Server 2012 R2 Data Deduplication w/ DrivePool

[everyonce]

The only topics I've seen on this are a little old.  It seems to me that it might work to enable Server's Data Deduplication tasks against the raw disk volumes instead of the main drivepool partition?  does this sound like it would work?

 

Thanks!

 

-everyonce

[Christopher (Drashna)]

In theory, it should work, if you use the Deduplication feature on the disks in the pool, and not the Pool drive directly.

 

However, you will need to make one change first to ensure that it works properly:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

Set "CoveFs_BypassNtfsFilters" to "false", and reboot the system.

 

This ensures that the Dedup filter doesn't get bypassed for the disks in the pool.

 

However, depending on your settings, the size of the disk and amount of data on the disk, as well as how often the data gets moved around, you may not see a huge savings.

Microsoft estimates that you will only see about 50-60% savings at most for a file server. But in reality, it may be much, much lower for you.

 

Also, deduplicated data is at a higher risk of loss, because if a block on the disk gets damaged, it's much more likely to corrupt/damage multiple files, instead of just the one.

If you choose to enable it, I would recommend ONLY putting duplicated data on the disks with data deduplication enabled.

[everyonce]

Great answer, thanks!  I'll probably leave it alone since the biggest benefit of dedupe is using across the entire pool, and it makes sense that that wouldn't work against the actual pool drive in this case.

 

Thanks again!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You are very welcome.

 

And yeah, you're not going to see the most optimal savings while using StableBit DrivePool, because we do spread out the files between the disks.

And as I said, "general file storage" may not see the most optimal savings anyways, as there isn't as high a chance of duplicate data, as opposed to VHD/VM storage (which I suspect the Microsoft Deduplication feature was designed for specifically).

[Michael Isaacs]

I am receiving up to 70% savings from Deduplication myself, while utilizing DrivePool technology across multiple drives on Win 2012 R2:

 

3 Drives in pool

H:  is the DrivePool drive

 

FreeSpace    SavedSpace   OptimizedFiles     InPolicyFiles      Volume

---------    ----------   --------------     -------------      ------

1.43 TB      4.79 TB      616928             616931             M:

1.48 TB      4.59 TB      592774             592773             O:

1.18 TB      2.25 TB      362248             362246             N:

4.1 TB       0 B          0                  0                  H:

 

 

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-DedupVolume

 

Enabled            UsageType          SavedSpace           SavingsRate          Volume

-------            ---------          ----------           -----------          ------

True               Default            4.79 TB              68 %                 M:

True               Default            4.59 TB              67 %                 O:

True               Default            2.25 TB              47 %                 N:

True               Default            0 B                  0 %                  H:

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That's a really good amount of savings. 

 

And it falls about in line with Microsoft's estimates.  Though, that always depends on WHAT you're storing.