Why Deduplication Shouldn’t Be Ignored for TrueNAS Backup Targets
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Recently, our team tested TrueNAS CORE 12 on the powerful HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus. We focused on comparing the performance of hard drives and flash over SMB and iSCSI shares. One of the key aspects of this comparison was considering the performance impact of stronger compression and enabling deduplication with TrueNAS.
Performance is a crucial factor to consider, but it may not always be the deciding factor depending on the use case. In this article, we will show you why even a significant decrease in performance wouldn’t matter for many TrueNAS backup target scenarios.
TrueNAS Backup Target – Testing Environment
At StorageReview Lab, we run various servers and storage arrays for our test environments. However, there are certain systems that we need to keep running smoothly as a production environment. Along with DNS, vCenter VM, and other systems, we also need to backup our test workloads in our VMware ESXi-heavy environment.
For this, we use Veeam v11 (check out our live v11 upgrade video) and an ExaGrid EX21000E backup target. In many cases, we rely on both of these for fast restores. Recently, we have been monitoring our backup speeds to determine the size of an additional backup appliance, which is an upcoming small TrueNAS CORE 12 NAS. When it comes to backup targets, deduplication is a crucial feature to prevent duplicate data from rapidly consuming the storage device’s space. However, we were worried if our small HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus would be able to keep up. Our build included the Xeon E-2224 CPU and 32GB of RAM.
TrueNAS Backup Target – Deduplication Performance
To cut straight to the point, we found that deduplication has a significant impact on write performance for SMB file transfers. We experienced a decrease in write speed from 2.62GB/s to 680MB/s, which is a 74% reduction. At first glance, this may seem concerning, but it’s important to consider the usable range needed in the first place.
In our test, we were using a 100GbE NIC on the HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus, which is overkill for the platform. However, we wanted to showcase the server’s maximum speed before the CPU gets overwhelmed. In a typical production environment, a single or dual-port 10GbE NIC would be used.
Going back to the performance needed, our average backup job transfers around 400MB/s to 600MB/s to our ExaGrid backup appliance. Hence, even with zstd compression and deduplication enabled, the HPE MicroServer’s transfer speeds were still able to handle the backup speeds from our Veeam environment without extending the backup window.
Switching focus to the other side of the question, with deduplication turned on, the MicroServer Gen10 Plus was able to achieve a 1.1GB/s read performance with four 5400RPM hard drives in RAID-Z2. This surpasses the speed of 10GbE, so the performance hit from 1.38GB/s to 1.1GB/s is insignificant here.
Final Thoughts
We hope this article helps in your research on whether or not to enable deduplication on your TrueNAS CORE 12 deployment, especially for the TrueNAS backup target use case. While deduplication may not be suitable for all situations, it was worth it for us in terms of space savings, and we saw no decrease in usable performance after enabling it. Even with the significant drop in write speed, it did not affect our nightly backup jobs.
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