EMC Avamar

Avamar Business Edition

In November, 2012 EMC submitted the new version of EMC Avamar Business Edition developed especially for the companies of medium business. The backup system of Avamar Business Edition takes several years top positions in the market, thanks to exclusive simplicity of management, efficiency of storage and network work. The configuration focused on clients of an average segment provides up to 7.8 Tb of deduplitsirovanny volumes for backup.

The distinctive feature of infrastructure of the next generation of Avamar Business Edition is a complete transparency of processes: from acquisition before deployment and service. The complete end-to-end solution EMC Avamar essentially changed approaches to data backup in the industry. With the advent of the version of Avamar Business Edition the innovative technologies become available to even more wide range of users.

Systems and programs of deduplication Avamar offer the unique features and opportunities increasing quality of backup and data recovery. Developed especially for the solution of characteristic problems of traditional process of backup, the Avamar system quickly creates complete backup copies for the virtualized environments, the NAS systems, workstations and notebooks, remote offices and critical business applications. Thanks to technology of incremental reservation, data recovery happens in one stage.

The solution Avamar Business Edition supplements systems EMC VNXe and EMC Data Domain DD160 available through a partner network of EMC Velocity. All these products are focused on needs of representatives of medium business — on technologies, a format and price policy.

The solution Avamar Business Edition will be available also as a part of reference architecture of EMC VSPEXTM Proven Infrastructure — a solution package, the approved EMC and available is exclusive through partners of the company. The certified solutions VSPEX guarantee to customers full compatibility and operational implementation.

EMC Avamar 6.1

EMC Avamar 6.1 as the specialized solution of backup can independently work, not only under control of the separate server (we will tell, EMC NetWorker). According to the statement of the developer, low loading of a local network is characteristic of software of Avamar that allows to create on a centralized basis complete backup copies of data of remote branches. It is convenient for the companies with a set of branches or that whose local network is overloaded with different traffic.

Among other innovations the full support of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and groups of availability of the Microsoft Exchange databases are noted, in particular, adding of special agents of applications for SAP and Sybase. The integration scale with Oracle increased, and closer integration with DD (as storage of backup copies) allowed to use DD Boost for copying for Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Hyper-V, SAP and Sybase. Support of Microsoft Hyper-V both at the level of a guest system, and at the level of images is added.

What is interesting, EMC did not announce adding of support of systems (and the standard) LTO (Linear Tape-Open) – it added to Avamar without loud declarations. Apparently, marketing specialists of corporation decided to place emphasis on more than one thousand clients which EMS helped to organize "tapeless" backups. Rob Emsli reported that support of LTO was caused by need of the existing clients – part of them prefers tape drives for long storage of backup copies.

Analysts believe that expanded support and other above-mentioned changes became a part of the plan for closer integration of the products Data Domain and Avamar. It is promoted also by support of DD Boost technology which into EMS was entered in 2011.

The solutions EMC Avamar and EMC DataDomain use deduplication algorithms with a variable length of blocks – they in general more difficult than algorithms with blocks of fixed length (to define border of blocks not easy), but usually give bigger effect. At the same time process of deduplication happens in the inline mode (line deduplication) when at first data are processed, and then unique blocks and "assembly schemes" of data are written on a disk. Such approach allows to use more effectively disk space and to increase the speed of recovery of information, unlike the post-processing method where data at first are written on a disk, and then in the background there is their deduplication.

For nonspecialists it is worth explaining features of deduplication at the level of blocks. Modern technologies of deduplication are divided into the following types:

• File deduplication – the oldest method to reduce the number of the stored data. If a system finds two or more identical files – it replaces everything, except the first, with links to the first file. At the expense of it the number of the stored files decreases. However if files differ at least on one bit, a system will consider them different and deduplication will not happen.
• Block deduplication. In this case each file on a disk will be broken into several blocks preset or a variable, depending on an algorithm, length. In storage only unique blocks and "assembly scheme" of blocks will go to the file. Thus, the coefficient of deduplication will be significantly higher, than at file deduplication.

EMC Avamar 6.0

EMC Avamar 6.0 is the software of backup with deduplication. This version for the first time provides integration with the systems of deduplication EMC Data Domain and offers new powerful opportunities for protection of the environment of VMware.

Thanks to a combination of simplicity and efficiency of the software of Avamar with scalability and performance of the Data Domain systems corporate customers have flexible opportunities of the Avamar expansion and use of this product in large working environments. Now even the biggest enterprises can apply at the new level Avamar software to design of highly optimized and scalable infrastructure of data recovery, consolidate process management of protection of the data and direct the selected backup copies to optimal storage systems, proceeding from workload parameters. Besides, inherent Data Domain capability to support several workloads at the same time helps users to refuse the legacy software and to provide compliance to requirements of operational backup. According to the performance tests executed by EMC, for administrators of VMware the software of Avamar 6.0 considerably increases the speed and efficiency of transactions due to use of the last improvements in VMware vSphere technology, providing almost triple advantage in speed in comparison with a product of the closest competitor.

Integration of Avamar and Data Domain is performed using the software of EMC Data Domain Boost which now is built in in clients of Avamar. DD Boost allows Avamar to manage on a centralized basis backup, recovery and replication of data on Data Domain storage systems. Software DD Boost distributes deduplication loading by method, other than standard deduplication of Avamar, and provides the improved performance for heavy stream loads (such as backup or recovery of all database), minimum using bandwidth in the client/server environment. Now administrators of Avamar can send backup copies to the Data Domain or Avamar Data Store systems, being guided by recommendations and the best practices for specific applications. The software of Avamar 6.0 supports data backup of Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and images of VMware on the Data Domain systems.

New functionality of backup of VMware vSphere. Complete use of the VMware vStorage API interfaces for data protection and close integration with VMware vCenter Server allows Avamar 6.0 to provide high speed at good scaling.

• Support of Change Block Tracking gives the chance to accelerate backup and recovery.
• Support of pools of virtual proxy servers accelerates creation of backup copies.
• Flexible options of level of recovery simplify the procedure of recovery.

The improved scalability is provided thanks to emergence of the Avamar Data Store Gen 4 system with the formatted capacity increased more than twice – up to 124 Tbyte. Besides, to receive additional capacity for separate backup copies, it is possible to add several Data Domain systems (including the new DD890 system supporting up to 285 Tbyte of formatted capacity).

EMC Avamar 7

On July 11, 2013 EMC announced in media release of the updated release of Avamar 7. Now software supports redirection of all main data streams, including backup of file systems and NAS/NDMP, on the Data Domian systems.

This addition is necessary for protection of all main data types.

At new release there is a VM Instant Access function which allows to start the virtual machine from the backup copy on the Data Domain system less than in two minutes.

Ролик EMC Avamar 7 Plug-In for vSphere Web Client Demo