Knowledge Sharing Article: Data Domain Sizing Best Practices

Introduction: 
Data growth in backups is a reality as business needs change. In any backup environment, it is important
to size a solution with the accurate capacity your customer would require to meet backup storage capacity
requirements. Insufficient capacity and bandwidth to perform the backup can cause backups to lag, fail
to complete or fill a backup device sooner than expected. Data Domain is a disk-based inline deduplication
purpose-built backup appliance that provides data protection and disaster recovery (DR). There are
multiple factors to consider such as data type, data size, data reduction rate(deduplication), retention,
backup schedule, etc. Which affects the usable capacity of the Data Domain.
This article explores how these factors affect the capacity requirements of the Data Domain, how to use the
Solution Builder sizing tool to calculate the usable capacity of the Data Domain device, how to avoid sizing
for incorrect usable capacity and the importance of Blue-Green charts for sizing. The main goal is to design
the protection storage system with the accurate model and configuration that can store the required
front-end data for the given customer requirements.

Audience:This article is intended for Dell Technologies sales and presales field personnel interested in gaining a
high-level understanding of Data Domain and basic methodology /process /procedures to size a Data
Domain appliance to best meet customer requirements and understand the core metrics that impact its
performance.