ONTAP Discussions

Exchange 2010, should I turn on dedup?

HendersonD
5,414 Views

I recently read a few articles like the one below stating that Exchange 2010 might be a good candidate for dedup

http://blogs.netapp.com/msenviro/2010/01/exchange-server-2010-and-deduplication.html

We just migrated from Exchange 2007 to 2010. We have a 300GB volume that houses our 160GB mailbox database. Should I enable dedup on this volume? We already use dedup on our NFS VMWare datastore as well as two CIFS volumes and are happy with the result.

4 REPLIES 4

bjornkoopmans
5,414 Views

We are using Exchange 2010 SP1, FAS3140 and DOT 8.0.1 to host 40 databases, each about 500GB in size. All databases are placed on 1TB SATA disks with no Flash Cache (yet!). We have successfully implemented dedup on all databases with no issues whatsoever. Unfortunately we don't gain as much free space as we'd like: about 10%.

Hope it helps.

Regards, Bjorn

peter_lehmann
5,414 Views

When moving from 2007 to 2010 it makes sense to enable dedup on the volumes hosting the Exchange data. Because Exchange 2010 does not use MS SingleInstanceStorage technique within the database. But be aware, results may vary depending on the mails and attachements stored in these databases and must be in relation to the additional load on the Storage system to run the dedup process.

For more Information:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3824.pdf

Peter

lfreeman
5,414 Views

If you want to test your Exchange environment for dedupe savings before you install dedupe, you can use the free Space Savings Estimation Tool (SSET) crawler to predict the savings without actually deduping anything.  Your NetApp SE (or authorized partner SE) can help install and run the SSET tool for you.  Or...if you have a FlexClone license, you can create an Exchange clone and dedupe just the clone volume, measure the savings on the clone with df -s then destroy the clone.  Finally, you can just turn on dedupe for the Exchange volume and watch what happens.  Worst case is that you don't like the savings and you just turn dedupe off (sis off, sis undo).

DrDedupe

HendersonD
5,414 Views

I turned on dedup and did the initial scan, wow was I surprised. My space savings was 37% using the df -s command. I was chewing up about 170GB on my mailbox database volume and now I am chewing up about 112GB. Fantastic

Public