ZFS Deduplication Property

Solaris Express Community Edition, build 129: In this Solaris release, you can use the deduplication property to remove redundant data from your ZFS file systems. If a file system has the dedup property enabled, duplicate data blocks are removed synchronously. The result is that only unique data is stored and common components are shared between files.

You can enable this property as follows:

# zfs set dedup=on tank/home

Although deduplication is set as a file system property, the scope is pool-wide. For example, you can identify the deduplication ratio as follows:

# zpool list tank
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
tank    136G  55.2G  80.8G    40%  2.30x  ONLINE  -

The zpool list output has been updated to support the deduplication property. For more information, see

For more information setting the deduplication property, see The dedup Property.

For detailed information about the ZFS deduplication features, see this blog:

http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_dedup

For up-to-date information about the ZFS deduplication features, see this FAQ:

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/dedup