For today's presentation, I'll begin with an overview of traditional data protection models. Then I'll provide an overview of Avamar technology, how it works, and how it solves backup and recovery challenges in new ways. and, at the end of the presentation, I'll summarize what we've talked about and answer any questions you may have.
Often the first outwardly visible sign of a problem in your technology infrastructure is that something, hopefully metaphorically speaking, “blows up.” An outage occurs, an application slows, a website goes down, or a service (e-mail, etc.) stops working. A flurry of e-mails, calls, texts and (heaven forbid!) tweets, ensues.
Avamar provides daily full backups that can be quickly recovered in just one step , thereby eliminating the hassle of restoring full and subsequent incremental backups to reach the desired recovery point.
The makeup of a company’s information storage environment varies greatly and so does the unique backup challenges for each area. Avamar was designed from the ground up, as a deduplication backup software and system, made to handle the backup requirements for virtualized environments, remote offices, NAS, desktop/laptop, and the most pervasive enterprise applications such as Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange; Oracle and Oracle RAC; and IBM DB2 and Lotus Domino. Avamar streamlines backup and recovery for the enterprise, dramatically reducing backup windows and network traffic.
As you can see, Avamar software has broader client support than any other products on the market, enabling EMC to protect the key applications that exist at remote offices and data center environments—and virtual infrastructure. Most recently, Avamar 6.1 client operating system and application support protection was expanded a variety of items as highlighted in green above. For a complete listing, please see the Avamar Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix.”
With desktop/laptop support you now have the ability to protect employee data back to the data center using the same deduplication backup software solution you use for your data center and remote office backups—including data deduplication, open-file backup, and CPU throttling—all in a small client footprint taking up only 5 MB. And since it’s Avamar technology, it requires little bandwidth because the same data is never backed up twice, providing up to 10 times faster daily backup. Avamar in Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh desktop/laptop environments is easy to install and use and it operates in the background, nondisruptively to the end user. An end-user interface eliminates the intervention of the Help Desk to restore data to end users’ desktops or laptops. End users are automatically backed up when logged in during normal backup windows. Alternatively, users can initiate backups on their own. Similarly, with the help of a powerful search engine, they can restore their own files at any time, and from anywhere, without contacting their IT Help Desk. EMC expects the majority of its customers’ IT departments to use their standard desktop deployment tools (like SMS) to install the Avamar client on end-user systems, and to eventually include the Avamar client in their master imageso that all new PCs come with Avamar installed. Policies (what to backup, when to run the backups, and how long to retain them) are managed at an (Avamar) domain or group level, so administrators can implement and enforce policies globally—or by well-defined organizational entities. For instance, while you may consider all Microsoft Word and Excel files to be corporate assets, you may only allow JPEGs or MP3s to be backed up on behalf of the Marketing group.Finally, Avamar’s traditional capacity licensing model is really simple and means that you don’t have to generate certificates or move licenses when you add users, or when your existing users upgrade to a new computer.
Now let’s review how Avamar brings it all together to manage backup and recovery for the enterprise. No matter what size or industry, Avamar provides flexible deployment options and fits into your environment. For desktops and laptops, only lightweight Avamar agents are deployed. They deduplicate and send only unique data compressed and encrypted to the Avamar Data Store at the data center. The same holds true for small remote offices; no extra hardware or backup storage is required, thus reducing costs and management overhead. For larger sites, you may choose to back up locally to an Avamar single node or to the Avamar Virtual Edition for fast local backup and recovery. This enables faster recovery of a large amount of data without having to traverse the WAN. Replication to the data center is required to ensure disaster recovery criteria are met. For virtualized environments, Avamar is optimized to provide application-consistent backups through guest-level agents, as well as bare metal recovery from agentless image-level backup.
Avamar is a key element of EMC’s next-generation Backup Recovery Systems portfolio.By storing data more cost-effectively on disk, Avamar provides data protection where enterprises no longer have to use tape as their primary method to recover data in the event of a failure or loss, and where disk can be the de-facto medium for backup and recovery.Avamar's backup and recovery software has an important difference—Avamar’s unique global data deduplication technology eliminates the unnecessary transmission of redundant backup data that is sent over the network and stored. This defuses the enormous amount of data growth. Avamar deduplicates at the source and across sites and servers. As a result, Avamar technology can dramatically reduce the amount of time required for backups and the impact on the network. This data reduction also alters the fundamental economics of disk versus tape, allowing companies to cost-effectively backup data to disk at a cost that is equal to, or less than, tape. I hope this presentation has helped you understand more about Avamar. Now, I’d like to discuss how this technology may apply to your specific environment or answer any questions you may have.
