General guidelines
Please always check the general deduplication appliances section as the best practices listed there also apply to Dell Data Domain.
Integrated vs Non-integrated
Always use Dell DataDomain with DDBoost as it provides many performance benefits over the non-integrated type. These include, but are not limited to:
- Much faster Synthetic Full Backups.
- Improved performance for Instant Recovery, SureBackup, On-Demand Sandbox, File- and Item-level recovery.
- In-flight data encryption.
- Immutability support by leveraging Retention Lock.
More details on these supported features are available on our Veeam Help Center.
Data Domain Replication vs Veeam Backup Copies
Data Domain native replication provides higher levels of data reduction than Veeam Backup Copies. This is outside of Veeam control and it is not possible to monitor the status of the replication process from Veeam console. Also, be aware that the replicated backup copies will need to be reimported into Veeam before they can be used for restore.
Veeam Backup Copies are still highly efficient as they only transfer changed blocks, but the key advantage is that they do not need to be reimported before they can be used for restore. This results in a much faster restore process, and less manual intervention.
The process of importing the Data Domain replicated backups can be done through scripting using the following PowerShell commands:
Considerations
Watch the load on the DataDomain systems. Replication may get stuck with lower-end DataDomains, especially when undersized and with constant high load. While the issue is acknowledged and a fix may be in the way, parallelism in this case should be avoided, as doing backup and DD replication sequentially works properly.
References
- Dell Data Domain - Official Documentation
- KB1745 - Deduplication Appliance Best Practices
- Veeam Alliance Partner Integrations & Qualifications - Dell -> Backup Target -> Deduplication
- Veeam Help Center - Dell Data Domain