New quarter new release. It was hardware in Q1 now it’s backup software with Avamar 6.0
A bit of history. When EMC first acquired Avamar it was clear that delivery as an integrated appliance was the best route forward. Drop it on a floor tile, give it power and network connectivity, IP the system and then hit the button marked “GO!” This has been a successful strategy, so much so it’s been copied (Badly) by Avamar competitors. Avamar Virtual Edition has been popular for smaller environments where it’s possible to leverage an existing investment in VMware Virtual Infrastructure. As well as the new system software that we’re announcing today we’re also introducing the Fourth Generation of Avamar Data Store with up to 124TB of useable storage capacity for backup data deduplicated at the source.
Gen4 is the performance & scale improvement you’d expect from a Data Store upgrade, but in the era of Big Data and considering BRS also owns the fastest single controller deduplication storage systems on the market we could do better.
So we did.
Moving yet another step closer to the integration of key BRS technologies Avamar can now use one or more Data Domain storage systems as backup and recovery storage for Avamar backups. It doesn’t matter if either the Avamar Data Store or Data Domain system are already in use, with Avamar 6.0 you pretty much just point them at one another and away you go.
Avamar 6.0 with Data Domain increases the overall addressable storage capacity and facilitates the high speed deduplicated backup and recovery of large structured data sets (Email, DBs, VMware images, etc) and sets us up well for a future of requiring even more capacity and even greater throughput.
Sending someone a download link or giving them some optical media with binaries on them is no longer enough. EMC has been in the business of delivering integrated software and hardware for 12 years now and it’s where the market has moved.
Let’s talk about new software functionality.
Through its integration with VADP Avamar already used Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on backup of VMware Image files, now it supports CBT on restore which can dramatically reduce the ‘time to first ping’. That is, the time when the restore has completed, the VM has booted and it’s reachable on a network.
Expanded application support brings things like support for Oracle RAC and granular object level backup and recovery of the latest versions of Exchange & SharePoint. Three gaps which needed closing.
There’s a lot more but for that I’d advise looking at the release notes on Powerlink.
All in all Backup Recovery Systems has a lot going on, what we’ve announced today is just part of it. There’s still time to win a free pass and come see us at EMC World where we’re running deep dive technology sessions, hands on labs and talking about our view of backup and recovery during the Blockbuster Backup Solutions keynote with EMC BRS Vice President BJ Jenkins and CTO Stephen Manley.
Them, me and the worlds biggest ball of tape.
