For years, Data Domain users running Veeam Backup & Replication often paid for two backup tiers: a fast disk-based landing zone for quick restores, and Data Domain behind it for efficient long-term retention. The good news is that landing zone is no longer needed.
The reason is that the Dell Data Domain has passed the Veeam Ready Repository Primary Target certification. This means you can confidently send primary backups straight to Data Domain and perform Veeam Instant Recoveries (e.g. Instant VM Recovery) directly from it. That means less hardware to buy, one less tier of storage to size and manage, and fast recovery from the same system that delivers deduplication and data security, including immutability.
Veeam Ready certification tests were run on the DD3410, the entry model of the current Data Domain lineup. Every model above it has more compute, memory, and flash, so the certification covers the full current product line, from the DD3410 up.
What this means for your business
- Lower infrastructure cost- Retire the separate landing zone storage, along with its hardware refreshes, support contracts, power, and rack space.
- A simpler backup architecture- One primary backup target instead of two. Fewer moving parts, fewer copy jobs, and less capacity planning.
- Faster recovery from deduplicated storage.-Bring critical workloads back online with Veeam Instant Recovery directly from Data Domain, without first staging data to a faster storage tier.
- Protection and performance in one place.-Get deduplication, Retention Lock immutability, and fast restores from a single platform.
Veeam and Dell Data Domain go back a long way. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide run Veeam Backup & Replication with Data Domain today. For perspective, that’s well beyond the roughly 6,000 total customers one of our closest competitors reports across its entire business.
With that many shared customers, making this combination faster and simpler pays off at scale.
Why the landing zone existed in the first place
In 2019, Veeam published KB2660 to set expectations for Data Domain users. Random I/O workloads, such as Instant VM Recovery, often ran slowly on fully deduplicated data.
The cause was architectural. Purpose Build Backup Appliances (PBBA), often referred to as deduplication appliances, were designed to excel at large sequential streams, which is exactly what a backup job looks like. A VM running directly from a backup file is different. It issues small, random reads scattered across the image, and on a fully deduplicated, HDD-based system, each read can trigger metadata lookups and disk seeks. This could make the VM unusable.
Many IT organizations added landing zones on non-deduplicating storage. It solved the performance problem, but it added cost and complexity
How Dell and Veeam closed the gap
Removing the need for a landing zone took engineering work on both sides.
Dell improvements
DDOS data-path optimization and application integration. Dell reworked how DDOS handles read requests from backup applications, so restore and Instant VM Recovery traffic runs efficiently instead of being treated like a sequential backup stream.
Flash-based metadata caching. Data stays on cost-effective HDDs, while metadata lives in flash. Lookups that used to cost a disk seek are served from SSD. You get faster random reads without giving up the economics of HDD capacity.
Veeam improvements
DD Boost integration. Deduplication-aware data transfer between the Veeam gateway server and Data Domain sends less data over the network, so backups and restores move faster.
Storage-aware Instant Recovery engine. Veeam Backup & Replication recognizes when it’s reading from deduplicatedstorage and shapes it’s I/O to match, turning scattered small reads into requests the appliance handles well.
RAM block caching. Frequently read blocks stay in memory on the Veeam side, so a recovering VM doesn’t go back to the appliance for data it just used.
Look-ahead and prefetch processing. Veeam Backup & Replication anticipates which blocks a recovering VM will need next and fetches them early, so data is often waiting before the VM asks for it.
Automated repository setting best practices. When you add Data Domain as a backup repository, Veeam Backup & Replication applies the recommended “best practice” settings automatically. Your team spends less time on configuration, and you avoid the misconfigurations that used to hurt performance.
Certification details
The Veeam Ready Repository Primary Target category validates that a storage system can serve as your primary backup target, not just secondary or long-term storage. That includes performance testing for demanding operations like Instant VM Recovery.
- Hardware: Dell Data Domain DD3410 and all higher models in the current product line
- Software: Veeam Backup & Replication v13.1.2 or later
More reasons to standardize on Data Domain
Since Veeam Backup & Replication v13 shipped, the integration has also gained stronger protection and simpler offsite copies.
Retention Lock compliance and governance modes. Meet security and regulatory requirements with immutable backups. Governance mode locks backups while still letting authorized administrators make changes when they need to. Compliance mode goes further with no one, not even an administrator, being able to delete or modify locked backups before retention expires.
Managed File Replication. Veeam Backup & Replication can now drive DD Boost Managed File Replication between Data Domain systems. Backup files replicate appliance to appliance in deduplicated form, cutting network traffic for offsite copies, and Veeam Backup & Replication tracks those copies so they’re ready when you need to restore.
Retire the landing zone
The old advice for Data Domain users was to put faster storage in front of it. That’s no longer necessary. With Dell and Veeam’s improvements Data Domain now exceeds the requirements for a Veeam Ready Repository Primary Target.
Already running Data Domain? Upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication v13.1.2 and plan to retire the landing zone at your next storage refresh. Planning a new deployment? Start with a DD3410 or above and get deduplication, immutability, and fast restores in a single tier.
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