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Backup Exec Deduplication Best Practices documentation and product enhancement request...

deejerydoo
Level 5
Partner

Documenatation Enhancement

The "Best practices for Backup Exec Deduplication Option" documentation mentions that you should not "delete any files from the deduplication disk storage device. To reclaim space from the deduplication disk storage device, refer to the following tech note: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000017049"

This part of the BPG should be expanded to mention that you should schedule regular deduplication storage maintenance to carry out manual reclamation and compaction on the store (depending on how busy your deduplication storage is, but at least annually). This would help a large proportion of your deduplication users from getting burnt by a deduplication store that fills up the Windows volume it's on.

Product Enhancement

Please, please, please, take a look at making the deduplication clean-up, reclamation and compaction process better. Currently we have to sit there and run commands, wait for hours, checking with other commands on progress, then rerun and recheck, for hours and then move on to the next step in the process, where we do the same thing, with a different set of commands. This makes the process take hours if not days, when this should be a process where we receive an email, from the Backip Exec notification system, that already exists, that each step has completed. i.e. Extend the Backup Exec notification system to cover the deduplication cleanup/maintenance processes.

7 REPLIES 7

Gurvinder
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified
BE 20 dedupe manages compaction on its own and has a better dedupe engine than BE 16,15, 2014. Recommend to upgrade.

Let’s hope it’s better. I’ll let you know in a year or so.

I went to upgrade from v16 only to find my deduplication store had expanded and I no longer have enough space on the volume to in-place upgrade.

Well, I have since found the following command, which is not even mentioned in either your deduplication best practices (https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/72686287-129480082-0/v70445236-129480082) or deduplication manual space recalmation KB articles (https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/article.100008765.html:(

crcontrol.exe --compactstart 100 0 1

This, finally, cleared up the space, on the Windows deduplication volume, that will now allow me to carry out the upgrade from v15 to v20.4

Why is this command not included in either of your above mentioned KB articles!?

So, what I have discovered, about deduplication, since migrating to v20:

1. Any real technical information regarding how DD10 works, in BE 20 is nowhere to be found.

2. Compaction is still running in BE 20. However, we have no insight into how it is running, as we did in previous versions. This means that, wehere before, where we could see intel on the compaction state and remedy issues, in v20 we have nothing. We are able to see whether compaction is currently running or not and that's pretty much it.

3. Performance improvements are not apparent.

4. Utilisation of the server has increased significantly, with the always on 24x7 deduplication maintenance tasks.

I have a client whos deduplciation store would blow-out about every 12 months. We would take a look at compactin and follow the fairly well documented procedure for queue processing, garbage collection, compaction and space reclamation. This same client appears to be having another blow-out of data in their deduplication store and we have no insight into what's going on!

I have has a support case, about this, open with the Veritas support team, at level two engineering and it's taken the level two engineer almost a week to come back to me and tell me that we have no way of seeing what's actually going on with compaction.

Quite simply put, this makes BE 20 DD10 an unusable product.

What we need to see:

1. Documentation about DD10 in BE 20 needs to be vastly improved.

2. Veritas support engineering need to have significantly more product training.

3. Veritas support really need to up their game in case triage, troubleshooting, handling and escalation.

Until we see some real improvements, I cannot recommend BE 20 to any clients that require deduplication.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@deejerydoo 

You have very valid arguments that need to be brought to the attention of Product Management. 

Do you have contact details of a Veritas SE in your country who could put you in contact with PM?

Hi Marianne,

Thanks for your reply. Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what a "Veritas SE" is?

Thank you.

Regards,

David.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

SE = Solutions Engineer

That will be the Pre-Sales person in the local Veritas office looking after Data Protection.