I’ve always been an EMC Celerra guy since I cut my teeth on it so many years ago,  and it’s support of de-duplication (single instancing) left a lot to be desired by me – mainly that it could not work across filesystems.  When I first started investigating Isilon I had high hopes for de-dupe across the entire array because it din’t have separate file systems.. New announcements today bring that idea to light finally. It is certainly not a surprise that OneFS will support de-dupe,  but the fact that it allows it across the entire IFS is a huge benefit.

Data written to the cluster will be written full size,  but in post processing objects and files will be de-duped using an 8k block size. EMC is suggesting you’ll see a 30% reduction in storage consumption, but your mileage will vary.  This is great news for the Isilon TCO – it’s already low overhead in raw storage and this announced reduction of consumption makes that TCO ever better.