Deduplication
This chapter describes the benefits and functions of deduplication on space saving.
Deduplication is an optional feature of Data ONTAP that significantly improves physical storage space by eliminating duplicate data blocks within a FlexVol volume.
Deduplication works at the block level on the active file system, and uses the WAFL block-sharing mechanism. Each block of data has a digital signature that is compared with all other signatures in a data volume. If an exact block match exists, the duplicate block is discarded and its disk ...