John Milner is one of our top systems engineers specialising in Virtualisation. Over the last year he has been running an experiment to see the potential of using an EMC datadomain as the primary repository for VM backups. He has approximately 200 VMs (150 Linux and 50 MS Windows) backing up nightly to this appliance. What is amazing is that this appliance has managed to reduce nearly 103TB of production VM backups to 6.8TB using de-duplication and compression!

The below chart shows the actual data (blue) growing rapidly compared with the disk used to store this information (purple).

This allows us to retain data for much longer periods of time than usually possible. John’s next experiment will be to try the same using Veeam Backup and Replication as a comparison.  It’ll obviously take a while to get the results but I’ll let you know when we have some numbers to show.

Check out the Timico Data Vault page here.