I have a few of the of the Barracuda appliances deploy as some of my smaller sites. They are pretty easy to use for the local teams. However I have some concerns about whether or not these appliances are doing what they claim. Specifically regarding De-Duplication and compression. For example:
Old Tape Performance:
- One site has 6 TB of a variety of data being protected
- When we were backing up with tapes we could easily get 1.6 to 1 inline compression (33% reduction to 3.75 TB for Full backups - No DDup)
- Differential backup would be small. Dozens of GB each night compounding each night until a new full.
- If I were to add up all the data for a months worth of tapes on hand to give me recovery points from the last EOM, Last 2 week ends, and last 7 daily recovery points I would be hard pressed to have 5 TB worth of data on all the tapes...