Microsoft Server 2016 vs Dedup appliance recomendation

[sdelacruz]

Good morning,

I am in the hunt for a new Veeam Backup repository. I cannot decide to go with a DE duplication appliance rather than purchase a Dell R730x with 16 4TB drives and 2 SSD drives for OS (RAID10 which would give me 32 TB of backup space). My plan is to use Refs on the volume I would store my veeam files.

I have approximately 12 TB of data that I backup.
My goal is to keep at least 1 month of disk backups and have the best restore performance. My backup window now is just fine.

I have already quoted both and the dedup appliance is almost 5K more expensive with only 7TB of storage.

Do you guys have any recommendations?

Thanks in advance
Sam

[DGrinev]

Sam,

Generally the hardware dedup appliance would be a better choice, but you should make a decision according to your requirements such as fast recovery performance and so on.
You can always find a lot of useful information posted by community members. Thanks!

[the_mentor]

Hi Sam,
We've been using a Windows 2016 Server as a Veeam Repo with DeDuplication and are extremely happy with it.
We're using a PowerEdge R730xd with 18 disks.
Here are a few points to take into account:
1) DeDup requires a decent amount of CPU/Memory so you might want to get a beefier server.
we got 64GB of RAM and are using about 50% of it CPU is mainly idle unless a Optimization or Scrubbing Job runs.
we also use this server as a proxy server with direct SAN access to save some network bandwidth so that was also a consideration to get more CPU power.
2) DeDup has much slower performance especially when using stuff like instant restore so we have 2 Repos on different RAID Groups one is our short term backups (30 days) and the other one is our Archived/DeDupe repo and we use a backup copy job to archive about 1 year worth of backups.

In case you're wondering here are statistics I pulled from the server's DeDup Drive we get about 89% DeDupe ration its quite impressive.

Capacity : 56.07 TB
FreeSpace : 44.54 TB
UsedSpace : 11.53 TB
UnoptimizedSize : 113.54 TB
SavedSpace : 102.01 TB
SavingsRate : 89 %
OptimizedFilesCount : 3418
OptimizedFilesSize : 112.79 TB
OptimizedFilesSavingsRate : 90 %
InPolicyFilesCount : 3418
InPolicyFilesSize : 112.79 TB

Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Edit: forgot to mention that Windows 2016 was a must for us because it adds support for a multicore DeDupe operations.