Avamar - Well Kept Secret

I am going to write a series of blogs focusing on what I consider well kept secrets in the storage industry that you should know about. The first in the series focuses on a vendor called Avamar. You are probably familiar with the name but not what they really do (and do well). Avamar is a backup and recovery software company. I think its stupid for vendors to shy away from that classification. Backup and recovery are fundamental to every end user customer in the great big world. And for the most part the leading backup and recovery vendors are not the most loved by the IT folks. This space is ripe for innovation. Avamar is a major innovator.

What Avamar does uniquely is provide what they call Commonality Factoring, which combines delta differencing, data de-duplicaiton and compression. This solves two major problems and enables a number of valuable things. The first major problem it solves is the backup performance problem. Don't listen to the misguided fools that tell you that backup is all about recovery. If you can't perform backups within the window, the data you may need to recover may not be there. You might think that VTL solves the backup performance problem and in some cases it will. However, there are three backup performance bottlenecks including the backup network, the backup target and remote backups. Avamar significantly improves performance on all three levels. The second major problem is reducing the cost of backup data being stored on disk. Since the Avamar CF technology can reduce the amount of data by 20 to 25 times (its true we tested it and spoke to lots of customers that attest to this) then the cost of storage is subsequently reduced as well. Which means you can also keep data retained on disk longer, for you know what - RECOVERIES. Using Avamar you can actually perform remote backups without having to spend a fortune on WAN bandwidth. And it won't take a million hours. You really can't do that with traditional backup software.

Big, small and medium-sized companies have become Avamar customers. Avamar is also partnering with different storage vendors. They recently announced partnerships with HDS and Sun. This type of relationship makes a ton of sense. Capacity reducing technologies are the NEXT BIG THING IN STORAGE and Avamar is one of the best at reducing capacity requirements. Avamar helps with core SAN backups, they improve NAS backups using their NDMP Accelerator, supports DAS and internal storage, they work in the data center, and are a great remote office backup solution.

If they are so great why haven't you heard about them? I think they are fixing that problem. Nothing against the old guard at Avamar but the new guard led by their CEO, Ed Walsh is building up momentum. My collegue, Steve Duplessie wrote an article for ComputerWorld  about the best storage CEOs out there. I would nominate Ed for that list. He has reinvented Avamar and has created real energy that is making a difference.

So what's bad about Avamar? Until recently it was a backup-to-disk only solution. But now they support tape - not directly - you still have to backup to disk first. The biggest issue they have is that incumbent backup solutions are hard to replace. Not because the existing solutions are so great but because customers have so much time, resource and money invested in them. Avamar has to fight the good fight every day. But if any segment of storage could use reinvention and innovation, backup ranks way up there.