<snip>


stan wrote:
> 
> I can't answer your question, but I do have a subsidiary question. We are
> thinking of getting an Avamar device here. What is the advantage of tying it
> into NetWorker, as apposed to using it standalone and using just the Avamar
> agent on each client? From my perspective, if we use Avamar without
> NetWorker, we can save a lot on annual maintenance because the Avamar agents
> are free.
> 


Avamar, unfortunately, does not do everything well; it's a by-product of the 
host-based architecture.   Since everything is loaded into RAM to be 
chunked/hashed, extremely large files - I'm talking individual files, NOT 
filesystems - can bog down your system.  For example, any program that 
generates a multi-hundred gigabyte flatfile backup will almost certainly have a 
dramatic impact on system performance.  Also, the NDMP backup support by Avamar 
is orders of magnitude poorer than the native Networker support (Avamar's NDMP 
backups require a special node to proxy the traffic, and its fairly slow).

On the other hand, what Avamar does well, it does REALLY well.  And having a 
single administration/notification/management point for it AND Networker AND 
Homebase simplifies things greatly.  We have Networker and Avamar and are not 
yet running in a combined mode, but I look forward to the day that we can.  
Your concerns about the licensing of the modules are certainly valid, and in 
our case they don't apply, so I'll acknowledge  that we may be in the minority.

What irks me greatly is that while it is technically possible (and trivial) to 
run the native Avamar system and clients at the same time you run a combined 
Networker/Avamar deployment, it is NOT a supported configuration.  If that has 
recently changed, someone please thwack me with a cluebat.  Other than the 
capacity management issue, I can't understand why its NOT.......?

HTH
-- brerrabbit

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