deduplikace

Deduplikace is a technique used in data storage and management to eliminate redundant copies of data. The primary goal of deduplikace is to reduce storage space requirements and improve storage efficiency. This is achieved by identifying identical blocks or chunks of data and storing only one unique copy. Subsequent occurrences of the same data are then replaced with a pointer to the original stored copy.

There are two main types of deduplikace: file-level and block-level. File-level deduplikace operates on entire files. If two identical files are encountered, only one is stored. Block-level deduplikace is more granular and operates on smaller fixed-size or variable-size blocks of data. This approach is more effective as it can identify and eliminate redundant data even within different files, as long as the data blocks themselves are identical.

Deduplikace can be implemented either inline, meaning data is processed for redundancy before it is written to storage, or post-process, where data is written first and then scanned for duplicates. Inline deduplikace generally offers better storage savings upfront but can introduce a slight performance overhead during writes. Post-process deduplikace has less impact on write performance but requires additional time and resources to scan the storage for duplicates.

The benefits of deduplikace include significant reductions in storage costs, lower bandwidth consumption for backups and replication, and potentially faster data retrieval due to less data to manage. However, deduplikace also introduces some overhead in terms of processing power and memory to perform the comparison and indexing of data. Additionally, the effectiveness of deduplikace depends heavily on the nature of the data being stored; highly variable data will yield fewer savings compared to repetitive data such as operating system files or virtual machine images.