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All file systems are thinly provisioned and always have compression and deduplication enabled. With thin file systems, only 1.5 GB is allocated upfront for metadata, regardless of how large the file system is. As capacity is consumed on the file system, additional capacity is allocated on demand. This on-demand allocation continuously happens until the specified file system size is reached and the file system becomes full.
Compression and deduplication help reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the amount of physical capacity that is needed to store the data. Savings are not only limited to the file system itself, but also to its snapshots and thin clones. Compression and deduplication occur in line between the system cache and the backend drives. The compression task is offloaded to a dedicated chip on the node, which frees up CPU cycles.