EMC this week announced a pair of new products designed to simplify the management of backups in virtual environments. EMC Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware is a virtual version of its data de-duplication backup-and-recovery software, and the EMC Avamar Data Store is a pre-configured system consisting of Avamar software running on EMC hardware.

Building on EMC’s recently announced integration with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) for backup within and across virtual machines, Avamar Virtual Edition now brings de-duplication into the mix and allows for the quick, repeatable deployment of Avamar software on VMware ESX Servers.

Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware combines backup and recovery with replication to move data between Avamar virtual machines or from Avamar virtual machines to the new Avamar Data Store or to standard Avamar servers.

The software supports up to 1TB of licensed capacity. EMC claims that 1TB of capacity is the equivalent of approximately 37TB of traditional backup storage when factoring in de-duplication ratios.

On the hardware side, the new Avamar Data Store is available in two models: a scalable multi-node model and a single-node model. The multi-node model is aimed at data-center deployments for backup consolidation of multiple remote locations or to protect VMware environments and LAN-attached servers.

The multi-node model scales to the equivalent of a half-petabyte of traditional storage capacity. Each two-node expansion of the system bumps up the capacity by the equivalent of 70TB.

The single-node model is targeted for deployments in distributed or remote offices. Both models support replication, either from the remote office to the data center for consolidation, or between data centers for disaster-recovery purposes. Single-node Data Store systems support an equivalent of 35TB of capacity.

Jim O’Dorisio, vice president and general manager of EMC’s Avamar business unit, says Avamar Virtual Edition and the Avamar Data Store together simplify and expand the deployment options for EMC’s de-duplication software to manage backup growth for remote offices, branch offices, data-center LANs, and VMware environments.

“Backup in VMware environments is currently a challenge. Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware completely virtualizes the backup-and-recovery process and can be integrated into the ESX infrastructure,” says O’Dorisio.

Avamar backup software stores a single copy of sub-file data segments across sites and servers, which reduces the size of daily backups.

O’Dorisio says users can drop a virtual Avamar server into a VMware environment to minimize the amount of data that moves across the network, resulting in reduced backup windows and de-duplication ratios of up to 500:1 over time.

Add the Avamar Data Store to the equation as a target and, according to O’Dorisio, you have a pre-configured, pre-packaged virtual backup-and-recovery system with data reduction technology for VMware.

The EMC Avamar Data Store is priced from $30,000 for a single node. Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware will be available in November 2007 and is based on Avamar v3.7.1, which is licensed and priced based on de-duplicated backup capacity. Pricing for the software will start at $17,000 for 1TB of de-duplicated backup capacity.