Overview

Background

For any company, data is the core asset. With the demand to store massive volumes of data that rises with rapid business growth, companies will need an ever-larger storage capacity. Fast data growth poses the following challenges:

• Business data may overlap, causing redundant copies and unnecessary storage device procurement expenses.
• Device maintenance and management become complex as more devices are added, including huge expenses spent on equipment rooms, power supply, and cooling systems.

The consequent maintenance costs of redundant data have far exceeded its value. Therefore, storage system administrators are looking for ways to reduce redundant data while ensuring data integrity and accuracy.

For all-flash storage systems, the amount of data that is written into SSDs and data write count during service running must be reduced due to the erase/write cycle and service life issues of SSDs.

Data deduplication and compression are common data reduction technologies aimed at improving data transfer, processing, and storage efficiency with less redundant data. In addition, the two technologies can reduce the data write count, minimizing the wear of SSDs and prolonging their service life.

Definition

SmartDedupe and SmartCompression are developed by Huawei to provide state of the art functions, including smart data deduplication and data compression.

• SmartDedupe deletes duplicate data blocks from a storage system, reducing storage space consumption. OceanStor Dorado V6 series storage systems support similarity-based deduplication.
• SmartCompression reorganizes data to save storage space and improve the data transfer, processing, and storage efficiency without any data loss. OceanStor Dorado V6 series storage systems support inline compression.

Benefits

Table 1-1 describes the benefits of SmartDedupe and SmartCompression.