topic Re: Windows DFS, Nimble and de-duplication in Array Performance and Data Protection

Windows DFS, Nimble and de-duplication

adamnewton52 — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:45:07 GMT

I was wondering if I created to Windows servers on a Nimble data store and set up distributed file services (DFS) on both services, does Nimble deduplicate the shares?

E.g if i have FILESERVER1 with a shared folder with 1TB of files on it, and I then setup FILESERVER2 with DFS so that also has 1TB of files on it, does Nimble de-duplicate this so that only 1TB of storage is taken up rather than 2TB?

Does anyone have any real-world experience of this?

Thanks

Re: Windows DFS, Nimble and de-duplication

Nick_Dyer — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 17:31:14 GMT

Hi Adam,

Dedupe is not a feature that Nimble carries in the platform currently, so what you're describing wouldn't be possible. It would however compress the data & detect zero-blocks, so you will get efficiencies.

Re: Windows DFS, Nimble and de-duplication

rmalmberg-glc30 — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 18:30:05 GMT

Distributed File System (DFS) is generally used as a federated shared file services at remote sites--this idea would dictate the requirement for multiple storage solutions, one at each location, thus losing any possible data deduplication options (you want duplicates across sites for availability).

Your description sounds more like a highly available file server; for this I would leverage Microsoft's Failover Clustering technology to create a highly available file server--this would have no requirement for deduplication at the storage level as both/all file servers would leverage the same underlying blocks of data (one volume).