Avamar Integration

Avamar integrates with several products and technologies to provide seamless backup and restore capability and simplified management.

Avamar integrates with Data Domain to use the DD system as disk.  DDBoost is built into the Avamar client and is used to direct backup to the DD instead of to the Avamar storage node.  The Avamar will initiate the backup and manage the meta data, but the client will communicate directly with the Data Domain.  One benefit of this is to provide faster backup and recovery of large, active databases, and another is to expand the Avamar system.  The DD does not need to be dedicated to the Avamar server but can be used with other backup methods on the same DD.  The Avamar maintenance routines will trigger similar routines on the DD, being seamless in management.

Avamar integrates with EMC Networker and would be used as a storage back end on Networker.  You would use this if you needed the extended support for applications NetWorker provides.

Avamar integrates with VMWare on both guest backup and image-level backup.  For guest backup, an agent is installed into the VM, and would typically be used for application and database support.  Image-level backup is handled using VMWare's VADP (VMWare API for Data Protection).  When Avamar initiates a backup job, it creates a temporary snapshot of the VM and uses an image proxy to reduce teh amount of CPU required to back up the VM.  The image proxy also handles the source-based deduplication.  Multiple proxies can be used to cut down on backup time.  VMWare backups take advantage of VMWare's changed-block tracking, which tracks which blocks of the VMDK file have updated or are new and sends only those blocks instead of the entire file.  This reduces backup time because Avamar doesn't need to scan the entire file for changes.

File-level restore is possible in Windows VMs with Avamar as of version 5.0, and Linux file-level restore is a feature available in Avamar 6.1.  Multiple proxies can be used, and restores use the same proxy as the backup.

Avamar 6.1 integrates with HyperV, but uses no proxy.  An agent is required to be installed on HyperV host.  Windows cluster is also supported with the installation of a special Avamar Windows Cluster client that is tasked with backing up the shared storage.  The install requires that the Windows Avamar client be installed and the systems register with the Avamar, after which teh cluster agent can be installed.

Avamar 6.1 also supports Veritas Cluster Services for Solaris 9 or 10 on VCS v5.0 and 5.1.  It will support a 2-node cluster in active/active or active/passive modes only.

Avamar will back up NAS devices with the introduction of an NDMP Accelerator, which is a pass-through device storing no data.  Avamar 5.0 and newer supports NDMP 4, and multiple NAS devices can be backed up to the same Avamar, or multiple Avamar devices can back up a single NAS device.  An Avamar with more than 8GB of RAM will handle up to 8 streams, where smaller Avamar servers will handle 4.  There is a limit of 10,000,000 files per backup to maintain performance standards.  Avamar determines if this should be the initialization, or first backup or if it should be incremental, and if it is incremental the Avamar system merges the data into a single full backup.