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Data Domain deduplication storage systems reduce the amount of data to process by only backing up data that has not previously been processed. The first full backup of a database requires sending all the data to the Data Domain system because that data is considered unique. With subsequent full backups, DD Boost software performs deduplication on the database server, sending only unique blocks for the network and skipping data that has already been backed up. Another DD Boost benefit is that full backups consume only a fraction of space on the Data Domain appliance and network use is minimized.
In our laboratory backup test, the initial SAP database size was 2.781 TB, as shown in Figure 40. The size consisted of approximately 2.318 TB of data and 463 GB of free space.
Figure 40. Initial SAP database size
At a high level, the backup procedure consisted of the following steps:
For our test backup procedure, we performed the following steps:
brbackup -t online -d rman_util -m all -u /
Figure 41 shows the results we obtained.
Figure 41. First backup test results
The first backup test provided the following results:
Note: A high deduplication ratio (global compression factor) is rare in the initial backup of a dataset because the data reduction in initial backups comes predominantly from local compression. With subsequent data transfers to the Data Domain system, deduplication (or global compression) is the dominant compression factor.
The new database size is 2.941 TB, as shown in Figure 42, with 2.434 TB of data and 507 GB of free space.
Figure 42. Data generation after the initial backup
brbackup -t online -d rman_util -m all -u /
Figure 43 shows the results we obtained after the five percent change.
Figure 43. Second backup test results
The second backup test provided the following results:
The new database size is approximately 3.107 TB, as Figure 44 shows, with 2.574 TB of data and 533 GB of free space.
Figure 44. Data generation after the second backup
brbackup -t online -d rman_util -m all -u /
Figure 45 shows the results we obtained.
Figure 45. Third backup test results
The third backup test provided the following results:
The new database size was approximately 3.107 TB, with 2.575 TB of data and approximately 533 GB of free space, as shown in Figure 46.
Figure 46. Data generation after the third backup
brbackup -t online -d rman_util -m all -u /
Figure 47 shows the results we obtained.
Figure 47. Fourth backup test results
The fourth backup test provided the following results:
The new database size, as shown in Figure 48, is approximately 3.107 TB, with 2.576 TB of data and 532 GB of free space.
Figure 48. Data generation after the fourth backup
brbackup -t online -d rman_util -m all -u /
Figure 49 shows the results we obtained.
Figure 49. Final backup test results
The final backup test provided the following results:
Note: We conducted all our testing in a laboratory environment with a generated test dataset, using the SAP SD and PBM. Your results might be different depending on the infrastructure configuration and dataset used.