What does the number next to the Deduplication Storage Device mean?

[RLeon]

Backup Exec 2012

Hi all,

Please refer to the attached screenshot.
Can someone tell me what the number next to the Deduplication Storage Device means in the Job History screen?
Everything is working fine; the deduplication rates are fine.
I just don't know that the number means. It is not documented in the admin guide.

Through testing, I have already established the following:
  - Other storage devices such as basic disk storage and tape storages - shared or not shared - do not have this number.
  - It has nothing to do with the fact that the dedupe device is shared between managed servers. The number appears even when the device is not shared.
  - It has nothing to do with the "concurrent operations" device property. The same job run on the same agent backing up the same resource will still give different numbers.
  - It has nothing to do with how many OST000000xx-43E25B924F9391B1 "medias" that get generated in a job.
  - It has nothing to do with the deduplication rate/ratio.
  - It has nothing to do with whether the job was created from a managed server, or from the Central Admin server.
  - It has nothing to do with which server managed the job.
  - It has nothing to do with whether the job was ran using client-side deduplication or server-side deduplication.

I believe my screenshot validates most of the above points.

What is it and why does it keep changing between 1 and 2 in different jobs?

Thanks,

RLeon

[edit: spelling]

[VJware · Accepted solution]

I guess, thats the number of concurrent jobs to the Dedupe storage..

dedup:1 means 1 job running

dedup:2 means 2 jobs running concurrently..

gotta confirm though in a lab :)

[Colin_Weaver]

When you configure a Deduplication Storage Folder and tell it how many concurrent jobs are allowed to run, what actually happens in the background is a virtual library is created within Backup Exec that has 1 virtual tape drive for each concurrent operation. As such if you setup the folder to have 4 concurrent operations, then 4 virtual tape drives are created.

When a job runs, that number you are asking about is a logical reference to which virtual drive ran the job in question. Backup Exec is coded to always show the device name and every device has to have a unqiue name, hence you see this logical numbering in the job log etc.

[RLeon]

gotta confirm though in a lab :)

I just came back from my own tests and can confirm that you are both right!

It didn't work before when I increased the dedupe device's "concurrent operations" value because I missed that hiding little alert that was trying to tell me to restart services to make the change effective.

Thanks all,

RLeon