EMC has announced two new
storage hardware products built to integrate with
Avamar Technologies'data deduplicationsoftware, as well as new packaging of Avamar's software
for deployment on VMware virtual machines.Avamar Virtual Edition is a bundle of Avamar software and Red
Hat Linux OS that has been revised to recognise virtual disks and
virtual configuration files. It is available on a hard drive, DVD
or FTP site from EMC. Avamar Virtual Edition assumes that the user
is running VMware ESX and already has shared storage deployed. It
can dedupe both within and across virtual machines.
"Being able to run dedupe inside a virtual machine, in addition
to deduping virtual machines [themselves], makes Avamar unique in
the industry at this point," said
Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group
(ESG).
The Virtual Edition for now is a "small version" with support for
up to 1 terabyte (TB) of physical storage, which Avamar claims can
hold up to 35 TB of traditional backup data. According to
co-founder and EMC vice president of product management Jed Yueh,
there are still performance barriers when it comes to hosting full
versions of certain applications on virtual machines, a concept
known as virtualisation drag. It is a problem also encountered by
FalconStor Software, which left storage virtualisation out of its
version of IPStor for virtual machines and limited the number of
host connections its virtual appliance will support.
Unlike FalconStor, Avamar Virtual Edition is not certified with
VMware as an appliance due to technicalities in licensing
regulations. EMC's licensing agreement with Red Hat requires it to
pay for each instance of the OS running beneath Avamar, which means
it can not bundle a copy of the OS with Virtual Edition. As a
result, it misses the requirements for official certification with
VMware. This means, that unlike other VMware-certified virtual
appliances, it won't be available as a free download from VMware's
Web site.
Technically speaking, EMC claims there's little distinction in
terms of deployment between the Virtual Edition with a bundled-in
OS from EMC and the licensed download from VMware, according to
Yueh. "There's no significant distinction between the two; it's a
matter of shades of definition," said Yueh.
Avamar Data Store: New hardware package from EMC and
Dell
Avamar, acquired by EMC last year for $165 million, has already
been integrated with the company's Celerra NAS array, and further
integrations with EMC's other existing hardware, as well as with
its backup software are planned, according to an EMC spokesperson.
However, rather than offering the ability to front Clariion or
Symmetrix with Avamar, as some in the market have been expecting,
this announcement also includes two completely new storage hardware
offerings from EMC based on products from Dell.
"Over time, we'll see more consolidation of platforms," Yueh
said. "But as things stand right now, there wasn't a logical fit
with any of EMC's existing storage systems," since the new Avamar
Data Store also includes servers.
The Avamar Data Store comes in two varieties, single node or
multinode. The single node is a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with 4
GB of RAM, 3 GHz processors and 1.8 TB of raw storage. The
multinode Data Store is a preracked, preswitched, preconfigured
system of two to 17 nodes, plus one spare node. Nodes are added to
the multinode systems in two node configurations.
Because the multinode system also uses Avamar's RAIN for
parallel access to storage and includes dedupe, Yueh acknowledged
it's very similar to the
HydraStor product from NEC Corp. of America,
released in March.
As a "drop in" system, it's also more similar now to the
prepackaged appliances sold by Avamar nemesis Data Domain Inc.,
Whitehouse pointed out. "I think this product is somewhat in
response to pressure coming from target vendors, like Data Domain
and ExaGrid, which have been able to drop their systems into
customer environments, while the complexity issue is the biggest
objection Avamar has to overcome."
The fact that the system includes so many moving parts --
servers, cables, switches, HBAs, storage nodes and all their
attendant connections -- suggests how difficult it can be to deploy
a software-only system that relies on complex hardware
configurations and has unusual performance requirements because of
the data deduplication feature.
"Our customers said, 'we shouldn't have to do all this assembly
when EMC has the technical expertise and supply chain to ship a
system that's preconfigured and ready to roll," Yueh said.
"It's also going to make it easier for EMC to support, making it
a more repeatable configuration, rather than having to qualify,
certify and support all the possible combinations of devices you
can use with this," Whitehouse said.
Joe Martins, managing director of the Data Mobility Group, said
he agreed that the "handpicked" hardware will ease a lot of
headaches, but said he still hopes to see EMC's existing arrays,
like Clariion, become available for use as data stores with Avamar,
as well. "The impression I get is that this is the [final]
Avamar-focused product," Martins said. "But some customers might
want to repurpose hardware they already have."
Avamar customer references did not respond to requests for
comment as of press time.
Pricing and availability
Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware is based on Avamar v3.7.1,
which is licensed and priced based on deduplicated backup capacity.
Pricing will start at $17,000 for 1 TB of deduplicated backup
capacity (equivalent to approximately 35 TB to 50 TB of traditional
backup capacity). The product will not be generally available until
November. For the Avamar Data Store, list pricing starts at
$30,000. The product is available now.