VLS6200 and Deduplication

[takka]

Hi,

Has anybody tried this. If so, does it work for you?? I already know the pro's and con's. Just want to know if anybody has sucessfully performed the dedup on 6200 series with firmware 3.1.0, would you mind to share on your procedure?

Regards,
Tac

[Kyle Weir]

Tac,

I have a 6536 VLS it runs the same firmware. So I'm assuming they work the same, just probably slower/less capacity.
For the most part the deduplication is pretty hands off. Your backup software just sees them as tapes. And the VLS makes it so the tapes take less actual disk space. A couple of crucial things, 1st it only dedupes when the tape is filled up. So for me I created 45gb virtual tapes, They should be at most 50gb, and at least 35. Too small and it has to open too many tapes, too large and it takes too long to dedupe the tape. All the tapes in the backup need to be full before it'll start deduping. So after your 2nd backup it'll dedup the 1st backup. For my exchange server this works great. I get a 45:1 ratio. I keep an eye on my deduping, at the moment my file deduping isn't doing so well (I have 2TB fileserver backups weekly) that aren't deduping/ it's taking too long to do. It does deduping on a per Tape basis during which it compares data in one tape to others. If there anything else I can tell you?