Ask the Expert: Migrating traditional backups products to Application based backups using DDBoost

This discussion is now open for questions. We look forward to a lively and informative event.

Best regards,

Roberto

Hi,

this is not a question but more of a comment. We are migrating from TSM/Data Domain to Avamar/Data Domain. When we look at Data Domain Pre-Comp Written to Post-Comp Written numbers, we find them to be sooooo inflated which in turn inflates Total Comp Factor number and make them look so good. TSM performs perpetual incremental backup, so does Avamar, yet DDboost numbers coming from Avamar look as if the system performs full backup every day which is not the case.  As a customer i find it very deceiving.

Thank you for your post, dynamox, and my apologies for the delayed response, but I wanted to make sure I had everything in place to answer you comment fully.

We are sorry you feel deceived by the system reporting.  Reporting on deduplicated storage is complicated, and unfortunately there were some misses during the initial integration of Avamar and Data Domain that may be causing the numbers you are seeing to be inflated.  Avamar 6 would create checkpoints on the Data Domain system using the fastcopy feature, which makes a pointer copy of the data in a new directory.  The fastcopy is seen as regular writes, so the reported precompression size of the data is reported.  Starting with Avamar 7, fastcopy is no longer used, but Avamar now uses the snapshot feature for checkpoints.  As snapshots are not counted as written data, they do not skew the precompression data numbers.  There is a hotfix for Avamar 6 to address some issues around the fastcopy actions, so being on the latest fixes there is recommended if you haven’t moved to Avamar 7 yet. 

Did you have any questions or observations from the migration from TSM to Avamar that you would like to share?

We are using Avamar 7.0 SP1.

Take a look at this graph, as you can Data Written started climbing in April  as we started migrating the same clients from TSM into Avamar.  Number of clients did not change, capacity of this servers practically stayed the same yet now we are reporting that we are backing up ~160TB daily where before it used to be less than 40TB daily. Total-Comp factor went from 40x to 140x  ..you don't think this is inflated ?

dynamox,

The way that the ingested data is reported coming from Avamar and TSM is different, and if you want to call it inflated I can see where you are coming from.  The way Avamar writes data to the Data Domain system, using the DDBoost protocol, is different than how TSM writes data, and that is going to impact the Pre-Comp Written and Total-Comp values.  It isn't designed to inflate the numbers, but the numbers 'inflate' due to the design of how the data is being handled.

Dear EMC Marketing,

I hope you are reading this,  as a matter of fact i know you are reading this because you took the time from your busy schedule to moderate this technical discussion and forced fine folks of ECN to remove my comment from this discussion. DPAD experts on this discussion have over 90 years of combined industry experience, so instead of giving them a chance to educate me, share their thoughts you decided to simply remove my comments (that apparently you did not agree with).

What a shame, your executives are boasting about transparency and this and that but here you are shushing people. I am number one contributor on ECN (out of 250k accounts), EMC Elect x 2 , eSolutions customer council member, tweeting and blogging about EMC technology ...you think i like EMC technology a little ?

Feel free to remove this post as well, i have screenshot that i will be happy to share with folks on social media.

I suggest you to drink some Cold-drink sir, para seems to be very high in your area

@EMC - we stand with dynamox, just FYI. he has done more marketing AND education of your products than any of your reps could ever do.

Ha ha.... we support Dynamox......One more thing...he never gets tired in typing the answers. Had I been at his place, I would be lazy to do that.....

Hi all,

For the record I did move Sergey's last reply to a separate thread in the Data Domain Support Forum here:

Re: Ask the Expert: Migrating traditional backups products to Application based backups using DDBoost

It was not the intention of us to remove it or keep it quiet. We were attempting to ensure your legitimate question got addressed and allowed the Ask the Expert event to proceed on the broader topic.  The branched  thread is public and there is a reply to it. So I apologize  if it appeared that the comment was being moderated to make it silent. As said it was not our intent to cause a harm or controversy.

Regards,

Mark

I thought my question was very much on-point. I am migrating from a traditional backup tool (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) that cannot take advantage of DDBoost to Avamar that has excellent integration with DDBoost/Data Domain. I question the numbers being used for reporting deduplication/ingest rates.

Thank you Mark. I don't mean to start a controversy but i despise marketing people playing big brother, someone who has absolutely now clue what is being discussed.

Dynamox,

This popped up in my feed, and during our brief interactions over the past year or two, I wanted to shoot you a quick response. Your contributions to the community are invaluable, and speaking as a member of the community, always welcome your perspective and input. As a technical person, our managers, both at a local and corporate level, stress the importance of transparency. I’d like to consider this lapse in moderation of this thread an isolated occurrence, and if there is anything at all I can do, please reach out to me.

Thanks,

-Ed

Side Note: …And when I say ‘anything’, I mean anything else besides diving into that report ;).

This Ask the Expert event has ended. Thanks to our experts and those who participated in the discussion!

Cheers,

Roberto

Hi again everyone, I just wanted to share with you that one of the experts on this event ( ) is now hosting her own ATE event and it's titled: Ask the Expert: Disaster Recovery Test Preparation and Post Mortem . Looking foward to see you there.