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Effect of SQL Native Encryption on deduplication ration
Hello,
With a general de-duplication ratio of about 2:1 with XtremIO and SQL, does this decrease and become closer to 1:1 if native encryption is utilized with SQL Server? I have a customer that has asked about any effects of using native SQL replication with an XtremIO array and what that does to the data profile being de-duped/compressed on the array side.
Thanks!
BryanWalsh
11 Posts
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February 27th, 2015 11:00
For the production DB, there would be no data reduction benefit.
In the case of snapshots however, you would have a full initial dedupe. A 1TB database with many snapshots would still be just 1TB of physical capacity used. However, new writes to any of these copies would not deduped.
Hope this helps!
-Bryan
Kumar_A
727 Posts
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February 24th, 2015 20:00
Are you seeing 2:1 dedupe on a single instance of the database or do you have two copies of the same DB?
echolaughmk
522 Posts
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February 25th, 2015 04:00
Hi Avi,
We aren't seeing that dedupe ratio at the moment. That was discussed from the SQL/XtremIO whitepaper out there as a potential generalized dedupe ratio that you could get from some SQL workloads on XtremIO so the customer mentioned they were looking to use native SQL encryption and was curious if that ratio might stay the same or if it moves closer to 1:1 given the host encryption. I couldn't find much on the effects native encryption might have so was curious if we had any examples or details on its effects with XtremIO.
Thanks!
echolaughmk
522 Posts
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February 26th, 2015 13:00
Hi Avi,
I wasn't sure if you had any additional thoughts around this from my reply above? Thanks for any insight.
-Keith
echolaughmk
522 Posts
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February 27th, 2015 08:00
Here is the blurb discussed with the customer that provides some optimism around 2:1 savings. My assumption is that with host encryption this would really end up as 1:1 given the unique encryption being done on the database, but would love to hear others thoughts and responses on the matter. Thanks!
echolaughmk
522 Posts
0
February 27th, 2015 11:00
Thanks Bryan and Avi - those answers are very helpful and along the lines of what I was thinking with the initial data and the snapshots so this helps.
As for the array encryption - we brought that up as a discussion point and are still progressing through that route, but the customer has desires to do it at the DB/app for potential business reasons, but we will certainly continue this discussion.
Thanks again for both responses!
Kumar_A
727 Posts
2
February 27th, 2015 11:00
Another thing to keep in mind is that you can now do the encryption at the storage layer (i.e. XtremIO) and let the host be busy with what it does best - do SQL Server transactions! Doing things like compression and encryption at the application level takes non-trivial amount of CPU cycles away from the host which could have been spent doing application related IOs.