VMware Selects EMC Avamar to Power vSphere Data Protection – VMworld Update, Monday

VMware Selects EMC Avamar to Power vSphere Data Protection – VMworld Update, Monday

August 28, 2012 by Phil George in Product and Technology News, Virtualization

By Phil George, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Avamar

While watching the VMworld Keynote session, and listening to Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger talk about how the industry has gone through a tremendous IT transformation, I couldn’t help to think the same about backup and recovery (no surprise there – that’s what I always think about ). I think we can all agree that most companies are 60% virtualized and therefore are changing their traditional backup to one that is optimized for VMware. Even VMware has transformed …

VMworld's Jeff Hunter, Sr Technical Mktg Mgr

VMware and EMC announced its partnership and the delivery of a next generation backup and recovery solution optimized for VMware as an integral part of vSphere 5.1 – vSphere Data Protection (VDP), which replaces VDR. Now don’t get lost in the acronyms. VDP is based on Avamar’s industry leading variable length deduplication which leverages Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for both backup and recovery. This provides the ultimate in backup and recovery performance while minimizing backup storage requirements.

Did you attend session BCO1361 Next Generation Backup and Recovery for vSphere presented by VMware? If not, don’t miss the next one on Wednesday at 11am! Jeff Hunter, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager for VMware wowed a standing room only crowd with everything a person would want to know about VDP (see picture above right).

VDP uses the new vSphere Web Client user interface and allows for end-user self restore. VDP uses a virtual storage appliance with up to 2TB of deduplicated capacity. The virtual appliance comes pre-built with proxy VMs enabling up to 8 simultaneous VMs to be backed up concurrently.

As seen in the new VMware vSphere Web Client (see picture below), you simply select vSphere Protection and then create your backup job or choose to restore a VM. Remember, the restore operation will CBT to recover only the needed blocks in a fraction of the time it would take to restore the entire VM.

After the press announcement there was a real buzz on the show floor with many questions and comments from customers. One notable comment I heard was “I have always wanted to try Avamar since I have heard from friends at other companies who swear by it.” Now VDP is based on Avamar, but it is a VMware product built right into vSphere, so there are a number of differences. The good is news is that if you do start with VDP and chose to move to Avamar someday, you can simply move your backup data right into the Avamar Data Store.