Avamar System Components

The Avamar System is comprised of 3 components:  the server, the administrator and the clients.

Servers are comprised of a utility node, which handles the internal server processes and services, holds the administration server, cron jobs, external authentication mechanisms, NTP and web access to the Avamar system.  Storage nodes are dedicated to writing data to disk and have large disk capacities.  A spare node can be implemented to speed recoverability from a node failure and must meet the other node capacities.  Each node requires its own network connections.

Systematic fault tolerance is provided in Avamar systems using RAID (1 or 6) for disk failure, RAIN to protect against node failure, replication to protect against server loss, high availability uplink and redundant switch to protect against network loss and checkpoints to protect against operational failure.  Checkpoints are read-only snapshots of the Avamar system and are hard links to all stripes in the system.

Avamar systems can come as single-node systems (non-RAIN) or multiple-node systems utilizing RAIN.  The common denotation for Avamar systems is  #_of_utility_nodes x #_of_storage_nodes + spare_node, or 1x3x1 for a system with 3 storage nodes.  The minimum RAIN config is 1x3+1 and the maximum is 1x16+1 - however the spare node is not required if Premium Support is purchased.

Avamar 6.1 runs SLES linux for the Gen4 Avamar.  Gen3 and previous run RHEL and is support for migrations up to ver 5.x.  These all support multiple CPU.

Node sizes:
Gen4:  1.3, 2.6, 3.9. 7.8 TB
Gen3:  1.0, 2.0, 3.3 TB
AVE:  0.5, 1, 2 TB (meant for smaller installations)

Avamar Data Store is the appliance version, AVE is Avamar Virtual Edition designed as an appliance to run on VMWare ESXi servers.

Avamar Data Store in Gen4 comes as single-node or multi-node configuration.  It si EMC built and certified, and must be installed by EMC trained professionals.  Single node comes licensed in 1.3, 2.6, 3.9 or 7.8 TB capacity, and the multi-node is licensed in 3.9 and 7.8 TB.

For multi-node systems, 1x3+1 is the minimum (unless Premium Support is purchased, then 1x3) and 18 nodes is max (1x16+1).  Previous generations supported 1x2 deployments, but that is no longer a supported configuration.


Each node utilizes a single IP address with multiple network connections.  Gen2, however, does not support multiple network connections.  Each node requires 2 Ethernet connections to provide HA Uplink to the network core.

A single-node deployment is not expandable.  TO get more capacity, the appliance must be migrated to a multi-node system.  In a multi-node config, a storage node can be configured as a utility node if required.  Utility nodes have 8 network connections, while storage nodes proved 4.

Avamare Virtual Edition (AVE) runs on ESX environment which are not supplied by EMC, and the ESX host must meet the I/O requirements tested for by EMC's benchmark utility that is run on the ESX host for 24 hours before deployment.