Exchange 2010 says goodbye to SIS

Fans of Exchange’s Single Instance Storage feature will be sad to know that is gone as of Exchange 2010.  That’s right.  Gone.

I was reminded of this fact when reading Dr. Dedupe’s latest blog post.  He points back to this blog post from Microsoft in 2007 that said  “Given current trends, we expect the value of single instance storage to continue to decline over time.”  I couldn’t find anything official on Microsoft’s site, but I did find this forum post that quoted this article.

The word is that SIS was hurting performance too much, so they took it out.  All you need to do is buy more storage for Exchange!

Or, as Dr. Dedupe pointed out, you can move your Exchange environment to NetApp where they will give you back what Microsoft took away, as their filers have free dedupe.  According to Dr. Dedupe, they’ve been seeing a 30% reduction in size.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

1 comment
  • Read the third answer in this Q/A and it will make a little more sense. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.09.exchangeqa.aspx

    Long story short, in attempting to improve performance by changing Exchange I/O to move sequential as opposed to random, it was a side effect that SIS needed to be removed. They have attempted to compensate for this by implementing additional compression. Most SIS savings have been rated in the 10% ish savings range which isn’t very significant in the scheme of things. Generally speaking, increasing storage footprint by 10% in order to signfiicantly reduce I/O requirements for an Exchange deployment is a welcome thing for most Exchange and Storage admins. Generally speaking, storage admins have had to leave many spindles partially empty or use very small drives as the number of spindles required to support an Exchange deployment typically far exceed the amount of space required which means all those half empty spindles are going to be more than enough space to make up for that little bit of extra space possibly needed due to the lack of SIS. In fact, many shops will likely be able to decrease the number of spindles required to support their Exchange deployments with 2010.