Single Instance Storage
I was working on a setting up a new storage / backup server for one of my networks.
Some of the requirements were data deduplication, compression, etc.
I had first hacked something together using Windows 2003 R2 and Windows Deployment Services’ Single Instance Storage functionality that is baked in.
It worked; however, it was not without problems. Namely it seemed to take forever for SIS to catch up. To be fair, this was volumes holding at least 2TB a piece.
In addition, the solution was lacking many basic tools for manipulating SIS volumes.
After setting up storage server and logging in, I dropped to a command line.
sisadmin /i e:
Install SIS on the volume.
sisadmin /e e:
Enable SIS on the volume.
Now for testing…
C:\>
e:
copy c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll file1.dll
Directory of E:\
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file1.dll
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file2.dll
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file3.dll
3 File(s) 31,524,864 bytes
0 Dir(s) 1,887,278,223,360 bytes free
E:\>sisadmin /l e:
Listing SIS controlled files on volume ‘e:’.
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file1.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file2.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file3.dll
3 SIS controlled files found on volume ‘e:’.
E:\>dir C:\windows\system32\shell32.dll
Volume in drive C is OS
Volume Serial Number is EC25-1163
Directory of C:\windows\system32
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 shell32.dll
1 File(s) 10,508,288 bytes
0 Dir(s) 7,007,498,240 bytes free
E:\>copy c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll file4.dll
1 file(s) copied.
E:\>dir
Volume in drive E is LD0-R0-1000
Volume Serial Number is 8205-C4FF
Directory of E:\
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file1.dll
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file2.dll
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file3.dll
11/08/2007 02:55 AM 10,508,288 file4.dll
4 File(s) 42,033,152 bytes
0 Dir(s) 1,887,267,696,640 bytes free
E:\>sisadmin /l e:
Listing SIS controlled files on volume ‘e:’.
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file1.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file2.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file3.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file4.dll
4 SIS controlled files found on volume ‘e:’.
It works!
Now I have to test this using real data – this is just a few files.