Backup Exec DeDup to a mapped drive

[nolaRAN]

I have a mapped drive I want to make a dedup drive, can someone tell me how. It does not come up as a choice.

[teiva-boy]

Not an option,  It HAS TO BE an NTFS formatted volume.

It should be internal disk, iSCSI, FC, or SAS/SCSI DAS.  It should not be USB, firewire, etc.

[nolaRAN]

strange, other software lets you use a mapped drive.

so you are saying that i can only make a DeDup drive from a drive attached to the Backup Exec server?

Then what good is the client side deduplication which is what i would like to do?

[teiva-boy]

And other dedupe products that allow that, suffer tremendous performance issues.  I've experienced it and know all about the competitors.

At the end of the day, network protocols are chatty and inefficient.  Symantec made the consious decision to only support block storage for deduplication.  This is a good thing for realibility.  It's a trade-off, but in a good way IMO.

If you cannot format it as NTFS and have backupexec use it as a local volume, it's not supported.  Does your NAS not support iSCSI?  That would be an alternative.

[nolaRAN]

what if i connect my server to the disk with SAS, would that work?

[teiva-boy]

If you can format it to NTFS, then YES.

Basically the limitation is no NAS devices.  It MUST be block based storage, and formatted to NTFS.  

In other words, yes a SAS DAS array would be more than acceptable.  Or adding in some SAS disks internally to create a new RAID group would also be acceptable.

[Colin_Weaver]

Also Client side dedup makes use of the DeDup folder on the media server with the processing being done on the remote system, it does not use a mapped drive to achieve this it uses a client --> server link from the remote agent to directly into the DeDup store on the media server.