A few days ago I was asked a question via my blog about Enterprise Vault and Windows 2012 Deduplication. I've done a little research and this blog post is the result of that. First of all when you read about it on Technet it would sound at first site that this will not be able to play nicely with Enterprise Vault File System Archiving:
Data Deduplication Characteristics:
1) Transparent and easy to use: Deduplication can be easily installed and enabled on selected data volumes in a few seconds. Applications and end users will not know that the data has been transformed on the disk and when a user requests a file, it will be transparently served up right away. The file system as a whole supports all of the NTFS semantics that you would expect. Some files are not processed by deduplication, such as files encrypted using the Encrypted File System (EFS), files that are smaller than 32KB or those that have Extended Attributes (EAs). In these cases, the interaction with the files is entirely through NTFS and the deduplication filter driver does not get involved. If a file has an alternate data stream, only the primary data stream will be deduplicated and the alternate stream will be left on the disk.
It's the talk about 'Extended Attributes'... that leads you to think that things aren't going to go so well. But, it's actually the opposite. A blog by Darren Locke, former FSA Product Manager, puts things straight:
In the blog Darren explains that Enterprise Vault FSA and Windows Server 2012 Data Deduplication will work together, and he goes on to explain that actually, for many several reasons FSA is still 'better' and perhaps when you've read the full blog you'll be left with the opinion that the Data Deduplication features in Windows Server 2012 aren't that great. I know that's how the blog made me feel when some of the 'features' in Windows 2012 are spelt out.
So, do you have plans to turn on Windows Server 2012 Data Deduplication? Let me know in the comments below.
A couple of further Windows 2012 and EV References: