[RESOLVED] StoreOnce Reported Capacity

[Berniebgf]

Hi all,

I have what I think is a basic question that I can't find any info to on the Web. it is with respect to a StoreOnce however I think the question is more a broader "Dedupe Appliance" question.

When using a Dedupe Appliance with CIFS Shares for Veeam, we see a capacity disparity between the following

1. Capacity used / available on the StoreOnce
2. Capacity used / available on the CIFS Share reported in Windows.

How does this "CIFS Emulation" work? what are their limits?
I can understand that Windows does not know anything about the dedupe appliance and is simply reporting what I think is the devices "raw usable capacity" but I can get my head around the following.

1. What happens when the CIFS Share reported capacity reaches 100%? (But the dedupe appliance still has free capacity)
2. How can we optimize Veeam to take advantage of Dedupe with the limitation above? (depending on answer to question 1). I'm hoping the answer isn't simply created more CIFS Shares to spread the Load.

Thanks again

Bernie.

[veremin]

Hi, Bernard have you already contacted HP with the issues regarding disparity between capacity used and reported? What was their answer? Thanks.

[Berniebgf]

Dealing with HP at the moment.

No answer to question as yet. The issue is around "usable Physical Capacity" V's "Effective Capacity".

Will update when I know more.

Bernie

[veremin]

Looking forward to the answer you'll get; since without detailed information from HP, it’s rather hard to make any speculations regarding potential workarounds, etc. Thanks.

[tsightler]

I've worked with a lot of dedupe devices and they all seem to take one of two approaches.

1. They always report the remaining raw space exactly.
- or-
2. They report the remaining capacity based on an estimate of current dedupe ratio.

Most seem to take option 1. With either of these scenarios they will never actually report the space full until all of the raw space is actually used. Think about it this way, if I have a system with 10TB of free raw space, then the system reports 10TB free. If I then copy 5TB of data to this volume, and it dedupes down to 1TB, the system will still report 9TB of free raw space because that's what is really free on disk.

[Berniebgf]

--- ISSUE RESOLVED ---

After working with HP to get to the bottom of this the following is discovered.

1. StoreOnce Firmware - 3.4.0, 3.5.0 is not optimized for Veeam IO workloads, we actually found that double capacity is consumed... E.G: Write 10GB = 20GB used.

This is with Incremental Backups and Active Fulls with Compression None and De-duplication OFF.

2. Implemented firmware - 3.6.2-1325.1- optimized for Veeam IO workloads, we now find that we are getting ~ 14x de-duplication.

This is with Incremental Backups and Active Fulls with Compression None and De-duplication OFF.

So if you have or are looking at the StoreOnce, update your code level.

best regards

Bernard.

[veremin]

Updating a software to the latest version is definitely the first thing to do in case of any issues! Thanks for sharing the resolution; much appreciated.

[Berniebgf]

Firmware was release while we were testing with HP, good timing!

regards

Bernard