Anyone Using Avamar?

[eperez507]

We backup LA, UK, Australia, India, Dubai, Minnesota, Ireland, and Boston and it is about 5 TB-7 TB. We have 3 appliances in remote sites that are larger and 1 big one at our main site.

In our test with 1 remote site this is the timing..rough estimate

TSM it took 2 weeks to backup the data the first time and 1 day for every incremental
PureDisk took 1 week for 1st backup and about 8 hours every incremental
Avamar took 96 hours for 1st backup and 15-30 minutes every incremental

The cost is varied by if you want fast local restores. With our test whatever it took you to backup with client-only based only mutiply that by 2 and that is your restore time. So 96 hours would take about 200 hours for total restore. But it depends on if you need a local appliance or not.

 

[Jeff_Jeske]

That is excellent information ... thanks. BTW what size links do you have for off shore backups?

 

[eperez507]

I knew you were going to ask this...you made be get my document...hehe...

Australia 2 Mbps
UK 44 Mbps
France 6 Mbps

The test site was 5 Mbps if I am not mistaken and it was in LA.

 

[rowl]

I am curious what sort of deduplication you achieve with Avamar. I had the sales pitch meeting yesterday, and some what of a deep dive into the technology and I think it is interesting. I am in the midst of a redesign of our environment and am considering a best of breed approach. For our large databases I would stick with TSM for now,but for the 1000's of file servers running linux, windows, and other *nix platforms Avamar sounds like it may be a nice fit.

The 18 node grid seems rather small to me, with just over 50 TB of usable capacity. I would need to achieve some very impressive deduplication, or get this at a great price point to make it work in our environment.

Like many others, the licensing model for TSM is driving us to look at alternative solutions.

 

[deep83]

Avamar for SQL DB Please help me out want to talk with you on this we are trying it

Hi
I saw your thread and want to request your help on this Avamar for SQL implemnetation can you please help me out on this as we are trying to implement avamar 6.0 with SQL DB we do have around 3000 DB and we need every 6 hour backup of db for t- logs Please help me out.

We use Avamar product here at the State of Mn..It is a good product but it does have some issues with supporting new levels of operating systems, SQL database levels. What I am trying to say is TSM is usually faster at delivering a backup client that supports newer versions of SQL, Windows, that arrive on the market. The only other issue I have with it is that one datastore as EMC will call it can only handle so much data, and then you have to buy another, but I guess you can compare that too buying more tape and adding an expansion unit onto your library. TSM can definitely hold more data before having to expand it to a new grid. But the dedup on Avamar is better than TSM because I have read TSM does not recommend dedup if you are pumping more than 3 TBs of data a night, not sure if that is true or not because our TSM environment does not use dedup.

I think TSM is the better product but I think since EMC has taken over Avamar it has made some strides. We have had avamar for 5 years One avamar grid only holds about 14 TB of dedup data, but I know EMC datastore might have increased that number. I think dedup is overrated for database backup but who knows its based on the data you are backing up. No matter what I have never seen this Avamar product be able to backup to tape. We do have a primary and a remote site but it is all disk based.

TSM has better documentation, and better scalibility.

 

[HadasB]

A few years late, but this is really helpful for those looking to implement Avamar: http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/avamar-review-by-antone-heyward

Really in-depth and, most importantly, objective review of the product.

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