Deduplication is something that we as people do naturally. Every once in a while you clean out the refrigerator, right? And if there are seven half-empty bottles of ketchup, you probably deduplicate that and throw some away. Or your closet. If you dig around and find thirty blue shirts, chances are that you can part with a few to save some space. These things make common sense, and so does deduplication when talking about the data that is stored on our servers.

Starting with Windows Server 2012, data deduplication became possible at the file system level. When enabled, Windows runs optimization jobs that search out for duplicate files and data, and consolidates them. If you have two of the same file, stored in two different locations, all that is doing is consuming extra hard disk space. Data deduplication removes the secondary copy and utilizes the primary whenever that file is called for from either location on the disk.

New in Server 2012 R2 is the ability...