Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Data Efficiency > Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale Inline Data Reduction > Data reduction and replication in a mixed cluster
SyncIQ is licensed on a mixed F810 and A2000 cluster and a SyncIQ policy is configured to replicate data to a target cluster. On the source cluster, replication traffic is isolated to only the A2000 nodes. When SyncIQ is run, worker threads on the A2000 nodes gather all the compressed chunks from the F810 nodes over the backend network (RBM). Then, the A2000 nodes perform decompression of the chunks in software. As discussed previously, software compression uses a different DEFLATE-compatible algorithm from hardware offload to help minimize the performance impact of non-offloaded decompression. After the chunks have been decompressed, the data is sent over Ethernet to the target cluster in uncompressed form.
Similarly, deduplicated data is always rehydrated when it exits a cluster. For a data service such as SyncIQ, data is replicated in its entirety and shadow stores and shadow links are not preserved on the target. This means that the target cluster must have sufficient space to house the full size of the replicated dataset. If the target cluster happens to also be F810 hardware and inline data reduction is enabled, compression or deduplication (or both) will be performed as the replication data is ingested by each target node.