Deduplication operates at the block level within the entire FlexVol volume, eliminating duplicate data blocks, and storing only unique data blocks.
Each block of data has a digital signature that is compared with all other signatures in a data volume. If an exact block signature match exists, a byte-by-byte comparison is done for all the bytes in the block, and the duplicate block is discarded and its disk space is reclaimed.
Deduplication removes data redundancies, as shown in the following illustration:
Deduplication runs on the active file system. Therefore, as additional data is written to the deduplicated volume, fingerprints are created for each new block and written to a change log file. For subsequent deduplication operations, the change log is sorted and merged with the fingerprint file, and the deduplication operation continues with fingerprint comparisons as previously described.