Avamar and archive solution

Question

Hello,

Still learning things on Avamar so please be gentle

A need to archive file data was raised by the client. At the same time they have a plan to move the backups of same fileservers to avamar from present tape solution. The general understanding is that archieved data willnot be backed up by Avamar which will eventually increase the lifspan of Avamar nodes (before they start getting to their capacity limit). We are almost done with configuring avamar integration into networker, so the archive system (if it ever is deployed) will happen after backups (not all servers at the client's location will be moving to Avamar initially) are moving to avamar nodes.

At this point even though files are archived, on the avamar side things dont get affected due to the block level deduplication. So the whole idea of deploying an archiving solution doesn't save me any space on Avamar nodes.

Is the above statement correct in this context? or am I missing something?

ionthegeek · Accepted Answer

Well, this depends on a few things.

The configuration of the archiving software is important. If Avamar does not recall the files from the archive to back them up, newer backups will include only the stubs. Eventually all the backups containing the files will expire and the chunks will be reclaimed, reducing the capacity of the Avamar.

On the other hand, if the archive is also being backed up to the same system, the chunks will not expire since they are still required by the backups of the archived data.

Sandeep_Sinha · Answer

Hello,

Not sure if i understood your question correctly,

If you have data already archived, then you may need not send the data to avamar server which has already been archived.

But if you are archiving the data after moving the backups to Avamar server, then you can set shorter retention period on Avamar as you are going to archive the data for longer retention.

Thanks

Sridhar246 · Answer

Thanks for the reply, it is the second scenario where archiving will be done after moving backups to Avamar.

Even though I set up shorter retention period, the way avamar dedup algorithm works it will not backup something already present on it. So even though a file might have moved to archive solution chances are good that the said file's unique blocks will be present on avamar (because archiving solution will be implemented after avamar).

So in that case the better dedup ratio I have means archiving solution will not help as far as backups are concerned.

Is the above correct or am I missing something?

Sandeep_Sinha · Answer

You're correct

Sridhar246 · Answer

Thank you, wanted to be absolutely sure before I bring up this point

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Avamar and archive solution

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