Item: Dell Avamar
Rating: 8
Author: Ratnodeep Roy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Very cost effective.
Can back up huge amount of servers.
For huge environment we can deploy multinode.

Alternatives Considered

Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication, Carbonite Server Backup and Commvault

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 Rating

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Dell Avamar delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Dell Avamar's feature set?

Yes

Did Dell Avamar live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Dell Avamar go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Dell Avamar again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Carbonite Server Backup, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

EMC Avamar: A boon for backup fraternity.

Overall Satisfaction with Dell EMC Avamar