Storage settings for dedupe appliances PBBA - dedupe-Friendly

[stevekarra]

The suggested Advanced Storage settings for a backup job that is writing to a PBBA (Data Domain in my case), disables the "Inline Dedupe" and selects large blocks for "Storage Optimization" and leaves the "Compression Level" as OPTIMAL. I want to confirm two things -

1. disabling "Inline Dedupe" means NO compression is done at all in which case the "Compression Level" setting is irrelevant/ignored?
2. dedupe-Friendly (after enabling "Inline Dedupe") would only be used to reduce the CPU load on the proxy server (as documented) or perhaps to minimize the amount of network traffic to the PBBA - any other valid reasons?

Thanks for any input.

[foggy]

Hi Steve, answers below:

1. Inline deduplication and compression are separate techniques in Veeam B&R that can be used both or separately. Disabling one of them doesn't mean the other will be ignored.
2. A lesser level of compression would indeed decrease the load on the proxy server but will result in higher bandwidth consumption (due to more data to transfer). For dedupe appliances it is recommended to enable decompression on the repository (advanced repository settings), this allows for more optimal data transfer without affecting storage deduplication.

Thanks!

[stevekarra]

Thanks for the clarification.

To confirm my understanding, if the Repository decompresison is enabled (for dedupe appliances) would Backup Job compression settings (none, dedupe-friendly, optimal) be acted upon if writing to that repository?

[foggy]

Data will be transferred in a compressed format and decompressed on the target side prior to being written to the storage.

[Andreas Neufert]

Dedup friendly will just remove the whitespace out of the data that will be transported from the Veeam Proxy to the dedup device. In the past this was a good way to save some space for example on a non deduped landing zone like a Exagrid system.

But now that we have a lot of other product parts writing into the dedup appliances like our Nutanix Backup, Agent Backups, Plug-in Backup and other sources, it became best practices to always transport the data to the storage system (Repository or Gateway Server) in a compressed way for network and data flow optimizations and then let the Repository/Gateway Server write it into the dedup storage into an uncompressed way. (Decompression enabled on the Repository setting).

[stevekarra]

Thank you guys for the good responses.

[jackyku]

so mean the exagrid is recommend to disable the inline and dedup friendly ?

[Andreas Neufert]

Exagrid is working on an update of the recommendations to reflect changes made in the upcoming v11 release.

The recommended settings from Veeam and Exagrid can be found in my statement above.

[foggy]

Here's more on the recommended settings for the Exagrid repository.