White Papers

5 Seeding from a Dell™ DR Series System to an External Device | August 2014
1 Understanding the seeding process
Seeding is a process that copies de-duplicated data from a DR Series system to an external device
(typically USB), which is exported as a CIFS share. The seeding process comprises the following steps:
1. The device attached to a client machine is mounted using the CIFS protocol on the DR Series system;
and, seeding is initiated, which copies the data (export) to the device.
2. Once the data is copied entirely, the devices are later shipped to the location of the target DR Series
system.
3. The device is attached to another client at the remote site and mounted using the CIFS protocol on
the target DR Series system.
4. The data is imported to the target DR Series system.
5. Once all of the data is imported, replication re-sync is initiated between the source and target DR
containers. Since the data is already present on the target, the re-sync completes quickly after
transferring the namespace with any other changes in data. Replication setup is ready between the
source and target.
The following diagram shows this process.
Perform seed export
Transfer the devices to
target location
Perform seed import
Enable the replication
relationship
Is
INSYNC?
No
Perform seed cleanup
Yes