Managing Volumes with Deduplication using Volume Sketches

摘要

This invention relates to a system and method for managing deduplication of volume regions. A storage controller receives the volume hashes of the data stored on a set of storage devices and produces a set of volume sketches. The volume sketches represent a fraction of the hashes. From these sketches and mergers of sketches, the deduped storage size is estimated. The sketches also integrate compression ratios in systems combining both deduplication and compression and are combined with off-line scans in systems that do not have deduplication.