State of Data Domain

[wilhartm]

I haven't been able to find any semi-recent posts regarding Data Domain performance or usage, so hoping some users can chime in. I'm considering a DD6800 for use as PRIMARY storage for our backups. From what I've seen, the last recommendations were to not use a DD as primary, but specifically for GFS copies only, due to read performance. Is this still the case? I'd also love to hear what people are seeing as far as dedupe rates with 9.5 u4 and newer DDs.

[foggy]

Hi William, using any dedupe device as primary backup storage is actually against our reference architecture, this is still the case.

[evilaedmin]

William,

Our environment is an HPE StoreOnce customer, a very similar product, and HPE's reference architecture for Veeam also recommends having the deduplicating appliance supplemented by a "Performance tier" of storage either as a landing repository before BCJ or possibly having different jobs with different retention policies.

That said we do use the device as our primary repository as it meets other business goals but not fast RTO or RPO. So I would say it depends. In our business the Veeam backup to StoreOnce supplements fast RTO and RPO of storage snapshots with cross-site replication, with much longer retention than storage snapshot can do alone.

We are happy with our StoreOnce performance if I were doing it again with any vendor I would scrutinize any claims and test in real world tests (for example, a restore of your largest VM while your largest synthetic full is being generated) before I would take any of their word.

We will revisit this architecture once its time to refresh primary and secondary storage.