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Storage efficiency in a OneFS powered cluster can be increased with SmartDedupe, OneFS’ native post process data reduction technology. SmartDedupe maximizes the storage utilization 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.
Storage efficiency is further enhanced by inline data reduction, combining both real-time compression and deduplication, exclusively on the PowerScale F910, F900, F710, F600, F210, & F200 nodes, and Isilon F810 and H5600 platforms. Isilon F810 nodes use an FPGA-based hardware offload engine resident on the back-end PCIe network adapter to perform inline data reduction. On top of the FPGA, the OneFS hardware compression engine uses a proprietary implementation of DEFLATE with the highest level of compression. This process incurs minimal-to-no performance penalty for highly compressible datasets. OneFS also provides a software implementation for the PowerScale F910, F900, F710, F600, F210, F200, and Isilon H5600 nodes. Software compression is also used as fallback in the event of a compression hardware failure, and in a mixed cluster, for use in non-F810 nodes without a hardware compression capability. Both hardware and software compression implementations are DEFLATE compatible.
Other features such as SmartQuotas thin provisioning, SnapshotIQ, and small-file packing also contribute to the overall efficiency equation. However, one of the most significant storage efficiency attributes is the way that OneFS natively manages data protection in the file system. Unlike most file systems that rely on hardware RAID, OneFS protects data at the file level. Using software-based erasure coding, it allows most customers to enjoy raw to usable utilization levels of 85% or higher. This is in contrast to the scale up NAS industry mean of around 60% raw disk capacity utilization. In-line data reduction serves to further extend this storage efficiency headroom, bringing an even more compelling and demonstrable TCO advantage to primary file-based storage.