Dell EMC Avamar

Reliable & safe, securely backs up our files without worry of "did they backup okay?"

Restoring files occasionally experience hiccups with file path.

Great backup solution

Backing up system files.

Scalability, ease of use. Runs on ded up location which is extremely efficient. Integrated with Data Domain backups are incredibly fast.

Not much I dislike but database compressed files and Avamar deduplication will create chaos in your environment.

N/A

Disk backup eliminates the need for tape, restores are relatively simple. Protecting all the data is a plus.

Avamar is an Enterprise Grade Platform and we deliver it in a fairly unique way - utilising our own proprietary portal to make managing the backups simple and intuitive. It supports all major business critical applications and it's client side de-duplication ensures backups are completed well within backup windows.

On the rare occasions that you do encounter problems it can be a pretty painful process when dealing with EMC support which does diminish from the overall experience of the product.

Make sure you size your environment correctly to avoid having to spend additional Capex to upgrade or add additional capacity or increase performance.

We leverage EMC Avamar to solve data protection issues for organisations of all sizes. We make the arduous task of data protection simple and have saved organisations on average 4 man days per month. Not only that but by leveraging EMC Avamar we de-risk the backup service and offer reassurance that should data need to be recovered it can be.

Everything. I love the dedupe rates, the reduction in complexity, and the speed. I love the application specific plugins as well. The VMWare integration works very well. Support is incredible. It runs Linux on the back end, so you can overcome a lot of what would be shortcomings if you know what yo are doing.

The main things that come to mind are that sharepoint GLR doesnt come baked in. I also don't like that we need to be full SA on SQL to do backups. Reporting is a little sparse, you need to know SQL commands in order to bake your own. The lack of automated SQL and file level restores is a pretty major shortfall. Some of the older hardware had reliability issues.

This ia a full suite and probably has more application support than you are aware of. Additionally, the VMWare integration will take a considerable amount of time and planning but is very much worth it. Its an excellent solution if you have in house linux talent, they will be able to service it far easier and fully use its potential

Additionally, in my experience the dedupe rates vastly exceeded even what the sales guys promised. Your support will also be top notch.

SQL will require full SA permissions.

We are resolving exactly the problems we purchased the software for: Protecting our companies data. The disk backups eliminate the tremendous amount of work that tape would be.

Changed block tracking for file level restores from VM's is fantastic. Although setup is a bit complicated, if done properly you will be thankful for all the time you've spent. Don't even get me started on grouping sets of systems in a policy and then backing up by that policy...

I still struggle backing up windows clusters. It just seems that the software is not enterprise ready for cluster backups.

There should be more data available when a backup fails. Now that we've had the system in place for a while, we're able to better determine cryptic description like "Administrative error occurred".

Get it.... but with the DataDomain. In previous version you had to split up the physical and virtual backups. Now, we can get the same deduplication which is a huge win for EMC.

Backing up the entire environment whether VM or physical on a nightly basis. Our failure rate is around 0 with hundreds of systems, file, and image being backed up.

Avamar is ideally suited for a large corporate environment, with many virtual servers, thousands of desk top systems, and many remote offices. It optimizes bandwidth, maximized storage utilization, and makes backup and recovery of these systems a breeze.

Avamar still struggles with very large Databases, and with clustered applications, such as SQL and Exchange. No single backup product can be effective at backing up every kind of data set. I'd recommend utilizing native tools to backup these systems, and storing the data on Data Domain storage for maximum performance and deduplication.

Make sure you are utilizing Avamar where it works best, and don't be afraid to have two backup solutions in house. Leveraging Data Domain storage is a very cost effective way to maximize your data protection.

Avamar addresses the problem of restricted or limited network bandwidth in a data protection scenario very well. Also, due to it's advanced file management, it performs normal backups in a very short time, maximizing system availability.

Moving to Avamar from Arc Serve, we decreased our backup times from days, sometimes more than a week, to hours / a couple of days.

Restoring VM's is VERY easy. Avamar integrates so well with VMWare.

Coupled with a Data Domain storage target this solution can ingest an unbelievable amount of data in a short period of time.

Restoring files. On a monthly basis we have to restore a few specific folders from several VM's.

The folder restore is easy if you only need a few files. In order to restore several hundred files the best practice is to restore the VM and copy the files off of it.

We also restore our Exchange Db's to a file to send offsite. Avamar won't do that unless there's an Exchange server it can restore to.

Great for shrinking your backup window.

Client side dedupe is magic.

Adding a Data Domain target behind it makes this an amazing solution.

Backup windows are again manageable.

Most restores happen quickly, easily, and successfully!

Image backups are seamless and you could easily restore files that are missing. The backup process never took long at all, because of deduplication. I like the user interface as well from EMC Avamar. It was relatively easy to use in comparison to EMC's other product NetWorker which primarily focused on tape backups. Avamar is a great piece of software you can look at and as long as you know the computer host names you are backing up you know exactly where everything is backed up.

Dislike that its only for enterprise businesses, because I could see myself using it at home for a backup solution for quick restores. Also, since log files are files that change often then the process of deduplication slows down the back up quite a bit, so if you're backing up log files be prepared for back ups take a while. Which means if you have a select time the backup can't run then the backup won't backup all your files.

It works well, I really wish I could use it at home to use it as a home solution but it is not economically feasible for home use unless the business model has changed.

I was solving a problem with backups that used tapes and converted over to disc backups which would then replicate to another office location. Benefits are the data within retention can be restored fast. Benefits by far outweigh the cons. File directories as big as 100tb that have changes can be backed up in minutes which means less network usage.

I like the integration of the backup target with the client software.

Bare Metal Restore capabilities could be better.

Try it and you'll like it. Use the AVE (Avamar Virtual Edition leveraging VMware, and you can use any storage you want, and not have to rely on dedicated storage for your backup target.

Knowing that I have data available to retrieve from past backups in a fast, secure environment. Especially if you have the ability to replicate the data to another location, and utilize different retention policies for the local, vs. the remote data.

file system backups are very fast , always incremental , easy to administer , faster and simple BMR. easy to set up replication to DR .

cache file dependency , if any cache file got corrupted then the next will be full backup .

virtual machine individual files restore limitation . during maintenance window only few backup can be run .

for filesystem backups , for BMR restore and managing is very simple.

File system backups are very fast , easy to deploy virtual machine backups , BMR backups , DR replication