Guidelines for using deduplication

The guidelines are as follows:

• If you have a performance-sensitive solution, you must carefully consider the performance impact of deduplication and measure the impact in a test setup before using deduplication.

• Deduplication is a background process that consumes system resources while it is running.

  If the data does not change very often in a FlexVol volume, it is best to run deduplication less frequently. Multiple concurrent deduplication operations running on a storage system lead to a higher consumption of system resources.

• You must ensure that sufficient free space exists for deduplication metadata in the volumes and aggregates.

• If deduplication is used on the source volume, you must use deduplication on the destination volume.

• You must use automatic mode when possible so that deduplication runs only when significant additional data has been written to each FlexVol volume.

• You must run deduplication before creating a Snapshot copy to obtain maximum savings.

• You must set the Snapshot reserve to greater than 0 if Snapshot copies are used.