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Using FlexCache volumes to accelerate data access

A FlexCache volume is a sparsely-populated volume on a local storage system that is backed by a volume on a different, optionally remote, storage system. A sparsely-populated volume or a sparse volume provides access to data in the backing volume (also called the origin volume) without requiring that all the data be in the sparse volume.

You can use only FlexVol volumes to create FlexCache volumes. However, many of the regular FlexVol volumes features are not supported on FlexCache volumes, such as Snapshot copy creation, deduplication, compression, FlexClone volume creation, volume move, and volume copy.

You can use FlexCache volumes to speed up access to data, or to offload traffic from heavily accessed volumes. FlexCache volumes help improve performance, especially when clients need to access the same data repeatedly, because the data can be served directly without having to access the source. Therefore, you can use FlexCache volumes to handle system workloads that are read-intensive.

Cache consistency techniques help in ensuring that the data served by the FlexCache volumes remains consistent with the data in the origin volumes.