Netbackup VM dedupe and compression ratio

[EthanLai]

Hi all,

I am new to this community. I need to get some advices with regards to a discussion with my customer recently. During the conversation, we were discussing about the Netbackup features especially on the dedupe and compress features. As far as I know, Netbackup software able to provide a very significant dedupe and compress ratio to the VM workloads, however what will be common dedupe and compress ratio that perhaps I can use to convince the customer?

Further to this, may I know is there any documentation or reference site that I can get a better understanding on this? 

Appreciate some guidance on this topic.

Thanks.

cheers,

Ethan

[davidmoline]

Hi @EthanLai 

The dedpulication ratio acheived by any customer will vary depending on the type of data and the change rate. If you are backing up image files, these will not dedupe well at all, so the ratio looks poor. So the answer depends on what is in the VMs being looked at. 

As a general rule you can use a 10 to 1 ratio. I have seen some customers acheive much higher ratios and some  less. It all depends on the data.

I've attached a whitepaper that may answer some of your other questions. 

Finally, the deduplication ratio achieved by all vendors is roughly equal (don't beleive the marketing! Some vendors will be better at some workloads than others but on the whole they are about the same). If you are trying to sell NetBackup on this basis, it is the wrong discussion to have with your customer. Look at the additional features that are provided NetBackup - for instance client side deplication (to avoid having to shift large amounts of data that is not required). 

Cheers
David