Using deduplication, data compression, and data compaction to increase storage efficiency
You can run deduplication, data compression, and data compaction together or independently to achieve optimal space savings on a FlexVol volume. Deduplication eliminates duplicate data blocks. Data compression compresses the data blocks to reduce the amount of physical storage that is required. Data compaction stores more data in less space to increase storage efficiency.
Note
Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, all inline storage efficiency features, such as inline deduplication and inline compression, are enabled by default on AFA volumes.
- Enabling deduplication on a volume
You can enable deduplication on a FlexVol volume to achieve storage efficiency. You can enable postprocess deduplication on all volumes and inline deduplication on volumes that reside on AFA or Flash Pool aggregates. You must contact technical support if you want to enable inline deduplication on other types of volumes. - Disabling deduplication on a volume
You can disable postprocess deduplication and inline deduplication independently on a volume. - Managing automatic volume-level background deduplication on AFA systems
Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, volume-level background deduplication can be managed to run automatically using a predefined auto AFA policy. No manual configuration of the schedules is required. The auto policy performs continuous deduplication in the background. - Managing aggregate-level inline deduplication on AFA systems
Aggregate-level deduplication eliminates duplicate blocks across volumes belonging to the same aggregate. Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, you can perform aggregate-level deduplication inline on AFA systems. The feature is enabled by default for all newly created volumes and all upgraded volumes with volume inline deduplication turned on. - Managing aggregate-level background deduplication on AFA systems
Aggregate-level deduplication eliminates duplicate blocks across volumes belonging to the same aggregate. Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, you can perform aggregate-level deduplication in the background on AFA systems. The feature is enabled by default for all newly created volumes and all upgraded volumes with volume background deduplication turned on. - Enabling temperature sensitive storage efficiency
Temperature sensitive storage efficiency was introduced in ONTAP 9.8 and is enabled automatically on newly created thin-provisioned AFA volumes. With this feature, storage efficiency is applied according to whether data is hot or cold. For cold data, larger data blocks are compressed, and for hot data, which is overwritten more often, smaller data blocks are compressed, making the process more efficient. - Enabling data compression on a volume
You can enable data compression on a volume to achieve space savings by using the volume efficiency modify command. You can enable data compression on a FlexVol volume to achieve space savings by using the volume efficiency modify command. You can also assign a compression type to your volume, if you do not want the default compression type. - Moving between secondary compression and adaptive compression
You can switch between secondary compression and adaptive compression depending on the amount of data reads. Adaptive compression is preferred when there are a high volume of random reads on the system and higher performance is required. Secondary compression is preferred when data is written sequentially and higher compression savings are required. - Disabling data compression on a volume
You can disable data compression on a volume by using the volume efficiency modify command. - Managing inline data compaction for AFA systems
You can control inline data compaction on AFA systems at the volume level using the volume efficiency modify command. Data compaction is enabled by default for all volumes on AFA systems. - Enabling inline data compaction for Hybrid systems
You can control inline data compaction on Hybrid systems with Flash Pool (hybrid) aggregates or HDD aggregates at the volume or aggregate level by using the wafl compaction enable node shell command. Data compaction is disabled by default for Hybrid systems. - Inline storage efficiency enabled by default on AFA systems
Storage efficiency features are currently enabled by default on all newly created volumes on AFA systems. Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, all inline storage efficiency features are enabled by default on all existing and newly created volumes on all AFA systems. - Enabling storage efficiency visualization
Use the storage aggregate show-efficiency command to display information about the storage efficiency of all the aggregates in your system. - Creating a volume efficiency policy to run efficiency operations
You can create a volume efficiency policy to run deduplication or data compression followed by deduplication on a volume for a specific duration, and specify the job schedule using the volume efficiency policy create command. - Managing volume efficiency operations manually
You can manage how the efficiency operations run on a volume by running efficiency operations manually. - Managing volume efficiency operations using schedules
You can manage how the efficiency operations run on a volume by using a schedule or by depending on the amount of new data written to the FlexVol volume. - Monitoring volume efficiency operations
You can monitor the progress of efficiency operations on a volume by viewing the status of the efficiency operations and the space savings achieved on the volume. - Stopping volume efficiency operations
You can stop a deduplication or postprocess compression operation by using the volume efficiency stop command. This command automatically generates a checkpoint. - Information about removing space savings from a volume
You can choose to remove the space savings achieved by running efficiency operations on a volume. You must ensure that you contact technical support before removing or undoing the space savings on a volume.
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