EMC
is getting busy cross-pollinating more of its storage intellectual property
within its corporate domain.
The
storage and data protection giant on April 18 launched version 6.0 of its
Avamar deduplication backup software, which is news all by itself. But a
further angle is that this marks the first time EMC has orchestrated the integration
of Avamar's features into its cousin Data Domain's gateway deduplication
storage system.
The
results, EMC contends, are significant new capabilities for the protection of a
number of environments, including VMware and SharePoint. For the record, EMC
owns all three organizations: Avamar (bought in 2006), Data Domain (2009) and
VMware (2004).
"After
the acquisition of Data Domain in 2009, one of the things we told the market we
intended to do was to bring all of our solutions closer together," Rob
Emsley, senior director of product marketing at EMC Backup Recovery Systems
Division, told eWEEK. "Avamar
6.0 not only continues to back up workloads to the Avamar data store, but now
it also backs up specific workloads to Data Domain."
Avamar’s
well-respected deduplication feature has been targeted at specific backup
problem environments—VMware, remote office, branch offices, desktop/laptop—where
resources and bandwidth can be a challenge for enterprise-wide backup and
recovery, Emsley said.
"In
the integration with Data Domain, we're really expanding the use case of Avamar
to support the enterprise applications that find themselves in the data center.
A lot of these applications are already being backed up to Data Domain, but the
software being used has been anything but Avamar," Emsley said.
The
Avamar upgrade also handles backups of Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL
server images. When used in coordination with Data Domain, which has the
ability to support multiple workloads simultaneously, Avamar 6 gives IT
administrators a number of new options in time saving.
For
Data Domain admins, the integration of Avamar and Data Domain is delivered via
Data Domain Boost software, now an optional feature embedded in Avamar clients.
DD Boost enables Avamar to centrally manage backup, recovery and replication of
data to Data Domain storage systems.
It
distributes a deduplication project differently from Avamar's standard
software, thus optimizing performance for larger streaming loads, such as digital
video and full database backups or restores, Emsley said.
"We
have recorded times as fast as 43 minutes to back up 1,000 virtual
machines," Emsley told eWEEK.
Using
Avamar 6.0, there are now three ways to restore a VM: to the original, to an
existing VM, or to a new VM.
Avamar's
Data Store also has been updated to its fourth generation, which more than
doubles usable capacity to 124TB. In addition, multiple Data Domain
systems (including the new DD890, which supports up to 285 TB of usable capacity)
can be added modularly for additional storage as needed, Emsley said.
EMC Avamar 6.0 is available now; pricing
information is available upon consultation.
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