Jon's bag of tricks

Avamar Deduplication: Notes from the Field

Companies and organizations are often faced with challenges regarding their backup windows, making them concerned about their overall reliability. EMC Avamar is a powerful backup and recovery system that can provide your organization with the reliability of daily full backups in a fraction of the time required by a traditional tape and disk based backup solution.

How is this accomplished? Through the use of source-based deduplication technology. This post provides a couple of recent real-world examples of how powerful this product is, and how it makes dramatic reduction in backup windows possible.

The first example is with backing up Microsoft Exchange. This backup agent is provided at no charge with the purchase of Avamar software. (As a matter of fact, all supported clients and application backup agents are included at no charge, but I digress...) Avamar's exchange agent can backup the Information Store as well as individual mailboxes. The brick-level mailbox backup is the focus of this example.

A Midwest-based customer recently purchased Avamar from IDS and engaged IDS to implement the backup solution for their two data centers. The first backup pass of the Exchange Brick-Level backup took 20 hours to complete. The information store was approximately 80GB with 120 users and 500,000 total objects. The last successful backup of the Exchange mailboxes previously took 13 hours to complete with a popular departmental backup product. The second pass of this backup, scheduled 24 hours later, took 2 hours and had a commonality ratio of 99.7% (meaning the second full backup consumed only 225MB of disk space on the Avamar grid).

The second example is where Avamar really shines. A municipal goverment technology office purchased replicating Avamar Grids and engaged IDS to implement the backup solution. This organization had a file server with 650GB of mixed office files and application data on one of their servers. The initial backup of this server took 23 hours and reduced the data required to store the full backup by 65% on the initial pass. The second full backup of this server took less than 2 hours and required only .4%, or 2.6GB, of storage space on the Avamar Grid. This technology and the ability of the system to replicate their data off-site to a secondary data center will allow the customer to recover their investment by eliminating their current costly off-site backup service, while providing faster, more reliable restores.

Stupid (But Useful) Avamar Tricks: Are you having challenges sorting your activity monitor screen by start or end time? Try Shift+Click on the heading you want for descending sort.

Newly found features: Avamar 4.1 SP2 (v4.1.33) was released on June 30th; here are a couple of interesting tid-bits I have recently found. Client based overrides: you can on a client-basis override the encryption setting, and/or dataset (this is particularly useful if you want to schedule a server with special excludes or file lists with the rest of the servers in a group).