Chapter 10. Advanced features for storage efficiency 421
/SM590000Thin and Compressed
In addition to on-demand space allocation, data is compressed before being written to 
storage.
/SM590000Thin and Deduplicated
In addition to on-demand space allocation, duplicates of data blocks are detected and are 
replaced with references to the first copy.
/SM590000Thin, Compressed, and Deduplicated
These types provides maximum storage efficiency and capacity savings by combining 
thin, compressed, and deduplicated.
The following software and hardware requirements are needed for DRP compression and 
deduplication:
/SM590000Enabled Compression license
/SM590000V8.1.3.2 or higher 
/SM590000Nodes must have at least 32 GB memory to support deduplication
Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) compression and DRP compressed volumes 
can coexist in the same I/O group. However, deduplication is not supported in the same I/O 
group as RACE compressed volumes.
10.4.2  DRP benefits
DRPs are a new type of storage pool that implement techniques, such as thin-provisioning, 
compression, and deduplication to reduce the amount of physical capacity that is required to 
store data. Savings in storage capacity requirements translate into reduction in the cost of 
storing the data. 
The cost reductions that are achieved through software can facilitate the transition to all Flash 
storage. Flash storage has lower operating costs, lower power consumption, higher density, 
and are cheaper to cool. However, the cost of Flash storage is still higher than disk storage. 
With technologies, such as DRP, the cost difference can be reduced to a point where an all 
Flash solution is feasible. The first benefit of DRP is in the form of storage savings because of 
deduplication. The deduplication process identifies unique data patterns, and stores the 
signature of the data for reference when writing new data. If the signature of the new data 
matches a signature, the new data is not written to disk, but instead a reference to the stored 
data is written. The same byte pattern can occur many times, which results in the amount of 
data that must be stored being greatly reduced.
The second benefit of DRP comes in the form of performance improvements because of 
compression. Although deduplication aims to identify the same data elsewhere in the storage 
pool and create references to the duplicate data instead of writing extra copies, compression 
is trying to reduce the size of the host data that is written. 
Compression and deduplication are not mutually exclusive, one, both, or neither features can 
be enabled. If the volume is de-duplicated and compressed, data is de-duplicated first and 
then compressed. Therefore, deduplication references are created on the compressed data 
stored on the physical domain.
DRPs offer a new implementation of data compression that is integrated into the I/O stack. 
The new implementation makes better use of the resources of the system, and, similar to 
RACE, uses hardware accelerators for compression.