EMC Updates Avamar Dedupe Software, Hardware

Avamar 6.0, which EMC got with its 2006 acquisition of Avamar, also features increased scalability, either when used on its own or in conjunction with Data Domain dedupe appliances, said Rob Emsley, senior director for the backup and recovery services division of EMC.

The biggest change in Avamar 6.0 is its integration with Data Domain appliances, which finally brings together EMC's Avamar dedupe software with either its Data Domain dedupe hardware or the Avamar-branded storage appliances, Emsley said.

The Avamar Data Store appliances are targeted at customers who are protecting large numbers of smaller files, while the Data Domain storage appliances target customers with larger files, Emsley said.

"This lets customers use Avamar to act as an enterprise-wide solution to handle data backups of any size while leveraging dedupe in Oracle, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint environments," he said.

Avamar 6.0 is also now better integrated with VMware's vSphere 4.0 virtualization platform. Emsley said the result is the ability to track changed blocks of data to increase the performance when restoring virtual machines, as well as the ability to create virtual proxy servers to handle tasks such as restoring and load balancing of virtual machines.

Avamar 6.0 also now provides three different ways to restore virtual machines, including restoring to the original virtual machine, to an existing but different virtual machine, or to a completely new virtual machine, he said.

EMC also used the unveiling of Avamar 6.0 to update its Avamar Data Store appliances to be able to handle up to 124 TBs of data, or over double the capacity of the previous model. The Avamar Data Store Gen 4 appliances can also directly leverage Data Domain appliances for additional storage capacity if needed, he said.

Avamar 6.0 and the Avamar Data Store Gen 4 appliances are currently available.