data domain

[mporliod]

I would like some advice. I have about 13 TB of VM data in a VMware environment. I need to implement a 14-day retention policy, then GFS in this way: weekly full backups for 4 weeks and monthly full backups for 6 months. Do you think a 16 TB Data Domain would be sufficient to hold the data with this policy? Thank you.

[Andreas Neufert]

A Veeam Hardened Repository (or any other XFS/ReFS) repository would need 30 TB of space:
https://rps.dewin.me/?m=3&s=13312&r=14& ... =4,6,0,0&e
see here for an overview. It says Backup Copy Job, but the chain is in the end the same.
This change uses already fast cloning of blocks within the same backup chains but not between them. The dedup devices optimizes this further and you can get an extra data reduction of maybe 2x over the fully Veeam optimized ones if you do a lot of GFS points. Do not get me wrong here, data domain and other dedup devices have larger data reduction on paper, but they calculate in a way that you would store the fulls in full on disk, but in the end when you look on data usage it is not that far away from the Veeam internal capabilities.

I would go to a Veeam Partner and ask for a quote for your source environment, that way you will get a good advice from an experienced partner that knows how to size the data domains. If you have 16TB of usable space on the DD, then it looks a bit too small. If it is 16TB of physical disk, then it is on the edge I guess. Think about the growth for the future years and as well that a datadomain do not run well when it is full. Then as well check prices, likely you will get a hardened repo like an HPE Apollo for a lower price (even with the additional storage needed because of the non global deduplication), but you will get way higher backup speed, too.

Veeam build products in a way, that primary storage is on a regular storage and then copies can go to all kinds of devices like dedup devices, tape, ... This the best practices from Veeam.

You can even mix.
Buy a hardened repository for 14 days backup with SSDs.
Then buy a DD for your above mentioned long term chain as copy target (invest into the license for compliance immutability as feature). Place the DD on a second datacenter/place, so that you are protected from Fire/theft.