HPE Storage Users Group

A Storage Administrator Community




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1 post ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: Thin Reclamation of Windows mount points
PostPosted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 2:13 pm 
Site Admin
User avatar

Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:35 pm
Posts: 1328
Location: Dallas, Texas
So, the practice of Thin Reclemation appears to be a dark art. Thin reclamation, is the process of taking back previously allocated space from a lun. This is good for cleaning up a VV that was migrated with a non-thin friendly method.

3PAR charges for the feature on their arrays, but provide no solutions on the host level to accomplish the task. To my knowledge only 2 file systems natively support this feature, Oracle's DBs and the VxFS included with Symantec Storage Foundations. For NTFS/FAT file systems, we're defered to a freeware utility called sdelete. I've been using this tool successfully for awhile but discovered the tool does not support mount points, just drives assigned to a letter. Bummer! Looking for alternatives I found many secure erase utilities, but did not find one that had the option to zero the data only. For example, cipher.exe is native to Windows XP and above, but, it secure erases with a pass of zeros, then ones, then random data, which will not relcaim our thinned free space.

Luckily, we found an OLD SCHOOL msdos solution to this problem... the SUBST command. By assigning a virtual drive letter to the path of the mount point, we were able to trick SDELETE into working.

_________________
Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.


Top
 Profile  
Reply with quote  
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1 post ] 


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Bing [Bot] and 54 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group | DVGFX2 by: Matt