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Data reduction helps reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the efficiency of the system. OE version 4.2 includes compression support for file systems and VMware NFS datastores. On OE version 4.3 and later, data reduction replaces compression and provides more space savings logic to the system with the addition of zero block detection and deduplication. In OE version 4.5 and later, advanced deduplication is included as an optional feature to the data reduction algorithm. This provides the ability to reduce the amount of storage needed for user data by only keeping a single copy of a data block and removing all duplicates.
Data reduction and advanced deduplication reduce the amount of physical storage required to store a dataset, which can lead to cost savings. These savings are not only limited to the storage resource itself, but also on snapshots of those resources as well.
Data reduction and advanced deduplication occur in line between the system cache and the storage resource. Data reduction and advanced deduplication that work at the protocol level is not supported. For more information about data reduction, advanced deduplication, and supported configurations, reference the Dell Unity: Data Reduction white paper on Dell Technologies Info Hub.
For file resources that support data reduction, data reduction and advanced deduplication can be enabled during creation and enabled or disabled later. Data reduction and advanced deduplication can also be enabled on resources participating in replication sessions. The source and destination storage resources in a replication session are completely independent, and data reduction and advanced deduplication can be enabled or disabled separately on the source and destination resource. The availability of enabling data reduction and advanced deduplication on a source and/or destination resource depends on the OE version, system type, pool configuration, and system model.