While EMC’s biggest news in the deduplication arena may have been around its acquisition of Data Domain earlier this year, that doesn’t mean that the storage and security giant has stopped progress on its other deduplication technology.

EMC is expanding its Avamar software—designed as backup software for servers in the enterprise, to officially support desktops and laptops, too, as well as exploit the capabilities now available for storage in VMware’s new VSphere 4 architecture.

And if your customers are getting ready to deploy VSphere, now is the right time to help them update their backup solutions as well, according to EMC.

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“When partners are installing new VMware for their customers, that’s the best time to help them protect the information in that new infrastructure,” says Rob Emsley, senior director of product marketing for EMC's Backup Recovery Systems Division. “Don’t just sell them new solutions for the primary creation of information, but also provide them with solutions to back up that information. That drives higher margins and higher trusted adviser status for channel partners.”

Emsley says that while some Avamar customers have already been using the product to support desktops and laptops in their environments, Version 5.0 is the first release that officially supports it, plus it adds a new end-user application that allows end users to initiate backups. And it enables users to restore data themselves without making a call to IT, says Emsley.

Avamar’s new VMware VSphere 4 support includes tight integration with VMware’s new storage APIs, providing for deduplication within the VMware offering.

The new version of Avamar, available immediately through channel partners and EMC, also adds new lightweight clients for Microsoft Windows and Mac, plus the end-user interface for backup and restore.

Support for VMware now includes integration of vCenter into the Avamar management console, providing a single point of management for all backup options available.

Avamar Data Store also now offers more than 60 percent more capacity in the same footprint, according to the company. The Avamar Data Store Gen3 is available in five- to 16-node configurations with up to 3.3TB of capacity per node for scalability of up to 52.8TB of deduplicated capacity.

Plus, EMC says that Avamar Data Transport for Long Term Storage now enables export of deduplicated data to tape for long-term storage, helping reduce tape storage by up to 50 times.