0
Multiple backup destinations
40%
4.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Backup to the cloud
N/A
N/A
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
N/A
N/A
Management dashboard
100%
10.0
Platform support
100%
10.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • Much less time spent managing backups (Configuration and tape changes).
  • Successful backups. 99+% of all our backups are successful
Reliability. Avamar is hands down more reliable than any other backup solution I have used.
Yes
It was part of our initial purchase. Multi year support. This also covers software upgrades.
Dell EMC has always provided great support. I typically use the online chat function and get through to a support engineer quickly. They are able to fully support the product without needing to escalate.
Great support. Very knowledge able engineers and quick to get resolution.
  • Restore selection and execution
  • Reviewing recent backup or restore activity.
  • Dashboard shows a great overview of recent backups success or failures along with system utilization and any warnings.
  • System reboots
  • Troubleshooting backup issues
  • Upgrades
No
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.
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