AVamar Integration with NDMP

The Avamar NDMP accelerator supports VNX, Celerra, and NAS devices running Data ONTAP.  It supports NDMP version 4 over 100/1000 Mb/sec Ethernet and will work over a LAN or WAN.

A single NDMP accelerator appliance will support multiple storage devices and up to 8 simultaneous streams, performing real-time data dedupe.  Of course, there needs to be sufficient RAM and configuration on the accelerator.

 By default, NDMP backups contain all storage device accounting information and ACLs.  Only volumes are visible , and include/exclude lists are not supported.  When combined with VNX or Celerra, the NDMP accelerator performs incremental backup at the volume level only and defaults to full backup of sub-root directories.  Best practice is to not backup more than 10 million files in a single backup job, which can be overridden in the config but jobs may fail for lack of memory with too many files.

When backing up NetApp Filers, the NDMP accelerator is backward compatible to Avamar 4.1 servers, but version 5.0 or newer is recommended.  The appliance will backup and restore volumes, qtrees and directories, and SnapVault snapshots must be backed up in full. 

The NDMP accelerator will perform file level restores, as well as single directories and sub-directories, but data backed up on other Avamar client types are not restorable to a NAS - if it came from NDMP, it stays on NDMP and vice-versa.  There is no web restore with external authentication - users must have local authentication, and ACLs are fully supported, but there is no control for overwrite options.

Both LAN and WAN location of the NDMP device are supported, but it is recommended to have the accelerator local to the device being protected.   8 GB of memory is required in the appliance for multiple streams, and the recommendation is to have 4GB of memory per stream (8 streams max).

Multi-volume accounts will attempt to backup all volumes simultaneously, opening up to the possibility that there would be too many simultaneous streams.  It is best practice to combine all multi-volume accounts into one account and have a single multi-volume backup using the avsetupndmp script.