Use Storage Space More Efficiently with EMC's Avamar

EMC's deduplicating technology, dubbed Avamar, is a technology that removes block-level duplication before sending the data to a target device as part of a backup process. The company added lightweight clients for Windows and Mac, featuring an intuitive end user interface for backups and restores, as well as several administrative tools meant for the easy deployment and operation of the new clients.

Now at its fifth version, Avamar has had its Data Store capacity increased by 60 percent and is no longer restricted to servers, but can extend its service to normal desktops and notebooks. Additionally, there is no more need for multiple backups to be made, reducing the daily network impact by an impressive 99%.

EMC's netWorker backup software is used to enable the central management of the entire Avamar deployment. The technology now includes virtualization support of VMware vSphere4 through vCenter and vStorage integration. Now, customers have more backup and restore options, for a greater reliability and data security. This, EMC claims, provides "a more robust solution for VMware backups. [Also] Center has been integrated into the Avamar management console providing a single point of management for all [the] backup options available."

A surprising move on the part of the company was the implementation into Avamar of the ability to export deduplicated data to tape. This feature is dubbed Avamar Data Transport for Long Term Storage and it is claimed to be able to reduce the tape storage-capacity need compared with raw data tape backup by up to 50 times. The tape export process is policy-driven and users have access to "searchable file-level catalogs for rapid restores." This feature goes well with the fact that EMC sells Quantum-supplied tape storage libraries.

Thanks to the capacity-based licensing model, customers may add this new functionality without paying a per-seat license fee. Instead, they may need to pay capacity-increase fees. V5.0 Avamar is available immediately from EMC and its channel partners and more information on the product may be found here.