With Microsoft DPM 2012 RTM and SP1 protecting deduplicated data on Windows Server 2012 volumes is possible but there is no deduplication on the DPM storagepool. This is a feature that has been needed and requested in the community for some time. DPM administrators have wanted a way to shrink the storage footprint for their DPMs.
Now with BridgeSTORs newest product Crunch deduplication is possible on the storagepool. The nice thing about this product is that its sold on a Deduplication as a Service (DaaS™) model helping organizations avoid CAPEX. Crunch performs deduplication at the block and file-level. For more on how the deduplication works in Crunch check out this video they made.
BridgeSTOR has moved from a physical appliance to a virtual appliance. Using a virtual appliance opens up many options of where to place the virtual machine such as a Hyper-V VM on the DPM server itself. Crunch not only offers dedupe but also serves as long-term disk storage for DPM and a way to push DPM data up to cloud storage. Here is a diagram they mad ethat shows where Crunch fits in the DPM architecture.
Crunch also has built in VTL so it allows for your DPM data to be stored to disk configured as virtual tape. The last thing I want to mention about Crunch in this post is that it does not require an enormous amount of hardware resources. Crunch does this by performing the deduplication at times of low system activity paging the hash table in and out of memory, eliminating the need for multiple processors and large RAM configurations.
I hope to do some testing of Crunch in the future to see what it can do! I will be posting another blog with my findings. For now you can visit www.bridgestor.com if you want to know more about it.
