N Series Deduplication: Complementary Technology for VMware Environments

N series deduplication technology is designed to take any N series flexible volume (called a FlexVol) - regardless of how data was written into the volume - and easily identify and eliminate duplicate blocks within that volume. If two or more blocks are the same, duplicate blocks are eliminated and data pointers are changed so that all the duplicates are redirected to a single data block. It does not matter what the blocks are or to what application they belong; if the blocks are the same, the duplicates are eliminated. This functionality is in contrast to some other deduplication products that predominantly limit use to a single application, typically backup.