Deduplication Appliance Best Practices

The default options of Veeam Backup & Replication are intended for non-deduplication storage.

If you use deduplication storage systems, you need to additionally configure the backup architecture and Veeam settings to achieve best performance. Below are some hardware and software configuration options that can be used with deduplication storages. In some cases, you may need to combine more than one option, but in all cases, it is strongly encouraged that you consult your deduplication appliance vendor and/or a value added reseller to discuss individual needs.

For the general architecture planning, Veeam’s best practices is to follow the industry 3-2-1 backup rule:

3: Maintain at least three copies of your data and applications. That’s the one copy you’re using and two backups. This way, if one of your backups is unavailable for any reason (for example, if you store the backup in the same locations with the copy you use and both go down), you can still recover what you need.

2: Store your backups on at least two different types of media or storage controller logics. One reason for this is that each type of media has its own vulnerabilities, and you don’t want both of your backups susceptible to the same problem. 

For example: run your business on a general purpose fast storage system and store your backups on a storage system that is specialized for this purpose, or a separate server with local disks.

1: Keep one of the backups in a different location. Consider a crisis in your primary data center, such as a fire or power failure. If all your copies are collocated, they can all be affected, taking down your organization.

To achieve this, use the Veeam best practices. However, each deduplication storage vendor has specific unique feature sets that allow the usage of their storages in different ways. Please check the following links for vendor specific guidelines:

• Best Practices for HPE
• Best Practices for ExaGrid
• Best Practices for Dell EMC DataDomain
• Best Practices for Quantum

Step 1:  Creating backups on the first site with long term retention.

Use a backup target storage system (general purpose storage system) for short-term primary backups and instruct Veeam to copy the backups to a deduplication storage system for long-term retention.

A variant of this approach is to use a standard server with battery backed RAID controller and disks to store the primary backups (cache approach) and use backup copy to deduplication storage systems for long-term etention.

Step 2: Add offsite target.

In addition to the above scenarios, you can use the following options to create an offsite copy of your data.

1. Place a deduplication storage at the second site. Use Veeam backup copy job to create the secondary offsite backup from the primary backup.  

2. Place a deduplication storage on both sides:  

3. Place a deduplication storage on primary side and use object storage or tape on second site. Use Veeam backup to tape jobs or Veeam scale-out backup repository cloud tier (connection to object storages) to store data offsite.

The scenario above reflects general best practices. Please contact your deduplication storage vendor for further guidance and check the vendor links provided above for additional usable scenarios with the specific storage.