<img title="Avamar Icon" src="http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/uploaded_files/EMCAvamar/avamar%20icon.png" alt="" width="69" height="68" />An Avamar NDMP Accelerator node is an awesome way to connect your CIFS or NFS shares to one of the best backup solutions on the market today.

With Avamars powerful de-duplication technology coupled with the offloading capabilities of the NDMP accelerator to enable you to pass the data on the an EMC Celerra or NetApp solution through to the Avamar grid for efficient backup of these files.

Important note, though....With the NDMP backup solution, there must be some head room in the pool for the backup caching.  20GB is the minimum, but it could be more than that if the pool is really large.

The benefits fair out weigh the small size requirement for the backup.  And with Avamar the files are broken down into sub-file level pieces that are de-duplicated at at that level.  Resulting in an awesome ability to take files that are different and only backup the parts of the file that are different.

For example....

If a file template was used to create a document (say doc1.docx) and the that same template was used for another document (doc2.docx), when those files are backed up, traditionally, both full files would be backed up with no de-duplication since they are different files.  With Avamar, it breaks those two files down and only backs up the parts that are different.  So, you still get a portion of de-duplication on the file even though they are different.

Efficient and awesome