De-duplication Advice

[peawet08]

Hi!,

I am just implementing BE2012 Media server. It is licenced for the required agents and De-Duplication. I'm not quite sure on how backups are configured when using De-Dupe. I've configured normal jobs using BE before but never used De-Dupe. I'm sure it's just a terminology thing so please humour me.

The server has 16GB RAM & 2 local drives. C:\ (Operating System) and D:\ (RAID 1). The D drive has around 1TB of storage space. There is also a 7TB iSCSI drive from a dedicated NAS device (2 Gbps LACP), call this E:\.

Within Backup Exec I am setting up the storage but am unsure as to how the D:\ (1TB) drive and the E:\ (7TB) should be setup.

Which should I use as the De-Dupe drive, larger or smaller? 

Do I configure all the backup jobs as De-DeDupe backups using the De-Dupe drive? Should I be avoiding normal type backups?

Thanks in Advance!

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

Dedupe should be on the larrger 7TB drive.  Please make ABSOLUTELY sure you are getting good throughput on this drive and verify not just network throughput (LACP benefits vs MPIO) but also disk throughput.  You want high sustained writes if at all possible.

All backups generally should go to the dedupe pool, and make sure to use client-side dedupe as much as possible, though I think it's limited to 64 clients.  Not a problem for many, but some do have issue with it.

[MusSeth]

great info teiva, in addition what tevia said you can even have a look at this article

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO74446
 

they are best practices for dedupe which will tell you about the memory consideration and requirements for dedupe.

[peawet08]

Thanks guys,

If you have De-Dupe then why would you want to configure normal storage (in my instance)? Wouldn't you just benefit by making ALL of your available storage De-Dupe Storage?

Thanks

[pkh]

1) you can only have 1 dedup folder per media server.  For other volumes, you would need to use ordinary disk storage.

2) dedup is a trade-off between space saving and resource usage.  If you do not have enough resoures, you might want to use ordinary disk storage.