Generally compression and de-dup devices shouldn't be mixed. That is, while your de-dup device may do de-dup and compression under the covers, you should never send it compressed data, since the chance of compressed data deduping well is slim. A de-dup device that has poor de-dup ratio/reduction is a very expensive storage device! I recommend looking at a number of vendors, if your purchasing situation allows it. First, the competition will bring down the price, and second, you may find a better device for your situation. I also recommend that you test any device you are seriously considering with your own data, and the more and more representative you can make your test data, the more you'll have expectations that will be met. Finally, for this area, look hard at what you'll do when you have more data than will fit on the device and what you'll be able to do when the device will no longer be supported (typically 5 years from GA). Others have covered Oracle BCT. You mention you want to write your backups to SAN and then copy to your de-dup device. You might want to revisit that inclination. I've never heard of "EMC Data Duplication" (I use a local and remote pair of Quantum de-dup appliances), so take this advice with an aspirin and grain of salt ... if you acquire the right size de-dup device and connect it with where the data originates appropriately, you'll find backups and restores very fast and all the latencies of tape handling gone. Whether you use your NetBackup DB agent, other software that might be part of the EMC Data Duplication devices/servers, or just use RMAN scripts to backup to an NFS share on your de-dup device, restores should be quick and easy compared to the extra step of using your SAN. By all means test and verify! Cheers, Wayne On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 5:55 AM, Jason Khym <jrkhym@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am an oracle DBA at a large ulitity company in the Southeastern US. Our > IT shop is considering buying this product for our server,email and database > backups. It would replace Veritas Netbackup Server and Tape libraries. I > was wondering if anyone on the list has any experience with the product. > > We current at taking full level 0 hot backups on all of our production > databases every night. So I know a dedup product like this would save us > alot of backup space. I also realize that RMAN incremental backups with > Block Change Tracking would give us the same benefit with less cost. We > haven't had time to implement this as a backup standard yet. Our db engineer > tried using incremental backups back in 8i or 9i and said it was not > reducing the backup size. He later found out he needed to enable BCT to see > the full size reduction. Our IT engineers want us(DBAs) to write RMAN > backups directly to this dedup servers. I am not sold on that idea. I would > like to continue to write our backup to ATA SAN storage and have the backups > pulled to the dedup devices. > > Overall, what do you think of this product? Any gotchas or leasons learned > that can be shared? >