Editor’s Note: In partnership with Microsoft Press, MVPs have been contributing to an ongoing guest series on their official team blog based on monthly themes. This month’s theme is Windows Server 2012. Today’s article is from Directory Services MVP Paul Clement which is the 18th in the series.
Windows Server 2012’s Data Deduplication feature
Paul here! For as long as there has been file servers running in our organizations, there has been the need to control data sprawl to conserve expensive storage space. As disks began getting larger in capacity and less expensive in cost this issue has moved from critical to more of an annoyance for IT staff to manage. Larger disks meant more space to save data and less urgency to deal with duplicate files.
Solutions have existed for many years to deal with what is known as “deduplication,” both in software and hardware; however they were expensive and not always as simple as they claimed to be.
With the newly minted Windows Server 2012, one feature of the exhaustive list of under the hood improvements and additions is a Service called Data Deduplication. Finally, a built-in and free tool that is integrated with the operating system is here for us to realize some pretty significant storage savings without the need to make it a capital project.
Some of you may have read my previous blog explaining how to install and configure this feature in the Beta version of Server 8; however the release version has changed this process. Read full article here
About the author
Paul is an IT Professional working within the Canadian Federal Government for the Department of National Defence. With almost 30 years of experience, he has been working with computers since the mid ‘80s and continues to learn more advanced areas of expertise as the years progress. He enjoys the challenges of new technology and learning creative ways of implementing them in non-standard environments so that even some dated installments can benefit from the new up-and-coming features and services being offered today. He admits that keeping up with the new releases and all the enhancements and product improvements is a full-time job some days, but the benefits they bring are immeasurable. Paul is a current Microsoft Certified Trainer, an MCSE and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Directory Services. When he is not working on some IT-related problem or article, he is more than busy enough at home with his family and could frequently use that 25th hour in the day.
About MVP Monday
The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager, formerly known as MVP Lead, for Messaging and Collaboration (Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and SharePoint) and Microsoft Dynamics in the US. She began her career at Microsoft as an Exchange Support Engineer and has been working with the technical community in some capacity for almost a decade. In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, shopping for handbags, watching period and fantasy dramas, and spending time with her children and miniature Dachshund. Melissa lives in North Carolina and works out of the Microsoft Charlotte office.