The data deduplication feature eliminates duplicate blocks used by your data by comparing blocks across the file system. When the data deduplication feature finds a duplicate block, it removes the space used and instead creates a pointer to the common block. If you change the duplicate file, thus making the files no longer share the same block, then that changed block is saved to disk instead of the pointer. You can perform post-process periodic deduplication in a file system to eliminate duplicate data without any continuous cost in CPU overhead. You can verify whether data is duplicated on demand, and then efficiently and securely eliminate the duplicates. The deduplication process performs the following tasks:

The amount of space savings that you get from deduplicating depends on your data. Deduplicating different data gives different space savings.

You deduplicate data using the fsdedupadm command.

See the fsdedupadm(1M) manual page.

Deduplication functionality is available with both Veritas InfoScale Storage and Veritas InfoScale Enterprise licenses.