Having put in several Avamar solutions in the past few months, I wanted to share some comments and statistics from real customer environments that are now happily globally and source de-duplicating their backups with EMC Avamar.

Below are comments from our most recent Avamar victory.

"At this point I have calculated an approximate 72% de-duplication rate for all servers. Our backup windows for daily backups has shrunk from 8 hours to 1.5 hours. <strong>Our weekend backup has shrunk from 48 hours to 1.5 hours.</strong> "

48 hours to 1.5 hours. That's kind of a big deal. From almost NOT getting the backups completed over the weekend, to getting them done before kickoff of the earliest game on Saturday. Makes for a relaxing football season.

Below is a screenshot from a different customer environment running Avamar. I cut off their client names to protect the innocent.

The "on demand backup" jobs in the screenshot were first time backups that had the benefit of global de-duplication. As you can see, only a small percentage of their data was NOT already on the Avamar grid from another client, in which Avamar does not need to send that duplicate data (that's the GLOBAL de-dupe action).

A good example to illustrate what this means: Consider the Operating System files in the following scenario. Client A runs Server 2008 R2 and has already been backed up. Client B also runs Server 2008 R2. Same OS.

The initial backup for Client B will NOT send any OS files over the network to be backed up, because the data is already there (so why send it again?). In the event that a restore is needed, Avamar knows how to get that data.

And this is done at variable segment lengths-- not at a file level, and not with a fixed block count.

Ah, the power of Avamar.

Can your backup system do that?

<img class="aligncenter" src="http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8791/avamarsnap.png" alt="" width="384" height="301" />