Avamar does dedupe to tape

Up until today I thought that CommVault was the only backup product that was storing deduped data to tape.  It turns out the Avamar now does it too.

The weird thing is that this little tidbit was put way down at the end of a press release that didn’t mention it in its title.  Read that press release.  I did when it came out.  But I didn’t notice this tiny little sentence at the end:

“Finally, EMC has increased Avamar backup capacity by more than 60 percent and added new deduplicated export to tape functionality.”

For a product that has maintained a “we don’t need no stinking tape” stance for quite a while now, I think this is bigger news than a single sentence at the end of a long press release.  I already made my peace with dedupe to tape, as long as it’s used in the right way — as long term storage, not for operational recovery.

So I’m glad to see that Avamar also has this functionality as well.  And kudos to Scott Waterhouse for pointing out my miss and telling me on Twitter.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

3 comments
  • I read a blog post about this last night (and cant remember where!) so I went looking for some info this morning. There are a few documents up on Powerlink under Avamar Data Transport regarding requirements and installation. It looks like its not a light undertaking :

    The Avamar Data Transport system supports Avamar Servers running versions
    4.1.0, 4.1.1, 4.1.2., or 5.0. The Avamar Data Transport nodes are highly customized versions of Avamar Virtual Edition 4.1.2.

    Avamar Data Transport requires VMware ESX 3.5 update 4 or ESX 4.0.0

    The Avamar Data Transport application uses one of two backup software products
    to transport data to tape: EMC NetWorker® and Symantec NetBackup.For optimal efficiency it is strongly recommended that one tape drive per transport

    ESX requirements look to be pretty hefty, for example, to deploy an Avamar Data Transport system (one control node and with two transport nodes as per basic recommendation), ensure that the ESX server has at least 10 GB of memory, 2 * Quad Core processors and at least 5 TB of disk space available for virtual machines. Its also strongly recommended that the ESX server is dedicated to this task.

    For 4 transport nodes (the maximum) then your ESX server needs 4 quad core procs with a minimum of 34GB ram and 9 TB disk…..

    Obviously on top of this you need a backup server and tape library (with one drive per transport node recommended).

  • Well funny enough, but ARCserve Backup has the capability to write out dedup Data to tape since release 12.5. Current version is r15. ARCserve uses variable block size deduplication, supports multistreaming and the best of it, it is part of the Base Product. You don’t get better value from anybody else!
    Best regards,
    Arthur