Deduplication Best Practices

The following best practices should be followed when using Commvault deduplication:

• Configure global deduplication policies before creating data management storage policies.
• When creating primary or secondary copies that will use global deduplication policies, the copies must be associated with the global deduplication policy at creation time.
• Determine and configure compression settings prior to protecting any data.
• Determine when partition deduplication is applicable.
• Enable client-side disk cache only for remote backups such as laptop / desktop clients or remote location which will backup directly over the WAN.
• Before hosting the DDB, ensure that the MediaAgent and disks meet the hardware and software requirements referenced in Deduplication Building Block Guide.
• Single or partitioned DDB configuration:
  • Place the DDB in a folder on a different volume or partition than that of the root file system.
  • Do not host the DDB under the software installation directory, for example software_installation_directory\Base directory.
  • For Linux, host the DDB on LVM volumes. The DDB Backups use LVM software for snapshots.
• Partitioned DDB configuration:
  • Host each DDB on different physical drives for better performance.
  • When hosting the DDB on different MediaAgents, ensure that all MediaAgents are of similar operating system type with 64-bit version, and the MediaAgents are online.
  • For more information on supported platforms, see Deduplication Building Block Guide.
  • For DDB Network Interface - By default, no data network interface pair is configured.
• We recommend that you configure a dedicated Network Interface Card (NIC) on each partition MediaAgent and set up data interface pair (DIP) between the data path and partition MediaAgents:
  • To increase the speed of the communication between the MediaAgents.
  • To improve data protection job throughput.
  • To avoid network bottlenecks.
• If you have a NIC configured on a partition MediaAgent, specify the network interface name or IP address for the DDB Network Interface.