Storage and Information Management Brief

Avamar: A Bold Approach to Backup and Recovery

April 2005Date:

Tony Asaro Author:

Senior Analyst Title:

Related Practice Areas For This Brief:Storage and Information Management

Abstract:Avamar offers a bold approach for solving a real problem – the entire backup process. The Avamar backup software, Axion is an easy to use, policy-driven application and the backup media is a disk-based system that is extremely simple to manage and scale.

Avamar has taken a two-front assault to re-invent backup and recovery within the Enterprise. Avamar provides a unique solution that seeks toaddress the problems with backup and recovery from end-to-end. While other vendors are trying to solve the problem by providing disk-to-disk backup products Avamar’s thesis is the problem is not just the tape library but also the backup and recovery software. The Avamar Axion solution consists of its backup and recovery software and a network-based disk storage system as part of a total solution. The Axion software was designed to be easy to use and provide functionality to improve backup performance and optimize capacity. The Axion storage system is extremely scalable and requires practically no management.

Customer ExperiencesOne Avamar customer told us that it once took 4.5 days to perform full backups but using Avamar reduced this process to four hours. Not every customer will get this kind of performance improvement. Another Avamar customer we spoke with went from 3 hours to 15 minutes – an amazing improvement as well. The implications of this are important. ESG Research surveyed 222 IT professionals asking them what their biggest problems were with their current backup and recovery solutions (Chart 1). Backup and recovery performance were at the top of the list. Avamar customers using Axion were able to reduce backup times by 15 to 27 times compared to tape. Recovery of data was also substantially faster with one customer reporting restoring data in 30 seconds from Axion compared to 15 minutes from tape.

Capacity Optimization = Lower Cost + Better PerformanceThe way that Avamar accomplishes these impressive results is through the use of three technologies including backing up only changed or new data, Commonality Factoring, and data compression. Avamar backs up only changed data, which is different than traditional incremental backups. Avamar requires customers to perform a full backup only once and then changes are continuously applied to it. Incremental backups supported by some other leading backup software products are more of a stop gap requiring customers to regularly perform on-going full backups. The Avamar approach is much more efficient. Avamar supports another powerful technology they call Commonality Factoring. This is a set of algorithms that scans for duplicate data and only backups up what is unique. Avamar also supports data compression algorithms, which eliminate space and redundant byte patterns. The combination of these technologies results in significantly improving backup performance, optimizing network bandwidth and disk capacity. To explain how these three technologies work together consider an email with a big document attached to it sent to different users within an organization, with many of theusers saving the document to their individual folders. The document is modified slightly by one of the users and then sent back out to the original distribution. Several of the recipients then save the modified document to their individual

folders. The following process occurs with an Axion backup:

The original document is backed up only once (commonality factoring). White space and redundant data patterns are removed from the Email and the attachment (compression). Only the changes in the modified document are backed up once within the whole environment. The changes are compressed as well tofurther reduce backend storage requirements.

Axion is also well-suited for remote office backup. Remote backup is typically cost prohibitive because of the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the WAN. However, the Avamar’s data reduction capability at the remote site significantly reduces the amount of traffic that is sent over the WAN. An Avamar customer told ESG that they never would have implemented remote site backup if it wasn’t for Axion. The costs would have been too high and they never would have been able to get all of their backup data over the WAN in a timely enough fashion.

ESG’s ViewBased on ESG Research the majority of customers (76%) are looking to augment tape with disk-based backup solutions(Chart 2). Additionally, in various discussions ESG has with customers they rarely have any strong loyalty to their backup software. Avamar has some significant challenges trying to convince customers to make two major changes. Avamar wants customers to abandon use of their backup software and tape libraries - solutions that took time, money and resources to put into place for operational backup and recovery. However, customers can implement Avamar Axionin stages starting with a single department or server, or use it to backup remote offices, or use Axion for daily and weekly backups and tape for monthly full backups. ESG heard comments such as “untenable situation” and “on-going agony” and “unacceptable window of vulnerability” as motivesthat drove customers to re-invent their backup environments. Avamar is making a bold move by attempting to replace both the backup and recovery software and tape library products. As one customer put it - “The reason we chose Avamar is because we think they are the only vendor offering a complete solution to the entire problem with backup and recovery”.

1ESG Research:The Evolution of Data Protection December 2003 2ESG Research:Tape Replacement Report March 2005

April 2005

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