Ask The Expert: Redefine with EMC Data Protection

Luc,

     Thank you very much for your patience and further information on what you require. Since my initial reply to you. I took the time to go back and have some discussions with our Product Management and Development Teams. I believe that we have a solution that will meet your needs with Avamar for connecting clients WITHOUT the need for a VPN connection.

Here is the link to a tech note on the EMC Support Site that walks you through the configuration details that is required to enable this use case: https://support.emc.com/docu49807_Avamar-Client-Connection-Options-Without-a-VPN-Technical-Note.pdf?language=en_US

I would encourage you to walk through this document and what you plan to do with your EMC Account SE this way we can make sure we provide you the best support during each step.

Please review this tech note in detail and let me know if this helps address what you were looking for.

Thanks,

Alex

Hi,

I have seen this Document already.

I talked about this document already with my SE

Please note following on Page 3

Note: The approaches in this technical note apply to clients that are likely to have static

connections. In environments where no VPN is available and clients are likely to connect

through a different provider and have frequently changing IP addresses, use Mozy®.

This is exactly the environment I want to use it in.

Using Mozy is not my intention for now.

To do this kind of setup I’m sure we need to go through what we still call a Proxy.

Same as we setup Exchange to be available to laptops, pad’s and smartphones now.

Greetz

Luc

Great conversation, everyone! Help us promote the debate. Please, share the following tweet:

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Thanks!

No moree answers from EMC on this question?

I heard rumors that Avamar 7.1 will support nested folders withing vCenter for container VM level backups. How granular that selection is going to be, can i select top level folder but de-select certain child folders ?

What do we need to monitor backup's done directly by the applications using "DD Boost for enterprise applications". Is this being logged in Avamar or Networker so we can check that backups are being done or do we need DPA for that.

Hi

I would very much would like Product Management to contact me

Thx

Luc

@BARCOLISI:

At this time, the attached document I provided in my previous post is the most current information we have on your request. If you would like, please send me a message via the ECN, and I can put you in contact with a member of our product management team that works on this area of Avamar functionality and your specific requirements can be discussed further. Appreciate the patience and apologies for the delayed response.

Questions:

1) when integrating NW with DDBoost, in setups where you have multiple and isolated VLANs, you wish to have DD Boost device on each VLAN so that clients can utilize their own VLAN towards data stream to DD.  What I have seen is that storage node (well server) will assign device to stream in round robin fashion and if this is device on VLAN as client - perffect.  If not, it goes to storage node over LAN and from there to DD box.  I have seen this with NW 7, 8 and I assume (not tested) with 8.1. Does 8.2 bring anything on table to remedy this?  Right now, only solution I see is to create pool for each VLAN and assign groups/clients and devices to it to have control over it.  I wish I could set DD interface for DD Boost operation on client resource.

2) Can you go into detail about changes with VMware protection in NW8.2.  I'm aware of high level white paper released, but it is really high level.  NW users are getting used now to change in each NW version so it would be nice if some more details could be spilled over what is new, what is changed, what is recommended and why.

Questions:

1) We are offering Avamar as BaaS. At the moment retrieving log from client works only in LAN environment (Avamar in the same LAN with clients) as logs are stored on client.

Are there any plans to bring this to work in WAN environment? For example storing logs also at Avamar? Would help a lot in BaaS scenario where you usually have no access to client and you have to request logs from client / clients IT support.

2) Data Domain stream count monitoring;  At the moment when using DD as endpoint with more than one Avamar or Avamar & other backup solutions, there is no easy way to see how many streams are active (and do we reach the maximum). Are we going to see some development in this?

3) Avamar stream count monitoring; Apart that I would need to know how my DD is utilized, I also would like to know have I allocated enough streams in Avamar for DD. You can allocate them by number or by % and if all streams are in use Avamar will queue jobs untils streams are available. When using multiple nodes with same DD this is kind of wild guessing or simply splitting maximum node count (depending of the DD model) with the amount of Avamar nodes. Now with 7.1 when I can backup DTLT to DD the stream count is going up and this gets trickier as we usually have separate Avamar for servers & desktops.

Is there going to be some way to monitor how much streams are in use / have been is use in Avamar so the stream count could be tuned in case of queueing on one Avamar and free streams available on another Avamar?

edit: Added question 3.

Hi Niko... regarding 2)... I do not have DD + Avamar combo, but I assume communication is done via ddboost.  In such case, ddboost show connections commands should show you active streams.

Hi Hrvoje,

regarding ddboost show connections, it shows you active & idle connections but not streams. You can use up to 10 streams on one SQL backup job with Avamar... Also would be nice to know if I hit the maximum and this usually would happen at night when I'm not on the command line at Data Domain.

Ah ok, you use striping (but ok, I assume multiple streams from single box are not difficult to imagine). Top of my head, I would use netstat to calculate session.  It would not be 100% accurate, but it would give approx. value.  Having current session count would be nice feature to add for sure.