Azure becomes the first public cloud supported by Avamar outside the EMC federation.

With its 7.1.1. release, EMC’s Avamar Virtual Edition heads into the Microsoft cloud, which integrates with Microsoft Azure. It also provides full integration with the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

“We are looking to having this available in the Microsoft marketplace,” said Phil George, Senior Product Marketing Manager at EMC Core Technologies. “This is a very exciting capability for us. The majority of our customer base at EMC, where we dominate in the enterprise and upper mid-market, already have their infrastructure to create their own private cloud. These kinds of customers are just starting to look at public cloud. The early adopters for public cloud were mainly startups, for whom it was much less expensive to start in the public cloud.”

George said that the traction for Azure in EMC’s traditional customer base is organizations looking for a better way to handle peak workloads.

“A number of large customers who are looking at moving these peak workloads to the cloud, and who want the same things in their private cloud available in their public cloud, are interested in this,” he said. “These are often companies who had good data protection, but often not a full disaster recovery plan.”

George said that this should be a great play for local offices and remote offices.

“Enterprise and midmarket customers have many remote offices and maintaining backup has been a challenge,” he said. “Many SLAs require local backup and recovery, so they don’t have to work over the WAN that much, but they also want disaster recovery, and this provides that.”

This is the first integration of Avamar with a public cloud outside the EMC federation. They have previously been integrated with VMware’s vCloud Air.

“The increased maturity of Azure over the last year and a half led us to do this at this time,” George said. “We have always had customers with pockets of Hyper-V, and this will appeal to them as well. While we have supported Hyper-V for two years, we have never had a virtual appliance that ran in Hyper-V. Server 2012 and 2012R2 added capabilities we needed for this. Market demand has also increased, and we considered this as well.”

The product is a virtual appliance, deployed as a virtual machine, which comes in 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 TB capacities.

“What makes Avamar so unique is its deduplication backup software, which dedupes the data first, identifies unique data, and then compresses and encrypts it and sends it to be stored,” George said. “That’s a key benefit of Avamar, providing a daily full backup in a fraction of the time, because it only backs up unique data not yet stored. The virtual environment is the most popular deployment, and this will definitely add to that.” NAS and remote office deployments are the next popular.

“We expect we will see some pretty quick growth from this on the Azure and Hyper-V side of things,” George said.

EMC Avamar 7.1.1 for Azure is available now.