Interoperability of Backup Exec 2010 dedup and native EMC tiered storage

[RussR]

How will the dedup option of Backup Exec 2010 work with EMC's native tiered storage option (archiving)?  This can be found on the their EMC Celerra Unified Storage SAN.  On these systems the archiving option will leave a stub pointing to the file in the archive storage.  For example will the backup client see the stub or will it read the file from the archive?

[teiva-boy]

 You will NOT set the Deduplication Storage Folder on a volume that is enabled for tiering like that.  There is no alternative.  That said, you can in the array choose which volumes are enabled for tiering, this is one that would be excluded.
Just point it to your SATA shelf, carve out some space, and you can grow it up to 16TB of capacity down the road.

Side note, BE2010 has an archive option that is built in that will be MUCH MUCH cheaper than the EMC solution.  Also Enterprise Vault what the BE2010 option is built on is also cheaper than the EMC solution.  Keeping you from having to buy expensive proprietary hardware.  EMC makes good hardware, but their options and vendor lock in are a killer.  It's a good thing there are alternatives that are hardware neutral...

[RussR]

The question is about how the dedup process will handle the stubs left behind by the EMC archiving process.  Not about enabling archiving on the volume where the Deduplication Storage Folder is created.

I do totally understand your points about not getting locked into proprietary hardware but during evaluation all options are explored.  This leads to questions like this.

[Ben_L_]

I'm looking into this, I or one of our other guys on the forums will post something once we have an answer.

But I believe we will only backup what is presented to us at the time of backup.  i.e. when we go to backup the volume if the stub is the only thing the user sees then that will get backed up, if the file is still visible then we will backup the file.

Now if you're using the EMC device as the dedup storage folder, I'm not sure how we would work with that. (another reason I'm sending this over to one of our dedup guys.

[teiva-boy]

You either do not select the stub files, or exclude them from BE.
The point of archiving, well at least one reason is to remove unneeded files out of primary storage.  This will free up space on expensive disk, and improve backup times.  The stub files are very small slowing down the backup jobs, and sometimes could trigger a recall of the file in some archiving products.

[RussR]

Initially excluding the stubs sounded like a great idea but... What about losing those stubs if a directory has to be restored?  Brings up the question, can the EMC solution or other archiving solutions recover or rebuild lost stubs?

[teiva-boy]

 Enterprise Vault can from Symantec I believe.

Another alternative would be using some sort of HSM system.  This is where you have a NAS head, with various backend storage tiers.  SS, FC, SAS, SATA, etc...

To the end users, they see their network share  \\servername\]share\*.*  But on the backend, the data is moved from one tier of storage to another based on age or last modified date.  While it is now moved to a different tier say from FC storage to SATA, the file is still in that same namespace, so stubs are not created...

F5 makes something like this, NetApp, EMC, and even Symantec with their FileStore NAS setup.

[RussR]

Ben,  I'm still interested in hearing what the engineers or tech support has to say about this.  I will not be using the EMC SAN for the media server or as a location for the dedup storage folder.

[teiva-boy]

Symantec  Enterprise Vault can I know of.  You would have to ask EMC if SourceOne can.