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ExaGrid supports data deduplication globally across all targets and all appliances in a scale-out system. Global deduplication ensures that all data is deduplicated regardless of the number of targets and/or the number of appliances in a system. In addition, global deduplication allows organizations the flexibility to redirect backup jobs to any target, on any appliance, at any time while maintaining data deduplication globally across the entire system.

Once the backup job is complete and off the network, the data is protected and immediately available to be restored. When deduplication and replication are complete, the data is ready for restore on theExaGrid appliances at the disaster recovery site. The backup data is written directly from the backup server to ExaGrid’s disk landing zone at the highest possible rate with no inline processing to interfere, resulting in the shortest possible backup window.

As backup data is deduplicated, checksums are added to the deduplicated data as it is placed into the internal storage area, called the “repository”. These end-to-end checksums cover the deduplicated backup data itself, and are used to verify the backup data during processing and as it is read from disk. The deduplicated backup data can optionally be replicated to a remote site; these checksums are used to validate the replicated data as well.

If the backup data is not written to the disk at periodic intervals or if administrators notice a log in data reads/writes to the backup server, then, the whole purpose of deploying the backup server would be defeated! It is therefore, the onus of the administrators to overlook how well the backup data is written to / read from the respective disks. Also, administrators should constantly keep a vigil on the deduplication process that is carried out on the backup data. To aid administrators in this regard, eG Enterprise offers the ExGdStatTest test.

This test reports the overall performance of the target ExaGrid Backup Server in terms of how well backup data is wrriten to the disk landing zone and read from the retention repository. In addition, administrators are alerted to performance lags if any, in the deduplication process. Using this test, administrators are also alerted to irregularities in backups.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the target ExaGrid Backup Server being monitored.

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
dataReads	Indicates the rate at which data was read from the retention repository disk.	Mbps	Periodical tracking of these measures helps administrators in identifying irregularities/slowness in data reads/writes.
dataWrites	Indicates the rate at which data was written to the disk landing zone.	Mbps
dedupRate	Indicates the rate at which data was deduplicated in the retention repository disk.	Mbps	Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate data, so as to increase the effective capacity in the disk tier, and the system’s RAM and flash tiers. A high value is desired for this measure. A sudden/gradual decrease in the value of this measure is a cause of concern. Administrators are required to analyze the reason behind such issues and rectify them at the earliest so as to ensure that the deduplicated data is upto date.