About Seeding - Dell DL4000 User Manual

Figure 8. Multi-Point Replication Architecture Diagram

About seeding

Replication begins with seeding: the initial transfer of deduplicated base images and incremental
snapshots of the protected machines, which can add up to hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of data.
Initial replication can be seeded to the target core using external media to transfer the initial data to the
target core. This is typically useful for large sets of data or sites with slow links.
NOTE: While it is possible to seed the base data over a network connection, it is not recommended.
Initial seeding involves potentially very large amounts of data, which could overwhelm a typical
WAN connection. For example, if the seed data measures 10 GB and the WAN link transfers 24
Mbps, the transfer could take more than 40 days to complete.
The data in the seeding archive is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated. If the total size of the
archive is larger than the space available on the removable media, the archive can span across multiple
devices based on the available space on the media. During the seeding process, the incremental recovery
points are replicated to the target site. After the target core consumes the seeding archive, the newly
replicated incremental recovery points automatically synchronize.
Seeding is a two-part process (also known as copy-consume):
• The first part involves copying, which is the writing of the initial replicated data to a removable media
source. Copying duplicates all of the existing recovery points from the source core to a local
removable storage device such as a USB drive. After copying is complete, you must then transport the
drive from the source core location to the remote target core location.
• The second part is consuming, which occurs when a target core receives the transported drive and
copies the replicated data to the repository. The target core then consumes the recovery points and
uses them to form replicated protected machines.
NOTE: While replication of incremental snapshots can occur between the source and target cores
before seeding is complete, the replicated snapshots transmitted from the source to the target
remains "orphaned" until the initial data is consumed, and they are combined with the replicated
base images.
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