Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Data Efficiency > Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale SmartDedupe > Overview
Dell PowerScale SmartDedupe maximizes the storage efficiency of a cluster by decreasing the amount of physical storage required to house an organization’s data. Efficiency is achieved by scanning the on-disk data for identical blocks and then eliminating the duplicates. This approach is commonly referred to as post-process, or asynchronous, deduplication.
After discovering duplicate blocks, SmartDedupe moves a single copy of those blocks to a special set of files known as shadow stores. During this process, duplicate blocks are removed from the actual files and replaced with pointers to the shadow stores.
Post-process deduplication first stores new data on the storage device and then analyzes the data, looking for commonality. The initial file-write or modify performance is not affected because additional computation is not required in the write path.