I need to make sure I understand the ramifications of client-side deduplication. That process is deduplicating before sending data over the wire for the backup, but it is not actually deduplicating the data on our EQ storage array, right? In other words, if our dedup device bites the dust, it only affects the backups and doesn't have any effect on the data sitting on the EQ?
For context - we recently got a Dell DR4100 and I'm using Backup Exec 2014 to back up our Windows server data to it using OST. The server data is all on the EQ. Before getting the DR4100, we would back up everything to tape - full over the weekend and diffs during the week. We keep our end of month full backups for one year and our end of year backups for several years.
I want to keep the backup schedule but have all backups go to dedup instead of tape. Every month, I'll duplicate the end of month full job to tape for our archives. So I'm just trying to make sure we don't lose a month's worth of work for several hundred users if the DR4100 has a problem right before the tape backup job.
Thanks.