During meetings with partners, clients, and potential customers I’ve had lot’s of discussions on the pro’s and con’s of long term storage of backups, and on the device and media that these have been stored on. Deduplication Appliances and Tape are at the top of the list.
A quick snapshot would be “Can you tell me why Vendor X is better than Vendor Y with Veeam”, and “Why should I go for tape over purpose built deduplication appliances”.
The answer is always a variation on “Your mileage may vary”.
I’ve used deduplication appliances for close to a decade and the market has changed dramatically during that time-frame, so it’s about time for me to include some information on each of the options I typically see.
To do this I’ve decided to test a few different purpose built deduplication appliances within my home lab, and connect them out to public cloud as appropriate. My criteria for the one’s that I’ve chosen are pretty simple, a small home lab version for testing should be available as a VM, where possible no cost should be involved, and it should have something to do with my work life.
At the moment I’ll be testing the following (in no particular order):
– Dell EMC Data Domain Virtual Edition (and Cloud Edition)
– AWS S3 VTL
– NetApp Altavault
– HPE StoreOnce
– HPE Nimble
– Microsoft StorSimple
I may add some more deduplication appliances, however getting the time to run these up in the lab is a job to itself. Hopefully I’ll be able to show integration with Veeam, and how they could be used to extend your environment to an off-site location or to a cloud provider.
As part of the series for each device I’ll include:
– A brief architecture overview
– Anything that makes each of the deduplication appliances unique
– A how-to deploy with some screenshots
– A how-to integrate with Veeam
– A why would you do it section
Of particular interest to me are the deduplication appliances that will allow me to connect to the hyper-scale cloud providers such as Microsoft and AWS. To do this I’ll need to configure account’s within both Microsoft Azure and AWS, so stay tuned for articles on those topics as well!
Stay tuned during April for this, and maybe a couple of sneaky side posts as well.