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. Going from almost NOT getting the backups completed over the weekend, to getting them done before kickoff of the early Saturday game. 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. This customer has dozens of servers that have a de-duplication ratio of OVER 95% (with 10+ that are 99% deduced).

The "on demand backup" jobs in the screenshot were first time backups that had the benefit of global de-duplication. Only a small percentage of their data was NOT already on the Avamar grid from another client, so Avamar did 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 duplicate OS files over the network to be backed up, because the data is already on the Avamar grid (that's what duplicate means, right?).  In the event that a restore is needed, Avamar knows how to get that data out and back to the client. It's like magic. And it's all done with variable length data segments; not at an entire file level, and not with a fixed block size.

Check out that 971.5GB backup that completed (and REALLY completed, not that "Completed with exceptions" nonsense) in 2 hours. That's almost 500GB an hour.

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" />