Client Side Dedupe vs Server Side Dedup questions

[macpiano]

I have been using dedupe for quite a while and many of the jobs say they couldn't use client side dedupe but now most do. I backup over a WAN and I would rather the jobs ran quicker more so than saving space on the dedupe folder. Many of them are virtualized and only do the traditional backing up. Which one would be faster and what would be best practice?

Upgrade to 2012 will be later this spring.

[CraigV]

Hi macpiano,

Not sure if you've seen the TNs below, but give them a read for starters:

About dedupe:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO73686

About client-side dedupe

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO23347

BE 2010 R3 Dedupe best practices

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO21767

Thanks!

[macpiano]

I have read these before. I am going to change one of my bigger jobs to server side and see what happens tonight on a full backup. The media server has plenty of horsepower, 24 gigs of ram and dual 6 core processors.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

By doing server-side dedup, you would be sending the raw data across your WAN link rather than just the changed data blocks and this will increase the load on your WAN link.

[macpiano]

I noticed that tonight on my test run of my normal full backup that the WAN is jammed to the max. That's ok because I only do them at night and the weekends. What I'm noticing is that the backup MB rate is alot higher and that is what I want.

It was taking about 80 hours to do a full backup on the weekends on 3TB. What I noticed before when I did server side dedupe that over time those full backups took less and less time.

Thanks for confiming my suspcions.