Deduplication Appliance Support

Deduplication appliances are solutions that use specialized data reduction techniques to eliminate duplicate copies of repeated data. These appliances are commonly used in data protection environments, regardless of whether network-attached storage, disk, or tape is involved. One of the primary advantages of deduplication appliances is their ability to significantly reduce the amount of datastore space required, often achieving reduction ratios of 20:1 or higher.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports integration with deduplication appliances. For details, refer to the following sections:

NAKIVO Optimization for Deduplication Appliances

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a specialized type of Backup Repository, known as a stream repository, which is optimized for high performance when used with deduplication appliances. With this type of Backup Repository, NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports a wide range of deduplication appliances as either primary or secondary backup destinations. The architecture of the stream repository is based on sequential block write operations using a limited number of data streams and storing backup blocks in dedicated data files.

Backup data is stored in incremental backup files and full backup files. As a result, the repository maintains VM backup chains that consist of periodic full backups and multiple incremental backups created between those full backups.

In terms of integration with deduplication appliances, a stream repository:

  • Creates fewer data streams in read/write operations during VM backup and recovery.

  • Does not leverage the global data deduplication feature of NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

Deduplication Appliance Configuration Details

When a Backup Repository is created on a deduplication appliance, NAKIVO's built-in data deduplication functionality is disabled. Additionally, the incremental-with-full-backups option is enabled by default. This configuration ensures that no extra resources are spent for double deduplication and reclaiming repository space is not required.