As far as I know NW does not support any other deduplication appliances natively in the sense that you could be using client direct, so that the client itself starts the deduplication already on client end by talking to the dedupe appliance in question. NW would still support many dedupe appliances, but it would then be target side dedupe only.So where datadomain supports others backup providers that are willing to hook into boost, the other way around their products don't hook into any other dedupe appliance natively. It would be able to backup to a competitor's dedupe appliance, but as said then it would be target side dedupe (so dedupe starts only once backup data has ended up on such an appliance by using a networker storage node (either shared NW SN (for multiple clients to use) or dedicated), which I think would be trough use of AFTD (advanced file type device) whereby the dedupe appliance would be mounted on a NW SN as CIFS or NFS share.Or you'd have dedupe appliances that would offer VTL (virtual tape library) functionality to backup to it using virtual tape and virtual tape drives over a SAN (which ideally would be separated from any storage SAN). Also that is target side dedupe.I consider myself lucky to be able to use NW and DD so to have client side dedupe, so not to have all of the backup traffic to go over the network all the time. Also while replicating (cloning, or called CCR (clone controled replication) cloning specifically between datadomains), it would use much less bandwidth once there is some data already on the receiving end.
Simple question:  Is Networker able to do client-side/host-side deduplication with a third party array?  I.E., no DataDomain or Avamar in the picture - just the NetWorker software? We are looking at solutions and trying to consider all options.  We want the benefits of deduplication being performed on the host prior to sending across the wire and are hoping to explore this further with NetWorker and our existing choice of back-end storage. Thanks in advance!
Networker: client-side dedupe with 3rd party back end storage