Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Billy Buffner — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:34:39 GMT

I concur with Chris Cho... Gotta go feel a song coming on.

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Sasko — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:58:18 GMT

Another reason Microsoft to left SIS was that SIR - Single Instance Repository (aka Single Instance Storage, Data deduplication, Common factoring, Capacity optimized storage) is implemented by major storage vendors: IBM, HP, EMC, NetApp, Hitachi (and many others) in different ways.
If you're a SOHO and cheap 2TB SATA is problem for you, then you are qualified for some cloud solution: gmail, hotmail, freemail etc
bye, bye SIS

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Gabby — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:42:56 GMT

Jonathan,

I remember hearing from the Exchange team at last year's US TechEd that they did have a lab version of Exchange up and running with a SQL DB, but they were not at all happy with the performance. SQL doesn't do well with large amounts of unstructured data and that's basically what email is.

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Chris Cho — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:30:49 GMT

I've been supporting Exchange since 5.5 and have worked at MS for a year during the Exchange 2000 - 2003 transition. MS was touting SIS as the greatest thing since sliced bread when it was introduced with Exchange 4.0, but now claim that it's no longer viable because of cheap storage. To me, it seems that the MS programmers who wrote E2k10 took the easy way out by trading in SIS for performance. The E2k10 software isn't written any better, it just removed SIS to give it better performance.
The E2k10 code should have been written better to accomodate both SIS and performance. MS recommended that logs and DB's be on separate disks due to random and sequential R/W operations. Now that most E2k10 operations are sequential, there is no longer a need to separate the logs from DB's.
Instead of working hard to rewrite E2k10 and innovate new ideas, the MS programmers just rearranged the E2k10 code to increase per server capacity at the expense of SIS.
I was not a fan of E2k7 and resisted E2k7, but I am more resistant to E2k10. What I would have liked to see was a 64-bit version of E2k3. Since E2k3 64-bit won't happen, I can virtualize E2k3 on any virtualization platform and support as many users as E2k7 or E2k10 using far less money and without training my staff on E2k7 and E2k10.
No need for PowerShell scripting. Yeah!!!

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Hany — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:36:54 GMT

how could that affect the amount of transaction logs generated, in addtion how can we deal with backup and restore time window and LUN size

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

MaximumExchange.ru — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:36:03 GMT

Russian version of this post:/Русская версия этой статьи здесь: http://www.maximumexchange.ru/2010/04/07/exchange-2010-sis-single-instance-store

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Mike — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:57:59 GMT

Dropping SIS was a really bad idea.
We're currently running Ex2K3 on 6 databases of ~70GB filesize each. Two of those databases store ~300GB worth of objects, the others not far behind.
Disks may have become cheap but in order to back up all that data to tape (which is mandatory by law for our kind of business in Germany), our backup volume would increase about 4-fold and thus using more media (read: money) and time (endangering SLAs).

Chances for Ex2K10 are dropping by the day...
Mike

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

BH — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:18:52 GMT

The real way to get cost effective storage is not buying more servers, licenses, and cheaper disk drives.

It's to go with a solution that work across multiple apps. It's virtualizing Exchange with Hyper-V or VMware.

It's allocating DB space with thin provisioning and SATA drives. When you price out SAN with thin and SATA, it's not so bad. If you use little 15K FC drives, of course that looks expensive!!

Even if the cost per GB is a bit cheaper with DAS, you end up spending so much more to manage it. and to cool it. And then, if you decide to try a hosted model, you have tons and tons of DAS sitting around, where if you have a SAN at least you could re-use the space pretty easily.

Just some common sense.
B

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

bday — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:07:41 GMT

@Tom, even blades can do faul tolerant iSCSI and DAS now so that excuse is quickly disappearing as well. :)

re: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Tom — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:56:06 GMT

People, please stop using SAN storage for Exchange (unless you have requirements like blades). You are missing the point for all of the effort the Exchange team has put into database efficiency.