Rehydrate to tape feasible?

[aread007]

Is it feasible to rehydrate to tape with Backup Exec Appliance? It sounds like the overhead of rehydrating data causes the push to tape unusable.

I must be missing something, why would I want a backup that can't archive off to tape?

What is a good D2D2T approach, avoid the dedup of data?

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Unless you're using something like Veeam that dedupes to a single file, all other vendors basically would see their deduped data rehydrated when duplicating to tape in order to rebuild those files in a format that is understood by tape.

What you can look at from a dedupe perspective is to duplicate to another dedupe store using optimized dedupe within BE. Check the TNs below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWzGg2h-RI

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO74447

http://www.emea.symantec.com/beguide/en/files/21227157_GA_Solution_Brief_BE2012_BEDAT_02_12.pdf

Thanks!

[pkh]

When you are backing up the internal disk of the appliance, your data is automatically dedup'ed.  There is no way to avoid this.  If you want to avoid having your data dedup'ed, then backup to a disk storage created on an external disk.

What is your concern regarding rehydration?  When you duplicate from your internal storage, which is a dedup folder, to either disk or tape, the data is rehydrated.  This may take some time, but this duplication should not impact your servers, since all the work is done by and on the appliance.  There are a lot of users who are doing D2D2T with dedup folders, both with and without the appliance.

[aread007]

Thanks for the response Craig.

@PHK, good point. My main concern is the ability to "feed" and LTO5/6 tape drive at a rate that won't cause shoe-shining.

Is the a valid concern?

[pkh]

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell because each environment is different. You would just have to test. If you don't want to take the risk then use an external disk for your duplicates

[CraigV]

...that's going to happen as you're not streaming a single large file off to tape. It's being rehydrated on the media server before being duplicated to tape.

Thanks!

[aread007]

Thanks for all you responses, this has helped in selecting the right approach for our backups.