The purpose of this article:
After the blogpost of my colleaugue Wouter Deneyer 'What is data deduplication', I will show you how to estimate your savings on a windows 2012 R2 fileserver.
What is a fileserver
Your fileserver is the drive where you store all of the company's documents. It's a vital part of any company nowadays. Sometimes there is a GUI layer on top of it, or applications that control access and make it easier for everyone such as our smartshare. But essentially, it remains the same.
it's the core of your company related to information and you use it constantly to access all of the production data.
Why would you do an estimation?
- To have an accurate overview of the possible savings. Seeing is believing!
- To calculate and anticipate the storage savings in your environment. While storage has become cheaper over the years, it's still a considerable part of the investment for your IT infrastructure. Especially when you are using SSD storage which is more expensive than traditional disks.
- Speed up the backup and thus decrease the time taken by your backup.
- Based on accurate numbers you can verify the pre-requirements, requirements and impact.
Seeing is Believing:
One of our clients has been running out of diskspace lately on his fileserver. They already extended his storage about a year ago by buying an additional 4x 300GB 15K high end disks on top of the 4x 300GB 15K that were already situated in the server. This explains why the server has two datadisks. Namely the e:\ and f:\ drive. We ran the tool and were stunned by the results!
Out of the 1800GB on data, 936GB could be saved by simply turning on deduplication on the fileserver, That's 52%!
And that's only for one single server! You probably have a lot more.
So how do we do it ?
Running the ddpeval tool is completely safe and does not activate the deduplication itself. It simply gives you an idea on "what if".
If you should consider implementing deduplication on your server, be sure to check out the blog my colleaugue Wouter Deneyer will be making that show how-to.
