Avamar is an end-to-end solution for backup and recovery in that it is comprised of both a software component and a hardware component. It uses "Global Deduplication" which is deduplicating data across all clients and all nodes in the backup system. Avamar appliances also provide data reduncancy by utilizing RAIN (Redundant Array of Independant Nodes), much like a RAID is using multiple disks to stripe data with parity, RAIN uses multiple appliances to stripe data. Avamar comes as a physical appliance (Data Store) or a Virtual Edition to be used in VMWare environments.
Avamar is a client-side dedupe process only, which reduces backup window by only transferring changed data, and also reduces network utilization. Avamar also uses incremental backup, but each backup appears as a full backup, reducing time to recover and restore.
Avamar software consists of backup agents to be installed on clients, and there are specialized clients for several databases and application vendor products such as Micro$oft Exchange and Sharepoint. The Enterprise Manager allows adminstrators to configure, manage and monitor the Avamar system, and the Avamar Administrator allows administrators to manage virtual machine backups through VMWare.
Avamar is tightly integrated into VMWare using VADP to perform image-level backup, and also installed agents to provide the granularity by installing agents on the VM itself to take advantage of the application-specific agents.
Avamar also has an appliance to assist with NAS backup, which is an NDMP Accelerator. It stores no client data, but transparently sends data from teh NAS to the Avamar server for backup. This makes it faster and easier to accommodate the large data sets normally associated with NAS devices, as well as accommodates the proprietary operating systems they utilize. The NDMP Accelerator is also recommended for remote office installations as well.
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