how to display Fastback 6.1 dedupe/deduplication capacity utilization?

[tyoung13]

I am in a 'try-and-buy' license mode right now for FB 6.1. So far, so good.

I'd like to be able to show my management team how effective the dedupe technology is, however, so I'm wondering if other users can help me display the dedupe capacity utilization.

For example, I know that FB 6.1's GUI shows the dedupe ratio in the bottom of the window. What I cannot see (from Snapshots Monitor), however, is the actual amount of disk used for the incremental backups. (What is shown in Snapshots Monitor appears to be the amount of data that has changed during the incremental snapshots, not the amount disk used in storing the dedupe'd data.

Help ?

 

[mccleld]

Try this:

In the FastBack Manager, navigate to General Configuration > Storage Pool > Repository Pool and right click on the dedupe repository volume (there should only be one of these) - in here, you'll see some further data deduplication stats/properties including (an example from a 12GB dedupe repos):

Data logical size: 3.5 GB
Data size on disk: 2.47 GB
Data deduplication ratio: 1.42

Is that more like the information that you were looking for?

Note that there is a bug in the 6.1.0.0 version of the code you're running which may affect you, resulting in the 'Repository Status' always showing 1% under certain circumstances. This is fixed in the latest 6.1.1.0 release of the full product. There is a thread on this at the IBM DeveloperWorks forum for the FastBack Try and Buy.

HTH,
___________
David Mc
London, UK

 

[tyoung13]

Thanks David. I was actually hoping to get a little more pre-snapshot info in much the same way that EMC's Avamar reports. For example, something to where I could display a client, its backed-up volume (i.e. D:\), the amount of data that changed in MBs and the amount of disk space used for storing that data (as a result of dedupe technology.) Any suggestion?

Try this:

In the FastBack Manager, navigate to General Configuration > Storage Pool > Repository Pool and right click on the dedupe repository volume (there should only be one of these) - in here, you'll see some further data deduplication stats/properties including (an example from a 12GB dedupe repos):

Data logical size: 3.5 GB
Data size on disk: 2.47 GB
Data deduplication ratio: 1.42

Is that more like the information that you were looking for?

Note that there is a bug in the 6.1.0.0 version of the code you're running which may affect you, resulting in the 'Repository Status' always showing 1% under certain circumstances. This is fixed in the latest 6.1.1.0 release of the full product. There is a thread on this at the IBM DeveloperWorks forum for the FastBack Try and Buy.

HTH,
___________
David Mc
London, UK

 

[mccleld]

As I'm sure you'll already have tried, you can right click on an individual snapshot to see some further snapshot properties (e.g., start/end time, Size, rate MB/s etc), but not anything that gives you the impact of the deduplication - I suspect this may be because dedupe is still a relatively new capability of the product.

However, there is some integration between FastBack and the Tivoli Common Reporting tool (I haven't played with this) - info is here >> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoc...sm.fb.doc/FB_InstallUse/c_fast_reporting.html >> according to which the following reports are possible:

o - Executive size summary
o - Executive count summary
o - Detail failures by protected server
o - Repository usage by policy
o - Capacity usage by protected server
o - Initial usage by protected server
o - Storage usage by protected server
o - Volume summary by protected server
o - Snapshot metrics
o - Policy summary by protected server
o - Snapshot size summary by policy
o - Snapshot throughput summary by policy

Some useful stuff there - might be worth a look.

HTH,
____________
David Mc
London, UK