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About LinkBacks@CyberNerd - which deduplication would you suggest?Originally Posted by CyberNerd
@CyberNerd - which deduplication would you suggest?
ZFS. either buy Solaris 11 or use FreeBSD. There are plenty of guides on how to set up ZFS and samba with active directory integration, quotas and acl's online.
( Solaris 10 Samba / ZFS Configuration for example)
I wrote a quota/acl/samba without ZFS howto on the edugeek wiki - still awaiting an explanation/restoration of these wiki's)
I'm not sure of the academic pricing for solaris, but freeBSD is free. It's not that hard to setup if you can a) use a text editor b) read.
Also, Windows 2008 R2 Storage Server has deduplication built in - we are going to be looking at this when we make our move to 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
Am i right in thinking you have to buy a device with storage server already installed or can it be installed onto an existing 2008 R2 server?
You either have to buy it on a device, or buy it as a specific package - it isn't an addon for normal 2k8 R2.
Worth noting that Windows Server 8 will have dedup as an installable role on the 'normal' editions - Storage Server as a separate edition will cease to exist.
At least MS have seen the light on this and will have it as an OS feature in Server 8... it's one of those artificial restrictions that drives me crazy as I don't want to buy a physical storage server for a feature that's been kept back to please a couple of OEM partners /rant
As for storage space, have you done a Windirstat or equivalent report to find out where all the space is going? There must be a lot of multimedia in there to use up that much space so it all depends on whether it's relevant data or personal files.
The other argument is not to give bundles of local storage space so staff have to put it on the VLE... in an ideal world that platform would be running via a repository system so staff can search for content but that panacea still hasn't arrived in the way I think it should exist on a technical level
But you're just shifting your storage requirements there. From your shares to your VLE...The other argument is not to give bundles of local storage space so staff have to put it on the VLE... in an ideal world that platform would be running via a repository system so staff can search for content but that panacea still hasn't arrived in the way I think it should exist on a technical level
True but at least they've got a better chance of being used rather than sitting in silos within each user's personal area, plus if people have to place them in a specific area, name the resource etc they're less likely to lob junk on there that's got little use \ relevance
I'm still at a loss as to why so many people on this forum are happy to wait, and wait, for vaporware rather than just choose the best system to do the job in the first place. Deduplication has been around for a long time, if it's something you need it is worth learning how to do it, even if that means using an unfamiliar system.
a distributed filesystem such as GFS would do this - enable you to have a shared drive that is part of a vle even if the webserver and CIFS server are running on septate servers, sharing hte same filesystem.
TCO for adding a non-Windows server in an all-Windows environment goes well beyond the initial 'learning how it works' phase. When you have experience of Solaris/BSD/Samba and all the rest its very easy to recommend, but when you have no experience of any of those things, introducing them for the sake of a single server is not nearly as straightforward or cheap as you seem to be implying. Time is money and not everyone has the time to commit to training and additional maintenance burden.
There may also be limitations on supported OS environments dictated by other things like the hypervisor you've standardised on - for example, Hyper-V (rightly or wrongly) only officially supports a very small number of Linux distros.
All of these things must be considered when deciding what the 'best' system for your environment is. You cant just look at the technology in isolation and say "that one".
Because I already have my primary storage and servers in the form of a SAN and VMWare infrastructure and don't feel the need to buy another box just to get a single feature. Btw are you talking file or block level dedupe? Looking at the reports from 2008 R2 FSRM file level saves a bit of space but the efficiency gains very much depend on how your data is being used. In our case I can see loads of similar (but not identical files) which really needs block level dedupe to do... NetApp make a big deal of this but then they also charge the £££ to match
I'd like dedupe... however I'm not going to throw away stable systems or chuck bundles of £££ at the solution to get it...
As shared drive on the VLE isn't quite what I'd be hoping for, the management of the content needs to be better via metadata on the initial upload vs a bunch of randomly named files in a randomly named folder... all imho of course
Last edited by gshaw; 6th January 2012 at 12:36 PM.
our teachers get 500MB of space, our students get 30MB of space which we increase as they need it to a limit of about 300MB.
Comments about deduplication and using a VLE are pretty spot on.
Duplication of files (from group shares to home shares, duplicates of files on different home shares, etc) is a big problem now that people have come to expect unlimited storage in some places ... the fact that most of the unlimited storage actually does have a limit and people have not hit it yet is a separate issue.
Moving over to a VLE to replicate shares is not a good thing. you are just changing the location of the problem. When needs to happen is to take a look at document management in general ... and this will mean a fair chunk of user training. This should be costed in at the same time ... and not delivered as an IT thing, but as part of how the school operates and runs. MS have some good stuff on the SharePoint pages which can be translated over to other VLEs so it might be worth looking at that. This is not specifically an IT issue ... I still see the same in the council office with physical storage where people want more copies of the same pieces of paper I have in my files (now archived off-site but I have digital copies of most things and people in other teams insist on printing copies out and filing things away!)
You wound't need to with vmware - we have linux file and webservers running on vmware with SAN and a similar setup to you, all integrated into a windows domain.
ZFS has block level deduplication, and file level prefetching.
Some pretty large companies run BSD/Solaris. they are stable and you'd be saving money with storage space. You don't need to throw anything away, it would be an upgrade.
I agree to some extent. I'm no solaris guru, but I know that setting up samba is pi** easy - it's literally a couple of text files and there is tonnes of documentation.
It's not that hard to integrate these days, maintenance is as minimal as on a windows server and once setup they tend to just work. It's just about weighing up the increased hardware costs and the reduced functionality that you get with windows vs's the TCO's of linux/unix. I reckon that in most circumstances it is worth investing the time to become competent in running multiple OS's - you'll eventually end up with an increased skillset and save money in the medium to long term. Choosing windows for windows sake isn't necessarily the smart option.
more like choose the best tool for the job
Hyper-v was never the best system around! mosy only put it in because of an MS mindset, rather than comparing features and pricing compared to Xen, vmware, KVM. Kind of my original point.
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