Data Deduplication in Server 2012

Just read this great post on Data Deduplication in Server 2012: http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2012/12/12/step-by-step-reduce-storage-costs-with-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx#.UNRb3G_Zbzg

The post details that “enterprise organizations report that as much as 60% of their annual capital IT budget is related to storage hardware”, then goes on to explain data deduplication, and how to enable this feature in Server 2012.

Once the role is enabled, you can run DDPEVAL.exe, which will estimate the amount of disk space that can potentially be reclaimed by moving that data to a Windows Server 2012 NTFS volume with Data Deduplication enabled.

Here’s an excerpt:

When I’ve executed this against various shared folders on my servers, I’ve seen it compute anywhere between 30% – 80% estimated disk space reclamation, depending on the level of duplication on a volume and staleness of data.  Wouldn’t it be great to have 30% or more of your storage budget returned next year to spend on other projects?  Results may vary volume to volume, so I’d be very interested in hearing about your results!