Hi there! Welcome to my blog. My name is Ivan. I am a Dutch IT Professional working as Principal IT Consultant. Deduplication is a powerful feature that helps you to reduce physical storage requirement. Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are now capable to enable this feature on a data volume.
Data deduplication involves finding and removing duplication within data without compromising its fidelity or integrity. The goal is to store more data in less space by segmenting files into small variable-sized chunks (32–128 KB), identifying duplicate chunks, and maintaining a single copy of each chunk. Redundant copies of the chunk are replaced by a reference to the single copy. The chunks are compressed and then organized into special container files in the System Volume Information folder.
I have done some testing and now I am going to enable this feature during my server refresh project on all file servers that are being migrated. Part of the migration is to create a SCCM program or task sequence to run this after the server has been migrated.
Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature -name FS-Data-Deduplication Enable-DedupVolume G:\
I have already seen reduction between 30 to 40% on a production file server. Today I have enabled this on my SCCM server to reduce disk space so I can add more installation images without expanding the storage on a private cloud provider.
Links
- MSDN: About Data Deduplication
- Technet: Install and Configure Data Deduplication
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