I don’t normally write too much about Avamar. While it’s a great product with some excellent features, my background has always been in NetWorker. That being said, I am trained in Avamar and use it from time to time, and for that reason, Avamar 7 made me sit up and take notice.
Comparing Avamar v7 to previous versions is like imagining some scrawny kid who you used to hang out with at school, then bumping into him a few years later only to find out he’s spent every day since in the gym.
Simply put, Avamar v7 is Avamar on steroids for a few, key reasons:
- No more black-out window: One of my biggest gripes with Avamar in the past has been the need for a black-out window. For a lot of organisations, a daily period where you can’t make configuration changes or run backups isn’t a big thing – particularly given the nature of source-based deduplication to result in much smaller backup windows. Yet, for some organisations, that window represented a sticking point. That’s now gone – finished, kaput. While backups are slower while garbage collection is running at the start of the maintenance window, that’s not really a problem.
- Increased stream count: The number of streams per storage node in Avamar has jumped from 27 to 72; the number of streams in maintenance mode has increased to 20.
- Instant-on recovery of virtual machines: Such is the integration now between Avamar and VMware that virtual machines backed up to a Data Domain may be powered on from the backup area, and if desired, VMotion’ed back into your production data storage.
- Enhanced replication: Previously, replication in Avamar was scheduled by cron and somewhat minimal; now with replication policies, you can schedule fairly granular replication to occur.
- IPv6 support: While I think a large number of corporate networks will remain on IPv4 for some time, firewalled behind an IPv6 internet, IPv6 support for a product like Avamar is a welcome relief for cloud service providers, regardless of whether they’re IaaS or BaaS.
- Increased Boost support: You can now pretty much backup anything in Avamar to a Data Domain system, with just a few minor exceptions. NDMP, fileserver data, you name it – it can now go to Data Domain. That means regardless of your backup requirements, you can pick the option that best suits your environment.
Avamar 7 is a big architectural jump ahead compared to previous versions of Avamar, and I think we’ll be seeing a lot of organisations using Avamar make the transition as soon as they can schedule it.