Solution to GFS copy job and dedupe units?

[b.vanhaastrecht]

Hi there,

Dedupe units are great for storing long term, same looking data. Veeam currently implements one method of building a GFS archive, and that’s with a copy job. (I'm not going into scripts ext., as that’s not suitable for most customers to manage & monitor) A copy job does a transform (synthetic full creation) at the end of the restore point chain. All inline dedupe vendors say NO to synthetics as it needs to rehydrate and dedupe at the same time, it’s very CPU intensive. If you can copy&transform within the given timeframe always depends on these three factors:
1) How much full data
2) How much incremental data to commit
3) How fast is your dedupe unit

Currently there are no options in Veeam to adjust the working of a copy job to these three parameters. And so, we have to do onsite tests to see if our proposed solution is suitable. This is time consuming, and costly. Veeam has added DD-Boost in v8 to speed up this process. Perhaps HP Catalyst will be coming to? But how about the other vendors? If customers already has a dedupe unit, (used with other backup software) they would be pleased if we could use it with Veeam.

We see three options to solve this, and let the configurator choose the best suitable copy job method to match the three parameters of the customer:
1) Copy job as currently operates, with (synthetic) transform at the end (suitable for small turnovers and faster dedupe units)
2) Copy job who just copy's the incrementals and fulls (this is only write i/o against the dedupe unit, which he does best, suitable for medium data&turnover)
3) Copy job who transforms on a (fast) staging area, and then copy's (this would be best of both worlds, fast transform, write IO to dedupe, for large data&turnover)

We currently are nervous in building a setup with dedupe units, it would be nice if Veeam would have options to better suit the need. When talking to the customer it’s not nice to say that their previous well working dedupe unit may not work fast enough with Veeam…