Data Domain and Boost software utilization

[tim.vogel@xtium.com]

I know this is just a recent announcement, but with the prior issues many of us have had using Veeam with synthetic backups to go to a data domain as the target, is Veeam planning to take advantage of the newly announced Data Domain Boost software to do some client side de-dupe and optimization? It apparently really speeds up backups to the devices.

[Gostev]

Hi Tim, to address the issue with DataDomain and alike not performing well on synthetic backup workloads, we are introducing ability to perform traditional backups. This fully resolves performance issues. I have actually tested pre-release v5 code on another storage device with deduplication recently, and saw performance improvement in a few times when backing up to dedupe NAS comparing to synthetic mode. In fact, in my testing, performance was the same as for "reference" job backing up to FC SAN LUN.

We do not have any plans on leveraging DataDomain boost right now (frankly this is first time I hear about this, I understand the announcement was only made yesterday). We won't have this feature in the upcoming release for sure, but as always, we are ready to add any highly demanded feature in the future release.

It should be noted that our product already does client side de-dupe and optimizations to ensure minimal possible amount of data is transferred to a storage device. So our software will not probably benefit from using Boost as much as all other backup solutions (I believe our solution is currently the only one which does client side de-dupe). Also, we are adding some improvements into our own dedupe engine with the upcoming release, and initial testing shows significant improvement on backup sizes.

[azuegler]

Hi all,

this thread is quite old, butI didn't find anything else concerning this in the forum, so I write here.

Are there any plans to support DD Boost software in future releases? This would be very important for us, because we want to make scheduled FULL Backups of all our servers every week to our Datadomain, but at the moment it takes too much time to be acceptable.

Best regards,
Andreas

[Gostev]

Hi Andreas, are you sure the reason for this process taking so much time is the fact that you are backing up to DataDomain? I would not expect DataDomain to be the problem in case of full backup (sequential writes). How do you have your DataDomain connected into Veeam (what backup repository type are you using). If CIFS, this might be the issue. We found NFS to be much faster with DataDomain. We have DataDomain in our lab and don't see any performance issues with FULL backups and the current Veeam code. Thanks!

[kashif_sidd]

I believe Veeam should have support for DD boost, its makes a difference also their competitors have it.
recently Avamar pre-sales guy tried to convince me to through-away my veeam and buy their product because according to him it will give better throughout (to datadomain) which is good for full system backups.

[Gostev]

It may make a difference, but I am not convinced it makes positive difference (based on our experience with similar technologies from other vendors). However, we will take a look and do some testing soon.

[dellock6]

Oh, really strange an EMC sales guy is willing to sell all his catalog

Honestly, I will be more concerned about restore times than backup times. Did it helps also on restores? Dedupe appliances are usually not that good in this, regardless having boots or other symilar technologies.

Luca.

[dreddaway]

I have need for Veeam support of DD Boost

[Gostev]

Hi David, can you please clarify the need? What issues specifically are you having today, without us supporting DDBoost? I am asking because I know we have a lot of happy customers with DataDomain. And the largest one that I am aware of stores as much as 60TB worth of VMs on DataDomain, and is very happy. So, I'd like to know what specifically is not working well for you today, that you hope DD Boost integration will resolve. Thanks!