Dell DR4000 Disk Backup Appliance & Veeam

I have recently been given the opportunity to take a deeper look at the Dell DR4000 Backup Appliance, as this now fully supports Veeam it was of particular interest to me. The DR4000 is a server appliance based upon the de-duplication technology Dell acquired from Ocarina. 

Out of the box to running was very quick and easy, with a text based wizard guiding me through the initial steps then moving onto the web based user interface. It took no more than 10-15mins of my time for the initial configuration and access to the user interface. 

Once the initial configuration was completed I logged into the user interface, the default username is administrator and password is St0r@ge!. Once you are logged in, you get a dashboard view of the appliance, the screenshot below is taken after a number of backups with Veeam. As you can see I have managed to get a total de-duplication saving of 63% across my Veeam backup jobs that I wrote to the appliance. I only had the opportunity to write a small amount of backups but presumably the more backups wrote there would be potential for larger savings. To break it down Veeam backed up 1.9TB of VMs to a 391GB file, the appliance below shows this backups, a reverse incremental for this backup at 46GB and a further 7GB backup file, after de-duplication and compression on the DR4000 these files were down to 168GB. 

One thing to note was in my haste I only plugged in one PSU and one NIC rather than the full 4 available and they show as errors in the hardware health page. 

The box comes configured out the box with a backup container ready for you to write your Veeam, Commvault, AppAssure etc backups too. You are also able to run through a very simple wizard to create other containers. 

You are also able to configure the compression level across the appliance to be able to favour maximum compression but there could be a performance hit or fast to get a happy medium. 

One of the elements that I really like about the DR4000 is the ability to use it to offsite your backups, you are able to quickly and easily configure one box to be a target and one to be a source. You are able to allow one DR4000 to be a target for up 5 source boxes. 

Once you have your backups writing to the appliance there are a good range of stats and usage statistics to tell you what is going. 

The only configuration needed from a Veeam perspective was to set the jobs deduce-friendly option and add a new repository pointing at the CIFs share. 

For me simplicity and effectiveness are key when it comes to backups they are one of the most important elements of IT to your business but they aren’t something you want to have sleepless nights worrying about, this is one of the reasons I like Veeam so much. For me the DR4000 adds to these elements offering further compression and the ability to simply and effectively move your backups offsite. 

I have a video demo available of this whole setup if anyone is interested please let me know.