Source:Si3 Deduplication Hardware Requirements

Copyright © SEP AG 1999-2024. All rights reserved.

Any form of reproduction of the contents or parts of this manual is allowed only with the express written permission from SEP AG. When compiling and designing user documentation SEP AG uses great diligence and attempts to deliver accurate and correct information. However, SEP AG cannot issue a guarantee for the contents of this manual.

Si3 hardware requirements

• For the minimum Si3/Si3-NG hardware requirements that apply to the SEP sesam Si3/Si3-NG deduplication server, see Hardware Requirements.
• For details on the required Java version, see Java Compatibility Matrix. Si3/Si3-NG is not mandatory, so there is no dependency rule for it in the RPM/DEB packages.
• When estimating the maximum size of a deduplication store, you have to ensure that there is enough space available for dedup trash, otherwise the deduplication store will run out of space. You should calculate the required disk space based on a representative sample of your full backup and add the additional storage space equal to approximately 50% of the representative full backup.

Disk attachment and protocols

Si3/Si3-NG supports all types of direct-attached disk storage, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS), Serial ATA (SATA), and Fibre Channel (FC)/LUN.

Performance tip

Applies to Windows only: SEP AG recommends using the High performance power plan to increase the performance of your backup. Note that Windows sets all computers to the Balanced power plan by default and you must manually switch to the High Performance power plan. This way, your Windows computer will use more power, but the systems with Si3 will always operate at the highest performance level.

• From the Start menu, go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Power Options and change the setting to High performance.

Restriction

To avoid problems resulting from the combination of excessively large Si3 deduplication stores and inefficient hardware, the maximum initial Si3/Si3-NG deduplication store size is limited to 40 TB.

This limitation applies to the creation of a new Si3/Si3-NG deduplication store in the GUI.

Note

It is not recommended to run Si3 deduplication (SEP sesam Server or RDS) on a virtual machine. If this is the case, e.g., during an evaluation or test, you should limit the capacity of the Si3/Si3-NG data store to 100 GB to ensure normal VM operation. Have in mind that deduplication consumes a lot of server resources for reading, processing, and writing the deduplicated data, so you should be aware of the limitations when running Si3 on a VM.

Required additional amount of RAM and CPU cores

The following tables show the required additional amount of RAM and CPU cores for a Si3/Si3-NG data store. The TB value corresponds to the capacity of the Si3/Si3-NG data store.

	Note
	These requirements relate solely to the need for deduplication. In addition to these requirements, the amount of memory for the operating system and other services should be taken into account.

Si3/Si3-NG data store capacity (check initial size limit)	RAM
<20 TB	16 GiB
20-40 TB	32 GiB

Depending on the deduplication store used, Si3 or Si3-NG, you can use the following command (from the admin command line) to find out how much RAM is needed at what capacity of Si3/Si3-NG. Note that you need to set the sesam profile to run the command.

Si3-NG

Enter the command sm_dedup_interface -T dedup2 propose jvmconfig <Si3-CAPACITY>.

Si3

Enter the command sm_dedup_interface propose jvmconfig <Si3-CAPACITY>. The output of MaxDirectMemorySize is the required RAM value.

The following table shows the number of CPU cores required for a Si3/Si3-NG data store. The TB value is the amount of data backed up (before deduplication)!

Backed up data (before dedup)	CPU cores
10 TB	4
20 TB	4
40 TB	8