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Storage : Volumes : Understanding volumes : Using deduplication to increase storage efficiency
Using deduplication to increase storage efficiency
Deduplication is a Data ONTAP feature that reduces the amount of physical storage space required by eliminating duplicate data blocks within a FlexVol volume.
Deduplication works at the block level on an active file system, and uses the WAFL block-sharing mechanism. Each block of data has a digital signature that is compared with all other signatures in a data volume. If an exact block match exists, the duplicate block is discarded and its disk space is reclaimed.
You can configure deduplication operations to run automatically or according to a schedule. You can deduplicate new and existing data, or only new data, on any FlexVol volume.
Deduplication removes data redundancies, as shown in the following illustration:

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