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Online Data Protection Solution Redefines Secondary Storage

Avamar Technologies Inc, a leading provider of innovative secondary storage solutions, has announced the availability of its scalable appliance for enterprise backup, restore, and archival Axion. Axion uses hard-disk storage to deliver online accessibility for all protected data, while its highly efficient software reduces the amount of data stored and moved over networks by up to 99% compared to conventional solutions. Fast access to information is critical for today¹s data-driven enterprise, and Axion provides a key component for building a highly accessible and cost-effective secondary storage architecture.

The easy-to-install Axion appliance provides policy-based scheduling, organization, and authentication through a network-ready, centralized management application. With its highly efficient Snapup technology, Axion eliminates the need for recurring full backups, easing backup-window requirements and reducing bandwidth utilization in congested local or wide area networks. An Axion Snapup is a fast, highly efficient event that captures a point-in-time copy of a system that can be immediately restored as individual files, folders, or entire file systems. Built for scalability and reliability, Axion can be expanded to handle large enterprise environments, while providing local and remote system fault tolerance.

"Axion unlocks the latent business value in secondary storage by making data easily and intuitively accessible," said Dr. Kevin C. Daly, Avamar president and CEO. "Secondary storage accounts for 80% of the data in a typical enterprise, but the limitations of tape storage have restricted the ability to access that data. In traditional backup, the resource contention for available drives in a tape library makes it difficult to quickly access data on demand. Axion efficiency makes it cost effective to use hard disk storage, which provides online access to data. And faster access translates into higher productivity for the enterprise."

Axion software maximizes storage and network efficiency by finding small, logical sequences in files, objects, and databases and storing each unique logical sequence only a single time across an entire enterprise. Edited files, copied attachments, shared applications, and even daily changing databases only present a small amount of new data to an Axion system. To identify and eliminate redundancy, Axion uses a Content Addressed Storage (CAS) architecture. The storage address for any data element stored in the Axion system is generated by an analysis of the data itself, in a process that ensures the authenticity of the data. This unique content address can be used to refer to repeated data elements to eliminate redundancy, dramatically reducing Axion disk storage requirements.

Furthermore, the content address provides direct access to data elements for immediate restore. Conventional backup solutions use a centralized index to store and locate data; this centralized index grows increasingly complex and difficult to manage as data volumes increase. CAS simplifies this challenge by using a direct access methodology, enabling the Axion system to smoothly scale to petabytes in capacity, with no centralized index.

"The Axion CAS implementation really eliminates the challenges associated with today's enterprise tape implementations," said W. Curtis Preston, analyst and founder of The Storage Group. "Its no-overwrite architecture verifies data integrity during the backup process, and the system verifies data for every restore as well. This is particularly important in industries where regulatory requirements demand the ability to restore authenticated data from archives."

Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, said, "This is one of the coolest things I have seen in the last few years. It really has the opportunity to fundamentally change what is possible in the backup market."

Today, enterprises need solutions that guarantee business continuity in the face of component failure or even site disaster. Axion provides both local and remote fault tolerance using a sophisticated Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) architecture. An Axion system can be configured with RAIN-5 (storage-efficient local fault tolerance), and Remote RAIN-1 or 5 (mirroring to a remote site or efficient fault tolerance across multiple sites), in order to guard against both local and entire-site disasters. Axion RAIN eliminates all single points of failure in a properly configured and deployed system, ensuring high availability and system reliability.

Price and Availability

Axion is currently available for major open systems platforms, including Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and 98 (all with open-file support); Solaris 2.6, 7,8; Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2; and Oracle databases using Oracle RMAN. Entry price for a fully mirrored appliance starts at $175,000.

About Avamar

Avamar is leading a new wave of innovative solutions that deliver increased value for secondary storage. Founded in Irvine, California, in 1999, Avamar provides enterprises with data management solutions to control the information explosion. Avamar Axion is a scalable appliance that provides online accessibility, while efficiently storing and protecting valuable information for the enterprise.