NetApp countered the offer by raising their bid to $30/share like EMC's.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D98J6CN03.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Sesar,
Steven L.
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 9:46 AM
To: william.d.brown AT gsk DOT com; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Anyone using avamar
Also worthy of noting, EMC is making a run for Data Domain. They just
bid $1.7B for the company, outbidding NetApp by $300M. Makes me wonder
what EMC's plans are for Avamar.
--Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of
william.d.brown AT gsk DOT com
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 6:33 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Anyone using avamar
I looked in a lot of detail last year at VTLs and disk backup solutions.
They all have pros and cons - a lot depends as someone else pointed out
on
what you are trying to fit it into.
If you have to create long term retention tapes the Avamar has a real
problem - it is not what it was designed to do, and anything EMC will
offer at the moment is really ugly. I'm sure they know that and will
try
and fix it. As pointed out, if you don't need that it is in principal
really good for VM backup as it dedupes in the client, so you can have a
greater VM density on your ESX servers, with more storage and not run
out
of physical LAN bandwidth off the ESX server.
We had a demo pair of these appliances, and had no problems doing what
it
says it does. We replicated transatlantically, and backed up clients
elsewhere in Europe. We wouldn't do that for production, it was just we
had the 2 demo units in different places. Like all dedupe + replicate
solutions, you just need to recall you buy in pairs at least. So the
entry cost is quite high if you are backing up a data centre. They come
from the Remote Office background, where there a many small sites with
modest data backing up to a central site. There are nice features like
you can restore from any replica, and there is none of the hierarchy of
a
NetBackup domain.
Both Avamar and PureDisk come from the 'low end' and are moving into the
larger sites. As pointed out, PureDisk *client* itself is not yet
integrated with NetBackup scheduling - it sends data to the PureDisk
appliance, and there is a capability to export to NetBackup to create
tape
copies. What tends to confuse is that same appliance can act as a Disk
Pool for NetBackup, and then it is just another kind of Open Storage,
you
use it in SLPs and whatever. It can do optimised replication, NetBackup
catalog tracks all the copies. There is a plug-in on the Media Server
that does the deduplication - so you don't get the in-the-client dedupe
of
Avamar, but if you position your media servers carefully you can still
do
good things. You use the normal NetBackup clients.
Both Avamar and PureDisk deduplicate across the whole appliance.
DataDomain support OST as well as offering straight NAS (as BasicDisk)
and
also a VTL mode. The issue we found was that a DD appliance could not
be
accessed by multiple NetBackup domains, so you can't share them. We
wanted to put an appliance on Site A that took the local backups and
replicated to Site B, and do the same in reverse. No can do
(currently).
We also wanted an existing Master on Site B to be able to import the
replicated images from Site A, without interrupting replication, so we
could do DR tests and the like. That is also an issue in some aspects.
DD
deduplicates within a single unit, so a stack of 16 is...a stack of 16;
you need to make sure backups from a particular client always go the
same
appliance to get best dedupe.
PureDisk (strictly the PureDisk Deduplication Option, PDDO) with
NetBackup
does allow the appliance to be used as a Disk Pool from multiple
domains.
You would need to be a little careful about free space reporting but it
worked fine in demo at Symantec. We could also use SLPs or Vault to
create tape copies as required, and as of 6.5.4 you can create the tape
copy from the remote replica (assuming you have a remote media server
to
do it).
PureDisk is not a simple appliance you buy - you *can* buy ready-built
from Sun - a little advertised fact - otherwise you get the DVD and the
licence, and build it yourself on your favourite hardware and disk - so
long as it is in all those compatibility matrices.
If you do want to end up on tape a VTL may make sense, with all the
pretend tape drives and media. I looked a lot at when and how the
deduplication is done. Quantum and all the FalconStor clones (like EMC)
store the backup initially at 'full strength' and then deduplicate that
to
another set of disks. They sell that gives you quick restore of the
most
recent backup - but you do need a lot of disk! You also need to decide
if you want a short backup window (least time to involve the application
server CPU) or a short time to get the data offsite. For the former,
backup to disk without inline dedupe is quickest. For the latter, you
want the dedupe to start as soon as possible, so either inline or at
least
starting as soon as you have a complete image on disk. You can't start
to replicate until you deduplicated, or you have too much to ship over
the
WAN.
Many of the VTLs have weaknesses around things like replication rate, or
being able control when it starts. If you don't need NetBackup to know
about the replicas you can do without Open Storage support. DataDomain
used as NAS BasicDisk is I think very widely used. It took a big knock
when Symantec changed the licensing so you need an Enterprise Disk
licence
to write to anything that deduplicates. NetApp are buying DD so
something is bound to change in their product offerings.
We are going with Avamar at least for VMs and other smaller servers, and
we were looking in detail at a PDDO deployment, but this year is not one
for a big capital spend...so that is not happening - although as someone
pointed out, it would save money over a few years. It certainly allowed
a
coherent design that tied in to existing NetBackup systems.
So in summary you need to decide what matters to you:
NetBackup integration
Ability to produce tapes for some backups
or...All backups end up on tape
Days of backups you want to retain on disk on site
Time to get data offsite vs backup window
Scalability
Resilience
and bear in mind, the products change all the time...
William D L Brown
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