Server 2012 Deduplication

[David 1]

Has anyone used Server 2012's Data Deduplication feature on your collections? If so can you share your experience (performance / storage space saving). I'm thinking of enabling it but wanted to see if others have used it first. It almost sounds too good to be true.

 

Thank you,

David

[Shad 0]

Can MB server be installed on 2012 server?  I didn't even try, but would have rathered so I could enable de-duplication.    I'm also curious about how much space one could save..

 

My Drobo-FS is full..  So I bought an external 8 bay enclosure and have it hooked up to my server.   Set all the disks up and JBOD and using a Storage Pool to combine them all.  So far it's working really well, but I'd like to enable de-dup to control the growth.  Of course if I stopped buying blu-rays, that would control the growth too.. 

[snazy2000 342]

MB3 runs fine on Server 2012. I personally don't think de duplication would do a lot as its mainly designed for VDIs (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures).

[David 1]

MB3 runs great in Server 2012. I've now done some testing in a 2012 VM. I setup a drive with dedup enabled and copied a bunch of MP3's, MKV's and JPG's to it. There was little to no savings. The only time I got any savings is if I duplicated any of the files. After more searching on the web I found a site where someone did some real testing (not Microsoft PR testing) and it confirmed my results.

 

Here is the article: http://www.happysysadm.com/2013/01/real-world-data-deduplication-savings.html

 

So it would seem my dreams of magically having more free space have vanished.

 

Thank you,

David

[Shad 0]

I wasn't expecting much savings.  As far as movies go, I don't expect much saving at all.  I do however have a few blu-rays that have more than one movie on them.  (A two movie collection).  I prefer ISOs with menus and special features.  In order to get a listing for both movies in my list and keep the special features, I'd need to have a folder for each movie, and a duplicate of the iso.  Also in my music collection, there are a number of occasions where there are duplicate tracks.  There's the full album, perhaps a single, and a best of album..  Maybe a track appears on a compilation with other artists.  De-duplication would definitely help in these limited cases.  Hoping there's duplicate data between two completely different movies is pointless though..

 

Thanks for the link to that article, it pretty much sums up what I expected..