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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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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

(1-2 of 2)
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Rodney Barnhardt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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".
The integration with Exchange has been improved over previous versions. Rather than having to install all of the components for a GLR restore (which complicated agent upgrades), a "swing" system can be used for these tools. The new interface allows for simpler recover than previous versions. The mailbox can even be exported to a PST if needed.
Data Center Backup (14)
84.28571428571429%
8.4
Universal recovery
90%
9.0
Instant recovery
100%
10.0
Recovery verification
90%
9.0
Business application protection
100%
10.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Backup to the cloud
60%
6.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
20%
2.0
Management dashboard
70%
7.0
Platform support
90%
9.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
60%
6.0
  • The fact that all backups can be monitored and maintained from a single product has greatly simplified my life. Where I used to spend a lot of time in the mornings going from system to system to check the backups, now I can just check everything in one place.
  • The data deplication greatly reduced the amount of time and bandwidth required to complete the backups. For example, one backup that used to take over two hours to complete, now finishes in about 20 minutes.
  • There has been a reduction in the amount of time spent on support calls. It was not uncommon to spend countless hours on a support call with Symantec when we were using their products.
Originally, we evaluated CommVault with Avamar and due to some differences at the time we decided to go with Avamar. Some of those reasons against CommVault no longer exist, but we have been satisfied with Avamar. Other more current products have been reviewed such as Rubrik and HYCU for our data center, but they also lack certain features. One of the primary being the ability to backup desktop\laptops. While this is not a huge need for us, it is still a need and many of the newer products do not have this ability.
2
The primary users are myself and one co-worker. We manage all of the backups for the entire enterprise. There is a laptop\desktop option that allows users to have some control over performing their own backups and recovery, but that has been an options that is not widely used. It was attempted with some remote users, but they had to be connected via VPN to perform the backups. This tended to be problematic for them.
2
There is one primary person and one secondary person. In our environment, the product requires very little intervention, and is easy to manage and maintain. There are some tasks that can only be completed by Avamar support, such as software upgrades. With that being the case, this frees up myself and my colleague to perform other functions while they are performing the upgrades.
  • Being able to backup and recover critical data.
  • Maintain backups for an extended period of time due to legal hold
  • Easy to maintain and manage
  • While under legal hold, we have configured the backups for specific system to not auto-delete. Then once the hold is over, the deletion of this data is a simple as selecting the appropriate backups and deleting. This avoids the long process of locating and then deleting the data.
  • In the event there would need to be a much longer retention period, there is a "tape-out" option. This allows backups that need to be kept for years to be sent to a tape and stored offsite.
  • While we do not currently have SharePoint, Avamar would be capable of backup up that product.
  • Avamar could be used in the event we would need to migrate data from one type of storage to another. The would allow a backup from one system and a restore to another. The restore would then have all of the ACL's intact just as they were on the source.
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.
Yes
There were several products that Avamar replaced. Originally, it was a mix of Backup Exec, NetBackup, PureDisk, and vRanger. This created a complicated mess of backup and recovery consoles that had to be consistently switched between in order to perform basic task. The desire was to have central management and monitoring no matter what the environment. Avamar gave us this ability.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
We were already an EMC shop and had and existing relationship with them as well as our partner. Avamar had the features we were looking for and we felt it would be a seamless integration into our existing EMC products. After comparing it with other products, it was decided that this best met all of our requirements. This was especially true with the desire to not deploy any additional hardware at the remote sites.
While the product has been very successful, if I was in the market for a replacement product, I would prefer to do a "bake off" between two or more products. This way I could test drive each one and compare the manageability and monitoring of multiple products. There could also be a comparison of restore times.
Tim Knarr | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
For a small business, it is cost prohibitive. For anyone who needs to back up over the WAN or has a large number of servers, it is a great solution. This is especially so if your server OSs are consistent across your organization. The dedup level and speed increases so much when your server level is equal across the board. The quality of our hardware has been really good as well. Over the five years of use, we have not dropped a drive or had a hardware failure.
Data Center Backup (7)
91.42857142857142%
9.1
Universal recovery
90%
9.0
Instant recovery
90%
9.0
Recovery verification
90%
9.0
Business application protection
90%
9.0
Multiple backup destinations
90%
9.0
Backup to the cloud
90%
9.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
  • Even though Avamar appears expensive out of the box, the fact that they don't charge by the client makes them affordable over other solutions if you have a large number of servers.
  • We have had to use the bare metal restore on two occasions and the speed and efficiency was incredible. Getting a server back up and running quickly can be a life saver.
  • Being JAVA based on the management can make things difficult in a crisis. The last thing you want to deal with is SSL cert errors and JAVA versioning issues.
I started with Avamar as a tape backup replacement. I had drives at each location and a tape robot at the central data center. Moving to disk backup with no tape switch out was incredible. With tech today, almost all backup is disk backup. Avamar's quality hardware and deduplication technology has kept it ahead of the curve with other competitors even today. When I have had to call EMC for support they have been quick and efficient in solving the issue. The amount of time saved from going from tape to centralized disk, frees up so much of my time and keeps me from chasing my tail finding tapes.
5
All IT except one. That one is a CEO who uses it to backup his laptop data and self administer. This allows him the security of knowing he is the only one viewing his data for confidentiality and quickly be able to restore files when he has an issue. Our IT staff uses it for backup/restore daily.
1
I have been the only person who handles the day in day and out maintenance of Avamar over the last 5 years. Although others know how to do restores, set up backups and install clients, I alone manage the system day in and day out. Having simple reports emailed to me daily keeps me up on backup integrity. One of the easiest backup systems I have ever managed.
  • Daily backups of core systems. Because of the speed and reliability, it is perfect for that.
  • Cross WAN backups. Dedup makes backups over the WAN to be fast and light on your network.
  • No need for the tape sprawl. Because it is contained, no need to switch out tape and move to a secure location.
  • User controlled backups.
  • Partnering with another organization in a different state, split the cost in half and solves the off site dilemma.
  • We are doing more user desktop backups.
Since we have had it for five years, we are currently looking to upgrade. New cost is a lot easier to swallow and being able to migrate easily are two of the biggest reasons we are staying with Avamar. It is a great product and has served us well over the years.
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