Is AER any good for tape out?

Yes it does.

Regards,

Adam - Sent from my iPhone

There is a feature/function comparison chart showing what is/not supported by each solution. ADMe will also be able to leverage your current tape application you used with ADT.

Regards,

Adam - Sent from my iPhone

Hi Adam,

Does that work with DataDomain too?

That's something else we are considering.

Thanks
BP

I concur with Adam's recommendation for ADMe.

AER is a complicated system which imposes lots of restrictions on what you can and cannot do with your Avamar Server(s) that are connected to AER.

We just deployed Avamar last year with an AER node.  I haven't been able to fully use the AER node just yet like I want – due to various reasons, but what I have used of it so far it seems to work pretty good.  From what I understand the AER node was created as an after the fact of Avamar due to customer requests.  Avamar was not intended to do use tape at all; Avamar was designed to house on disk because of the deduplication.  So the AER node was created, and is a little specialized piece of equipment.  Anytime I mention the AER node, I always get an "Oohh, ok" response.  There is a little specialized group of support folks that deal with AER

I've noticed that AER does use more tapes than my previous backup software did.  I believe it is probably because of the meta data, but I am not for sure.  I am not sure how long AER has been around but I wish there were a few features that it had.  When exporting data the AER node relies on the Retention Tags to determine what data to export, and will export the latest tagged data.  If you want to export previous data, like I need to do, you have to change the Retention Tags.  If you want to do multiple machines you will be looking into scripting this to help out. 

I haven't been able to yet but I want to look into ADMe more, because from what I can tell I would have a lot more flexibility with ADMe to assist in taping out data.  There just isn't enough time in a day with the other job duties

One of the biggest Concerns I have with AER is future support. If you need to read that tapes you currently have archived well into the future, then you will have to maintain a working AER server, and along with a Working Avamar Server, and maybe a special client just for restoring to read old tapes. AER will go into End-of-Service-Life at some time. If you use ADMe, the tapes are written in Open Tape Format, which can continue to be read and restored by future EMC products as well as may other Open Source Solutions.
Bottom line, If you have long term retention periods in the order of several years, then stay away from AER and go to ADMe.