CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

May 21, 2007

Product News

EMC Avamar Software Extend De-Duplication Capabilities to Virtual Machines and NAS Systems

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new data de-duplication capabilities that reduce the time it takes to backup virtual machines by up to 90%. Helping to advance its next-generation backup and recovery product portfolio, EMC® Avamar® software version 3.7 now supports VMware® Consolidated Backup (VCB) for the protection and reduction of backup times within and across virtual machines. Additionally, EMC Avamar has expanded its support to include EMC Celerra® network attached storage (NAS) systems. These Avamar software enhancements coupled with EMC's other new backup and recovery capabilities announced today (see related releases) help form the foundation of a next-generation backup infrastructure.

Avamar backup and recovery software transforms the entire data-protection process using unique global data de-duplication technology that eliminates the unnecessary transmission of redundant backup data that is sent over the network and saved to secondary storage. This helps customers manage the enormous amount of data growth both in core data centers and at remote offices. By de-duplicating at the source and across sites and servers, customers can dramatically shrink the amount of time required for backups, network utilization, and the growth of secondary storage.

VMware Consolidated Backup, a component of VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of the industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software suite, simplifies data protection by offloading backup to a centralized server. Offloading backup allows VMware ESX Server, which is also part of VMware Infrastructure 3, to run more virtual machines by reducing its load, and it eliminates hardware dependencies and enables backup to occur safely even during production hours.

With Avamar's new support of VMware Consolidated Backup, VMware customers have a simplified way of de-duplicating backup data stored in virtual machines, greatly reducing the amount of data backed up and minimizing the impact on host servers.   In many cases, customers can significantly reduce the size of backup data for virtual machines, resulting in reduced backup times and storage. Legacy solutions have challenges keeping pace with VMware software, creating problems for daily and weekly data protection. By eliminating redundant, unnecessary workload and data, customers leveraging Avamar can keep pace with virtualization, both for VMware Consolidated Backup and guest-level backups.

Brian Byun, Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions at VMware, said, "VMware delivers a new model for today's data center, and we're excited to have EMC's Avamar software integrated with VMware Consolidated Backup. Organizations continue to look at ways they can improve the efficiency of their backup environments - from the reduction of data moved, backup times and overhead on shared resources. As more customers deploy virtual machines using VMware products, Avamar's de-duplication capabilities enable customers to save time and money while helping their data to be protected."

Brad O'Neill, Analyst with the Taneja Group, said, "As VMware continues to permeate through organizations of all sizes, it creates a greater need for enhanced protection of data residing in virtual servers. EMC Avamar's new support for VMware Consolidated Backup puts EMC in a unique position that allows customers to drastically reduce the amount of data backed up in VMware environments. With this new support, customers can optimally drive their VMware deployments while taking their data protection environments to the next level."

Increased Support for EMC Hardware and Software, Operating Systems and Applications

Avamar also now provides backup support for EMC Celerra NAS systems.   File system environments, by their nature, typically have multiple copies of identical files. As a result, this increasing amount of duplicate data places pressure on backup windows.   Customers can now use Avamar de-duplication capabilities with Celerra systems, via NDMP backups, to address this challenge and accelerate the full backup of their file systems. In addition, EMC Backup Advisor software has added Avamar as a supported backup application providing advanced monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting capabilities for Avamar environments. These new capabilities provide visibility to Avamar backup job completion, as well as diagnostics to provide better analysis of failed backup jobs. Finally, Avamar has added new operating system and application support for HP-UX and Mac OS platforms as well as Oracle and IBM DB2 databases.

Mark Sorenson, EMC's Senior Vice President of Information Management Software, said, "Reducing the amount of backup data transferred and stored on secondary media helps alter the fundamental economics of disk versus tape as backup media, allowing companies to cost-effectively utilize disk at a cost that is equal to, or less than, tape. Our next generation backup solutions - like EMC Avamar solutions - are enabling customers to take advantage of that paradigm shift and enable disk to become the de facto medium for backup and recovery. With new game-changing technologies like de-duplicated backups for virtualized environments, EMC continues to raise the bar, helping customers store, protect, optimize and leverage their information infrastructure."

Availability

EMC Avamar software version 3.7 will be available in June 2007 from EMC and its authorized resellers.

 

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