Three Customers for EMC Avamar

EMC Corporation announced
that users of EMC Avamar report better backup for their VMware
environments, citing metrics that impact operational efficiency and
client service levels.

EMC leads the industry in backup of VMware environments
by using the VMware vSphere APIs to deliver VM backup and
recovery.

Avamar deduplication software and systems excel at backup of both
virtual and physical environments. This enables customers to make the
transition to a virtualized environment faster than if
they used any other backup method.

"Regardless
of size, industry or location, Avamar users share common experiences and
successes when it comes to the protection of their VMware environments,"
says Rob Emsley, senior director of product marketing, EMC backup recovery
systems division. "As virtualization
continues to drive more efficiency and flexibility into IT environments, it
also creates new and different challenges for backup and recovery of data and
applications. Avamar users are not only able to meet these challenges head-on,
but also deliver better backup and DR capabilities to their
internal clients. Nothing speaks louder than universal customer success, and
the common thread running through Avamar customer experiences is dramatically
enhanced VMware backup and recovery."

Cal-Israel Credit Card Ltd is an Israeli credit cards
company, the issuer and acquirer of the credit card
brands Visa, MasterCard and Diners, and provides financial services and solutions
for 1.8 million cardholders and tens of thousands of businesses.

The company was facing a variety of data
protection challenges due to its tape-based backup system, particularly with
respect to the protection of approximately 1,000 VMs. Cal-Israel
solved these challenges by implementing an integrated
backup and recovery solution that leveraged Avamar for its virtual
environment.

Re’em Hazan, data protection and DRP manager, Cal-Israel Credit Card, said:
"With Avamar, our virtual machines
achieve a deduplication rate of as much as 97%, and our backup and recovery
performance has been significantly enhanced. For one backup group of about 300
servers, Avamar has reduced the backup window from twenty-four hours or more to
between two and four hours. Avamar is simple to use and has been highly
effective for our VMware environment. The SLA for file restores is now minutes
– compared to hours or even days before, and we can efficiently replicate
backups offsite to meet our regulatory requirements."

St. Charles Health System (SCHS) is Central
Oregon’s largest employer, with multiple medical treatment delivery facilities
and over 3,000 caregivers. The SCHS team was protecting its IT environment with
an aging IBM Tivoli tape-based system that was failure-prone, labor intensive
and in need of a major upgrade. VMware backups at SCHS were running well past
their nightly window, and their tape-based backup system was ill-equipped to
keep pace with the velocity of the organization’s virtual server growth. By
using EMC backup and recovery solutions, SCHS saved $400,000 compared to the
cost of upgrading its legacy system and solved a variety of data protection
issues. Using EMC Avamar for backup and
recovery of its virtual environment, SCHS has reduced its nightly backup of its
VMware environment window from eighteen hours to seven hours, while paving the
way for increased virtualization levels.

Mike Crystal, enterprise architect for servers
and storage, St. Charles Health System, said: "We anticipate yearly savings of over $130,000 from our Avamar system.
Restores that were taking eight to ten hours now take only one to two hours.
But what’s really impacted our organization is the operational time savings. I
can’t emphasize enough how much our IT operation has improved now that our team
is not spending all day on backups. Our in-house customers are excited about
Avamar’s ability to do file level as well as image level restores, and our IT
team can focus more on building our virtual environment – with the full
confidence that we can efficiently and effectively protect it."   

TekLinks, Inc. is a services provider of IP
telephony, network security, storage, backup, DR and hosting services to
numerous businesses across the Gulf South states. The company has seen its data
assets and infrastructure grow rapidly as more businesses have embraced its
cloud-based services. With this growth, TekLinks faced increasing challenges
keeping up with the operational demands its backup and DR services were placing
on its staff, and with several different backup systems in use it was becoming
more difficult and time consuming to track and verify what backup jobs were
completing successfully.

To address its clients’ backup and DR needs and help
accelerate its virtualization process, TekLinks introduced TekVault, a new
Backup as a Service offering based on Avamar deduplication backup software
and systems. It implemented Avamar in each of its three data centers-two
of which are replicated for DR. Avamar Virtual Edition is used to deploy
virtual Avamar servers at client sites. Today, most backup jobs of VMware environments
for individual tenants complete in less than fifteen minutes over clients’
existing network links versus eight hours or more previously, and restores
typically take just minutes. TekLinks is now able to execute the majority of
its nearly 1,000 daily full backup jobs within its 12 hour window using a
single backup administrator, and its infrastructure is 90% virtualized with
VMware vSphere.

Ed McLain, director of data center operations,
TekLinks, said: "We needed a backup
solution that would perform reliably in the cloud and effectively address
VMware backup. After looking at several other solutions, only Avamar delivered
the performance, versatility and efficiency we required. With backup as a
service, clients are often concerned that a backup job will choke out their
network bandwidth. Avamar gives us a great competitive advantage, enabling fast
daily full backups across existing LAN/WAN links. Our clients really respond to
that. With Avamar, we have exceptional
visibility into our backups so we know we’re delivering great service levels to
our clients. We now have just one admin assigned to backups, yet we’re
processing nearly five times as many backup jobs."

Avamar is optimized to provide fast, efficient backup and recovery for virtualized environments. It supports the VMware vSphere Storage API for Data Protection (VADP), and
it is integrated with VMware vCenter Server for seamless management of
the backup infrastructure. Avamar provides an
implementation of changed block tracking for data recovery – resulting in the
fast virtual machine restore. It also leverages its own
load-balancing algorithm across multiple Proxy VMs to maximize throughput, and
further accelerate backups.