Windows 2012 Deduplication with Networker

Question

We recently upgraded our enterprise file servers to Windows 2012 mainly for the built-in deduplication. It has brought significant savings, some volumes are down by 40% or more. We're talking 10+ TB's so far since Saturday's upgrade. We use Networker 8 on the client, 7.6.4 on the server, and Data Domain for the media. Here is an example of a folder that was optimized. Original size 403MB Dedupe size 31MB Backup size on DD 23MB Now, the real point of the post. I was concerned with restoring the data. We did two restores, one to a normal volume and one to another location on the same deduplicated volume. On the 1st, it restored the data fully in its original, non-optimized size of 403MB. On the 2nd, it restored the data fully, but in the optimized state at 31MB. We are testing with larger pieces of data to try to load test the system, but everything looks good so far. Just wanted to share the experience.

redm1 · Answer

My experience:

Pros:

- deduplication quality is not soo good as with Data Domain, but the price for DD and W2012 + disks is excellent, even if I need larger capacity

Contras:

- W2012 is not able deduplicate large data volumes. So in my case, for the backup size 2TB is the dedupe window not large enough (post deduplication is slow) and deduplication canot be finished before new backup start next night. Data on disk then grows and grows.

- recovery from deduplicated data is not fast enough

- licensing. In Networker you should purchase license for volume amount as seen from Networker. If your backups have 50TB (deduplicated 10TB), it must be 50TB license used (very high price for me). If you have the Data Domain, the special 10TB Data Domain capacity license is needed)

bingo.1 · Answer

Hi Zguy28, thanks for sharing this valuable info. Just to make sure as you did not state that precisely - which NW 8.x client version did you use? I assume it was 8.1, correct?

NetWorker

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