[OpenIndiana-discuss] ZFS with Dedupication for NFS server

[Ware Adams]

On Apr 23, 2011, at 12:29 PM, Gary Driggs wrote:

>> Unless you buy the fishworks based storage products, which I believe includes the dedup feature and is sold for production environments. I just don't remember if the dedup feature is labelled experimental or similar.
> 
> The unified storage series of appliances offer inline dedup, compression, and thin provisioning as production features; http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/unified-storage

Though even the 7000 series presents a warning about potential performance issues when you enable dedup.  We are not running the most recent firmware, so this might have gone away by now.

We have enabled dedup on some very lightly loaded fileshares on a 7000 and not seen any issues (and have gotten some benefit, about a 2:1 savings).  We have not enabled dedup on white box opensolaris and solaris express machines due to stories from this list and zfs discuss.

Given that when it doesn't work well it is quite a problem to reverse we have decided it isn't worth the trouble (particularly on a white box machine where disks are so cheap).

--Ware