Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » EMC ports data de-dupe to VMware

September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

EMC ports data de-dupe to VMware

TAGS: Storage

Trend toward server virtualization pushes storage software into VMs

In yet another move aimed at extending business-conscious storage management capabilities to customers capitalizing on the virtualization trend, EMC today announced plans to virtualize data de-duplication technology it brought on board with its November 2006 Avamar acquisition.

Whereas yesterday FalconStor proposed virtualized CDP (continuout data protection) as the less-muss means for preventing data loss in the event of server failure, EMC is betting that its Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware will provide significant cost savings to VMware-based enterprises by virtualizing backup and recovery.

The marriage of Avamar de-duplication functionality with the virtualization capabilities of VMware likely comes as little surprise to those attempting to make sense of EMC's spate of acquisitions in recent years. Worth noting, however, is what EMC's move to port Avamar technology to ESX Server may say about enterprise interest in supporting remote branches by fully virtualizing them.

Tapping client-based agents, EMC Avamar Virtual Edition de-dupes data at the source, cutting down the resources required to back up guests and systems. And by making this technology available to VMware ESX Servers as a virtual machine, EMC enables VMware-based organizations to tap the benefits of data de-duplication at remote sites without impacting their existing infrastructures and -- more importantly, for some -- without requiring dedicated branch-office IT staff, according to the company.

"Encapsulating the Avamar server in a virtual machine so it can sit on the same shared server and storage infrastructure that's deployed at remote branch offices allows you to completely eliminate the need to have separate management and hardware for backup and recovery," said Jed Yueh, founder of Avamar and now vice president of product management at EMC.

Although Yueh noted that this model would free enterprises from having to ship tapes from site to site for disaster recovery, it is more likely that the trend toward server consolidation already under way at many organizations is what will drive the demand for storage software delivered in virtual iterations.

EMC Avamar Virtual Edition is slated for general availability in November.

Posted by Jason Snyder on September 6, 2007 10:10 AM

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