The Dell Unity Snapshots feature is fully supported with data reduction and Advanced Deduplication. Snapshots also benefit from the space savings achieved on the source storage resource. When taking a Snapshot of a data reduction enabled storage resource, the data on the source may be compressed or deduplicated. The data is left in its current state, and the Snapshot inherits the savings achieved on the source storage resource.

When a snapshot is mounted and the source storage resource has data reduction enabled, data reduction is also utilized on any snapshot I/O. If a read is received for a compressed or deduplicated block of data, the data is restored to its original size and sent to the requestor. Savings can also be achieved on writes to a snapshot. As write operations are received, if the source storage resource has data reduction enabled, snapshot writes are also passed through the data reduction algorithms. This savings is tracked and reported as part of the GBs saved for the source storage resource.

More information about Snapshots can be found in the Dell Unity: Snapshots and Thin Clones white paper found on Dell Technologies Info Hub.