Hello folks,

I've been using source-side deduplication pretty successfully for most of my 
clients (Unix and Windows and TDP for MSSQL)  for at least two years now.  The 
backup window for the source-side is significantly shorter for Unix clients, 
minimally shorter for Windows and somewhat longer for MSSQL nodes on average.  
The pain I've been having is with Oracle RMAN and TDP.  I'm unsure if our older 
Oracle servers are just really undersized or if it's a function of TSM dedup 
overhead while doing source-side dedupe that is expanding the backup window way 
too long.  I have tested several versions of TSM against several versions of 
Oracle (10 and 11) on several different hardware Oracle Solaris tiers.  I 
wanted to see if anyone in the group has had any significant achievements with 
source-side dedup and Oracle DB's.  Am I being overly optimistic with TSM or 
TDP and its ability to process over 100GB of DB data for one node for a level 
0?  Our databases are not that large, with the largest being about 400GB (and 
doing level 0's on that thing is a nightmare).

Here's some info on the environment settings that I'm currently testing

Deduplication ON in TSM and Client
Compression ON in TSM
Filesperset 1 in Oracle for Data files
Filesperset 10 in Oracle for Archive logs
Archive and Data files are both processed for dedup (I don't like the 
complexity of managing a non-dedup storage tier just for logs, so I'll try to 
eat the overhead on that)
TSM API at 7.1.1.0
TDP Version at 6.3.0
RMAN version ?
Oracle version 10, moving to 11 but having same performance issues
TSM catalog is on an auto-tiering SAN array with flash.

Right now, my failback is to do post-process deduplication and that's worked 
out fine, but I really want to see what kind of ingestion rates we should be 
able to see with Oracle RMAN and TSM source-side deduplication.

Also, I'm not shelling out money for a VTL right now.  The decision was to 
stick with TSM Dedup and aside from nagging clients like Orace RMAN and TDP, 
I've had no issues with TSM dedup.  (Running a TSM server on Solaris was awful, 
however).

Thanks!
Sergio