vSphere 5.1, new Data Protection and Avamar

[fgl]

This may be a premature question to ask but I'll direct it to those that have beta tested the new VDR replacement Data Protection that will be in vSphere 5.1.  From what I've read (I have not seen it yet) its basically the Avamar product from EMC but maybe in a strip down version? I don't know until I get to play with it.

But anyway my question is how will this integrate with customers that already have Avamar in their environment like myself?

Can I ditch my expensive Avamar grid in favor of Data Protection since its included with the vSphere 5.1 license. 

I can only imagine the new vSphere 5.1 licensing model is going to increase in cost as I can't imagine VMware is going to hand out Avamar for free.

[vMario156]

vDP is a self-contained product from VMware, it´s not a limit version of Avamar etc.

Developers from EMC worked with VMware together and some features are based on the Avamar engine.

This i read yesterday on some offical VMware blog....just don´t find the link right now again.

Regards,

Mario

[vMario156 · Accepted solution]

Here it is:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/08/setting-the-record-straight-on-vmware-vsphere-data-protectio...

Now on to the hot question at hand: Is VDP a “re-packaged” version of  Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE)?  The answer is no.  VDP is an entirely new  VMware product co-developed by VMware and EMC. It was designed  specifically to be integrated with vSphere and packaged with vSphere 5.1  (Essentials Plus and above).  VDP does leverage Avamar technology  “under the hood” to provide a robust and mature solution, but it is an  entirely different product from AVE. VDP is only sold as a VMware  product, available in the vSphere platform, and is not sold by EMC.

[fgl]

Thanks for the info.

I will just have to wait and see what Data Protection has in stored but from the article it seem to be still self-contained and multple appliances don't interact with each other nor with a full Avamar grid.

In short it looks to be still vDR but with a much better and improved engine and with my experience with Avamar and practically every enterprise backup solutions I worked with (Networker, BackupExec, TSM, Arcserve, Altris, etc....) I have to say Avamar is hands down the best enterprise backup system I've ever worked with so I will have high expectation for the new Data Protection product.

[snekkalapudi]

For VDP discussions follow the VDP community thread - http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/vdp-beta

[fgl]

Unfortunately the VDP beta community is only open to people that is part of the VDP beta program which I am not so I am unable to access the VDP community. 

[mcowger]

You are absolutely correct - VDP allows for up to 10 ppliances suporting 100 VMs or 2TB (deduped) data each.  The appliances do not interact with each other, cannot interact with a large Avamar env and cannot participate in Avamar Grid.