EMC Avamar – Epic Fail


Terrible initial implementation. High-downtime expansion. Unreliable backups. Absentee support. That’s EMC Avamar.

On the tiny upside, deduplication works great…when backups work.

In September 2011, our tragedy began. We’re a 99% VMware-virtualized shop and bought into EMC Avamar on the promise that its VMware readiness and design orientation would make for low-maintenance, high-reliability backups. In our minds, this was a sort of near-warm redundancy with backup sets that could restore mission critical systems to another site in <6 hours. Sales even pitched that we could take backups every four to six hours and thus reduce our RPO. Not to be.

Before continuing, I should qualify all that gloom and woe by saying that we have had a few stretches of uneventful reliability, but that’s only when we avoided changing everything. And one of those supposed times, a bug in the core functionality rendered critical backups unusable. But I digress…

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