The last test I ran finished in 2.5 hours whereas the previous tests were 10+ hours. I confirmed with Rui that the compression executable on the DataDomain should be LZ as opposed to GZIP (which the engineer thought would be better) and the performance improved to the point where I'm very satisfied. I now think it's a viable off-site solution for us. Thanks to all and especially to Rui for helping me out. From: Rui.Amaral@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To: martinfbrown@xxxxxxxxxxx Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:51:27 -0400 Subject: RE: Rman Full Backup with DataDomain Just in case you didn't see this abstract (it's what we used as a basis): http://www.usenix.org/event/fast08/tech/full_papers/zhu/zhu_html/ in pdf: http://www.modcomp.com/pdf/Whitepapers/Storage/Data%20Domain/Data%20Domain%20-%20Avoiding%20the%20Disk%20Bottleneck.pdf it explains all those performance numbers for DD. It details which algorithm they used (LZ) and number of streams (up to 4 achieving 211mb/s). HTH Rui Amaral Database Administrator ITS - SSG TD Bank Financial Group 220 Bay St., 11th Floor Toronto, ON, CA, M5K1A2 (bb) (647) 204-9106