Avamar is tightly coupled with EMC’s Data Domain line of storage systems.
Avamar has the most advanced data deduplication offering among all backup vendors because it is their primary area of focus.
Avamar is suited for storage specialists who want to focus on backup and integrate multiple storage, networking, and software components in order to stitch together the solution that meets their needs. This is the opposite of Unitrends’ value proposition, which wants you to focus on your business instead of your backup.
Primary Disadvantages of EMC Avamar:
Avamar’s software only solution tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to the higher operational expenses of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software.
The non-integrated nature of Avamar’s software only product leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software vendors when a problem occurs.
For larger heterogeneous datasets, the price of Avamar appliances gets very prohibitive.
Setting up Avamar for deduplication can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the Avamar software will operate.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression and/or encryption) using Avamar on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
Integrated fixed/rotational archiving for disaster recovery and long-term retention (D2D2-disk, -NAS, -SAN) is not supported by Avamar.
For having a comprehensive backup, archiving, and disaster recovery solution, other products from the EMC portfolio have to be used, thereby increasing the cost and complexity of the solution.
