Hey all of you still not on vacation this time of a year! It sucks to be us, right? August can't come fast enough for me! Besides, not much is going on with so many people being out. Luckily, Microsoft has made an announcement to keep us entertained, unveiling a bunch of new functionality of the next Windows Server feature update - which will now come on semi-annual release cycle, so we won't even have to wait those usual few years to get our hands on this stuff!
Of course, as it comes to Veeam, the most interesting announcement is about Windows Server deduplication coming to ReFS! There's also some "ReFS compaction" feature, which obviously can't be bad by the sound of it – but I've no idea what it is about, and trying to find out. Anyhow, in the last few days, many people pinged me to share their excitement about ReFS deduplication specifically, but unfortunately I had to cool them down a bit.
First, I understand that this deduplication will not be block clone aware: performing a block clone operation that involves deduped data will require the cloned block to be rehydrated first – which will obviously kill all performance benefits of fast cloning. So I would not recommend using ReFS dedupe for primary and secondary backup repositories with Veeam for sure – however, there's one use case where it will shine, and that is the Archive Tier functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication v10. Indeed, ReFS Storage Spaces with dedupe enabled makes the perfect long-term archival solution: you still get proper variable block size deduplication as today with NTFS, but you also get the reliability of ReFS with its data integrity streams and automated data corruption self-healing. Except one little problem...
Because Microsoft is reusing the existing, proven NTFS deduplication engine, we should expect the same max volume size of 64TB also with ReFS – which really limits the applicability of this technology as it comes to backup repositories to smaller shops. Oh well, maybe I have no rights to be upset, because who said Microsoft wants to go competing head to head with deduplication storage vendors anyway? Although to me, the bigger issue is that they are seemingly building lots of new functionality around ReFS instead of focusing on making what is already generally available more stable. I just don't get that – for Veeam, resolving support issues is always #1 priority for R&D. Yes, often this means some new features postponed, which always hurts me as the Product Manager – but I'm still the firm believer it is the only right thing to do.
In other news, we have finally decided we are ready to initialize auto update servers with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0, and we will do it first thing next week – so, everyone still running Veeam Endpoint Backup 1.5 will get an upgrade notification, and will be able to perform in-place upgrade (worry not, all the functionality and job configuration you have today will be preserved). We're still going with the RTM build 2.0.0.700, as our support has seen only a few issues in the past 10 weeks that required hot fixes, but nothing major or wide spread. As a reminder, here's the full list of all new features > What's New in v2
Thanks for all the suggestion regarding the Exchange email app! One interesting observation is that vast majority of you are Android users – either that, or iOS people don't use Twitter, or don't care to help :) as far as the suggestion for Android, the overwhelming consensus was that the Nine app is by far the best business email client for Android, so this is what I went ahead with. After using it for a few days it's OK, I guess I will get used to it eventually (having no other choice anyway). Other notable mention was BlackBerry Hub, which has by far the cleanest UI to my eye – but it duplicated all calendar items and was exorcised. And perhaps MailWise, but this one still has some odd reply formatting issues (as is commonly suggested Microsoft Outlook for both Android and iOS). As far as the phone, I went with Galaxy S8 and oh do I feel impressed. Android has definitely made some great strides since I last evaluated it 3 years ago, and Samsung appears to be making absolutely phenomenal hardware these days (S8 does make iPhone 7 look antique, not even talking about poor Lumia 950). |
Komentáře
Okomentovat