"It depends".
Just another thing to think about:
Yes, it sounds cool to reduce the footprint of all those XP files if you
have hundreds of XP systems.
But, at a site where we were backing up about 200 desktops along with
Windoze severs, I sat down and actually spent a bunch of time looking at
what was really getting backed up (there's no quick and easy way to get
this info out of TSM.)
Those OS files, while annoying, are read-only (translation, only 1 copy
per client) and are actually a very small part of today's very large hard
drives. At that particular site where I did the study, I calculated that
the OS files from 200 Windows systems made up less than 10% of the total
data stored in TSM.
Result: Not the place to spend $ or effort in reducing backup footprint.
That's not to say that de-dup won't save you bunches of space somewhere
else; just that you gotta KNOW YOUR DATA to figure out what is worth
doing.
YMWV..
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 03:09:09AM -0400, Curtis Preston wrote:
>> Unlike a de-dupe VTL that can be used with TSM, de-dupe backup software
>> would replace TSM (or NBU, NW, etc) where it's used. De-dupe backup
>> software takes TSM's progressive incremental much farther, only backing
>> up new blocks/fragements/pieces of data that have never been seen by the
>> backup server. This makes de-dupe backup software really great at
>> backing up remote offices.
>
> We had Avamar out a few years ago pitching their solution, and we liked
> everything about it except the price. (And now that they're a part of
> EMC, I don't expect that price to drop much... *smirk*) But since we're
> talking about software, there's an aspect of de-dupe that I don't think
> has been explicitly mentioned yet. Avamar said their software got
> 10-20% reduction on a backup of a stock Windows XP installation. A
> single system, say it's the first one you added to your backup group.
> That's not two users with the same email attachments saved, or identical
> files across two systems - that's hashing files in the OS (I presume
> from headers in DLLs and such.) So if you backup two identical stock XP
> installs, you get 20% reduction on the first one and 100% on the second
> and beyond. Scale that up to hundreds of systems, and that's an
> incredible cost savings. Suddenly backing up entire systems doesn't
> seem so inefficient anymore.
>
> Dave
>
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