Customers Affirm EMC Leadership in VMware Backup

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• Speed - A large financial services company cut the backup time of VMware environments by 10x and now responds to restore requests in just minutes
• Scale - A rapidly growing cloud service provider processes five times as many backups-addressing 1,000 backup jobs daily-with just one backup administrator, while improving customer service levels
• Savings - A health care provider will save $130,000 annually on the backup of VMware environments with Avamar, after cutting backup times by 3x and restore times by 8x
• Success- EMC Avamar users are exceeding their expectations for the backup of VMware environments and recovery performance, while delivering better service levels to their internal and external clients                                                               

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that users of EMC^® Avamar^® consistently report better backup for their VMware environments, citing metrics that positively impact operational efficiency and client service levels. EMC leads the industry in backup of VMware environments by fully using the latest VMware vSphere^® APIs to deliver fast and reliable virtual machine backup and recovery. Avamar deduplication software and systems excel at backup of both virtual and physical environments. This enables Avamar customers to make the transition to a highly virtualized environment faster and more smoothly 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 disaster recovery 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.

Cal-Israel is an Israeli credit cards company, the issuer and acquirer of the world's leading 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 virtual machines. Cal-Israel solved the full range of its challenges by implementing a comprehensive, integrated backup and recovery solution from EMC that leveraged EMC Avamar for its virtual environment. 

"With Avamar, our virtual machines achieve a deduplication rate of as much as 97 percent, 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."

- Re'em Hazan, Data Protection and DRP Manager, Cal-Israel Credit Card Ltd.

St. Charles Health System

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.

"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."    

- Mike Crystal, Enterprise Architect for Servers and Storage, St. Charles Health System

TekLinks

TekLinks is a leading services provider of IP telephony, network security, data storage, backup, disaster recovery 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 disaster recovery 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 more effectively address its clients' backup and disaster recovery needs and help accelerate its virtualization process, TekLinks introduced "TekVault," a new Backup as a Service offering based on EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and systems. TekLinks implemented Avamar in each of its three data centers-two of which are replicated for disaster recovery. 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.

"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."

- Ed McLain, Director of Data Center Operations, TekLinks

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

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC Avamar
• Follow EMC backup on Twitter: @EMCbackup
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC and Avamar, are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks herein are the property of their respective holders.

VMware, vSphere and vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship with VMware or any other company.

SOURCE EMC Corporation