Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Data Efficiency > Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale SmartDedupe > Space savings estimation with the SmartDedupe assessment job
To complement the deduplication job, a dry-run deduplication assessment job is also provided to help estimate the amount of space savings that can be achieved by running deduplication on a particular directory or set of directories. The assessment job reports a total potential space savings. The assessment does not differentiate the case of a fresh run from the case where a previous deduplication job has already done some sharing on the files in that directory. The assessment job does not provide the incremental differences between instances of this job. Dell Technologies recommends that you run the assessment job once on a specific directory before starting a deduplication job on that directory.
The assessment job runs similarly to the deduplication job but uses a separate configuration. It also does not require a product license and can be run before SmartDedupe is purchased to determine whether deduplication is appropriate for a particular dataset or environment.
The assessment job uses a separate index table. For efficiency, the assessment job also samples fewer candidate blocks than the main deduplication job and does not actually perform deduplication. Using the sampling and consolidation statistics, the job provides a report that estimates the total deduplication space savings in bytes.