Hand-on - EMC VNX2 - Block Deduplication

In an attempt to save additional space, you decide the best feature to use is Block Deduplication. This is a storage systembased capacity efficiency offering for VNX2 systems that removes duplicate 8KB blocks, leaving only a single copy of this data. You will enable deduplication on the storage you provisioned to the marketing team to help save space.

Navigate to the LUNs Page

View LUN Properties

Turn On Deduplication

Confirm

Deduplication Summary

• Now that you have enabled deduplication on the Social Media Daily Reports LUN, data stored on the LUN in the future will be able to be deduplicated which will save space depending on how many duplicate data blocks are present.

• Note: Since there is no data in the Social Media Daily Reports LUN and deduplication can take time to complete, for the purposes of this demonstration you will view deduplication savings on another LUN. The Marketing - Virtual Machines LUN has already been deduplicated as an example

• This 70GB LUN was filled with Virtual Machine .vmdk files which contain a lot of duplicate data, making them good candidates for deduplication. Since deduplication is run on all deduplication enabled LUNs in a pool, the savings are viewed at the pool level.

Click Deduplication Summary on the right

View Savings
On this page, you can view the savings from deduplication by storage pool. Because the Marketing - Virtual Machines LUN is on the Marketing storage pool, you will be viewing the savings on this pool.
You can see that the savings are high in this case, due to the duplicate data contained within the  .vmdk files. Deduplication savings will vary based on the data contained within the pool.
Block Deduplication works best under the following circumstances:

• • LUNs contain a large amount of duplicate data

• • LUNs contain a large amount of static data

• • LUNs that experience less than 30% writes

• • LUNs that do not experience Sequential or Large Block random I/O

• • LUNs that contain latency insensitive applications

EMC VNX VNX2 Technical Update - Deep Dive

Overview Link

Virtual VNX: Overview, Architecture & Use Cases

VNX Overview

Vnx series-technical-review

EMC VNX Unified Best Practices For Performance:Applied Best Practices Guide

NAS Meets SAN – an intro to VNX Unified

EMC VNX Monitoring and Reporting