NBU 7.1 with EMC DataDomains replicating - config advice

[VirtuallyWarped]

Howdy

I just inherited an nbu 7.1 server that has many policies with a variety of clients, Windows, Exchange, Unix, SQL, etc.  The policies seem OK so far, I've used NBU a good amount, but not with disk based storage like this EMC DD.

I found some suggestions about doing client side dedup so less data is written to the DD, but then I read that when using the OST plugin which we are that the Dedup is done on the master server anyway so there's no need to do the client side dedup.

I do have a couple remote servers where I need to do the dedup at the client side because right now they are backed up with the terrible MS DPM product and that is just a disaster.  

Does anyone have some good suggestions on whether anything "special" should be setup for this or do I just create the policies and let the master server and DD do the work?

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

Client side deduplication is only supported with MSDP or PDDO from Symantec. It's not supported on Data Domain. However both DD and MSDP can co-exist without any issues. 

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO36284

[RLeon]

Client side deduplication is only supported with MSDP or PDDO from Symantec. It's not supported on Data Domain. However both DD and MSDP can co-exist without any issues.

Although I find it strange that none of the DD Boost OST documents that I could find mentioned client-side-deduplication, but it does work. It probably didn't at some point, but it does now.
As a side note, it also didn't use to support Netbackup's "Optimized Synthetic", which means it also didn't support Netbackup Accelerator, but the latest version does now. (I think it started to support Opt.Synthetic some time late last year)

Here is a Backup Exec thread with at least 2 people confirming that DD Boost can do client-side-dedup skipping the media server (and one claiming that "Symantec Advanced Support" assisted in setting it up):
https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/be-2012-and-data-domain-w-ddboost

Since the Data Domain (with DD Boost) is presented to Netbackup/BackupExec as an OST storage server (just like the Nbu 50xx appliance), for as long as a client has network connection to it, and has the plug-in setup correctly, it does make sense that client-side-deduplication should work.

[William_Jansen_]

Nicolai is right, client side Dedupe is not supported. What you could do, if you have a capacity based license. Is to Setup a media server on the remote side. As the DD OST plugin only sends changed data blocks from the media server to the DD Device. You could always do a Media server setup on each hosts, but that would just be overkill as the OST Plugin isn't very taxing on a media server(suprisingly)