EMC Avamar Helps Three Users Accelerate VMware Backup

EMC Corporation announced that
customers around the world are realizing results for backup and
recovery of their VMware virtual environments by using EMC Avamar.

The integration between Avamar and
VMware vSphere, deduplication and replication capabilities deliver
fast and reliable virtual machine backup and recovery.

"Customers using Avamar to protect their VMware
environments typically share several characteristics," said Rob Emsley,
Senior Director of Product Marketing, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
division. "First, many have
achieved a high percentage of virtualization in their environments and have no
issues with common virtual backup challenges such as resource contention and
data growth. In addition, they all
report extremely fast backup and recovery of virtual machines, and minimal
bandwidth consumption during replication for disaster recovery. These common characteristics are no
accident. Avamar is optimized for
VMware, and is helping customers on their journey to fully virtualized
environments by overcoming the challenges associated with legacy backup
solutions."

More enterprises are deploying Avamar systems to optimize
their VMware backup and recovery, extending the leadership of EMC in the backup
and recovery market. According to the
new IDC Worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance 2010-2015 Market Analysis and
Forecast, 2010 Vendor Shares report (May 2011), EMC had a 64.2% share of the
Purpose Built Backup Appliance market. Customer experiences, however, best illustrate the reasons for choosing
Avamar for VMware backup.

Avamar Customers Weigh In
From Around the World

Curtin University of Technology (Australia)
Located in Perth, Curtin is western Australia’s largest
university, with 16 campuses and education centers across the region supporting
48,000 students. Curtin’s IT environment
is now over 90% virtualized using VMware, with 530 virtual machines in place as
well as a VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform. As the organization’s virtual machine count approached 300, they
experienced immense difficulties backing up these virtual servers to tape
within twenty-four hours. This
represented a significant obstacle to the continued expansion of their
virtualized infrastructure and presented business continuity risks that they
deemed unacceptable. By implementing EMC
Avamar to protect its virtual environment, the university eliminated its backup
window issues and is now confident in its ability to recover data
effectively. 

"With Avamar, we are saving more than AUD$ 100,000 in
tape costs alone, and with two IT staff redeployed to help us focus on our data
center strategy the total savings are even greater. The performance we are seeing with Avamar is
incredible. Our backup deduplication
rates range from 95 percent to over 99 percent across all of our key
applications and databases. Avamar has
given us greater flexibility to provision and protect new virtual machines, and
I’m not up at night worrying about how I would recover data if something went
wrong," said Peter Nikoletatos, Chief Information Officer, Curtin
University of Technology

Elliot Health System (United States)
Elliot Health System (EHS) is a provider of healthcare services in southern New Hampshire. The storage
infrastructure at EHS leverages VMware virtualization as well as a variety of
EMC products, including Symmetrix VMAX, Symmetrix DMX and CLARiiON storage
systems, as well as EMC FAST technology
for automated storage tiering, EMC VPLEX
virtual storage technology and EMC Avamar.

"EHS has a highly virtualized environment. With 298
virtual machines, we are presently 80% virtualized. We recently conducted a
proof of concept trial with Avamar, and liked it so much that 3 weeks later we
purchased and implemented it at our data center for backup, with replication to
our secondary site for disaster recovery. Avamar is blazing fast for backup and
recovery of virtual machine image data – it’s just fantastic. We’re not only
pleased with how efficiently the product protects our virtual environment, but
with the fact that Avamar is staying in lockstep with the latest VMware
developments such as vSphere 5 and vCloud Director 1.5. With Avamar we are
confident that we will always be able to have support for the latest VMware
technologies so we can continue to evolve the protection of our virtual
environment," said Tom Fairfield, IT Manager for Elliot Hospital.

SPAR Group Limited (South Africa)
SPAR Group provides distribution and retail services to over
800 stores located throughout the country through six distribution
centers. As the company migrated to a
VMware data center infrastructure, its existing tape-based backup system was
simply not up to the task of protecting SPAR’s VMware environment. Backup operations were highly protracted,
weekly full backups needed to be performed over weekends, and backups
frequently failed or were incomplete.
SPAR turned to Dimension Data, an EMC Velocity Signature Solution Center
partner and hosted service provider, to provide a backup solution that would allow
SPAR to maximize the value of its technology investment in VMware. By delivering a hosted EMC Avamar backup
solution, SPAR’s 189 terabytes of backup data is stored on just six terabytes
of disk. However, the benefits were felt in terms of the speed, accuracy and regularity of full
backups which now run daily in just four hours.
The tapes and tape services costs (approximately R60,000) are now long
gone and their virtual machines are readily recoverable.

"The Avamar system has been rock solid since it was
implemented. Prior to implementing Avamar, our backups, which had been running
for up to three days in some cases, are now completing in the three to four
hour range," said Greg Hay, Group Network Services Manager, SPAR Group Limited.