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BP1020 EqualLogic & PowerVault: SQL Backup and Restore with CommVault Simpana 25
3.4.2 Source side deduplication
In this section, tests were performed for source side deduplication to study the impact on production
SQL Server and overall dedupe and backup performance. For this test,
• A storage policy with source deduplication was created. Client side compression and signature
generation were enabled at the subclient in the CommCell console. The software
compression and the signature generation for this deduplication happen at the source
(production SQL Server) by default because of the source side deduplication storage policy.
However, when SnapProtect is enabled, there is an option to specify a proxy server (either the
DL2200 or the production server which have Media Agent in them) to mount the snapshots for
the backup. The software compression and signature generation happen at the selected proxy
server and it is a way to choose where to run the deduplication workload. The tests in this
section compare the impact of choosing,
o Production SQL server as proxy (Refer to Figure 19) and
o PowerVault DL2200 as proxy (Refer to Figure 21)
• Production SQL server was specified as proxy server for performing the SnapProtect backup
operations for this test. It was specified in the subclient SnapProtect operations tab under
properties. The media agent that performs the backup of the data to the target array is at the
DL2200 (Refer to Table 3).
• DL2200 features the drives other than the operating system drives (The operating system
drives reside in slots 12 and 13 within the DL2200 system) mounted as folders located in the
tree structure C:\DiskStorage\<number>. As a best practice, the deduplication datastore was
placed on C:\DiskStorage\1\1 within DL2200.
Production SQL server as Proxy
Figure 19 Data flow in source dedupe with production server as proxy