Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 and dedup repositories

[ezervoud]

The customer has Backup for 365 and as a repository they had acquired a StoreOnce 3640. The 3640 is not supported as a repository for VBO365 since it's a dedup device. The customer has temporarily solved the issue by introducing a Synology NAS as a repository. Now they are in the process of updating their main storage from a VNX to a PowerStore populated with NVMe disks.
Of course it's an overkill to use an NVMe target for VBO365. PowerStore has dedup features always on and can present file systems (SMB and NFS) over FC and iSCSI. Will this be a supported solution with the current or upcoming version of Backup for Microsoft 365? Any ideas or comments are welcome -TIA

[Mildur]

As long the storage is presented as an iSCSI device to a windows server, it‘s supported by vbo365.
The main issues with deduplication appliances is the performance. Because VBO365 uses databases to store the backed up data, the involved storage must have a good latency or the databases will face performance issues.
Normally, dedup appliances are referred to datadomain or storeonce. There are others too of course.

I don‘t know Dell Powerstore Storages, but it looks like there are built for primary storage for vmware environments. So I don‘t see any performance issue to be used as a VBO365 backup repository. Especially with NVMe.
You could even think of using it as a vmware datastore and run your vbo365 as a vm directly on this storage. You could consider taking vm Backups of this vm then for the 3-2-1 rule.

[Mike Resseler]

The problem is that our repository is a running database, which is never good to be on a dedup device. It either will slow everything down or even get corrupt in worst case scenario.

If you are going to use the PowerStore (I am not really familiar with it), are you running the VB service in a VM? Because in that case I would suggest looking into adding a virtual disk to that VM which is stored on that PowerStore. But as you see from Mildur, there are other options also

[ezervoud]

Hi Mildur and Mike,

First of all, thank you for your responses which are greatly appreciated
Yes, as I said it will be their new primary storage with very low latency and a 10 fold of iops more, in comparison to their current solution
I will take your suggestions into consideration and go over them with my resident engineer