Adaptive Content-Aware Deduplication for Similar Data Zones
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing deduplication systems lack content awareness, leading to poor deduplication ratios and increased storage and bandwidth consumption, especially when dealing with encrypted or re-indexed data, and struggle with managing large numbers of small metadata objects, resulting in performance degradation.
Innovation Solution
A content-aware and adaptive deduplication processor that identifies and manages zones of contiguous bytes, generating zone stamps to detect similarity and perform delta compression, reducing metadata overhead and enabling efficient storage and transmission of similar data zones.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If deduplication operates on small kilobyte-sized objects, then deduplication granularity is improved, but metadata management complexity increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments data into zones of contiguous bytes rather than fixed-size chunks, allowing variable-length segments that are grouped into application objects. This segmentation approach reduces the total number of metadata entries while maintaining fine-grained deduplication capability within each zone, resolving the contradiction between granularity and metadata complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent merges multiple small zones into larger application objects that can be managed as single metadata entities. By combining related zones that belong to the same application context into unified objects, the system reduces metadata overhead while preserving the ability to perform granular deduplication operations on individual zones within the merged structure.
2Reliability
If deduplication is applied to encrypted or re-indexed data, then data security is improved, but deduplication ratio deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs deduplication operations before data is encrypted or re-indexed by downstream applications. By conducting deduplication on plaintext data in advance, the system achieves high deduplication ratios while allowing subsequent encryption or re-indexing operations to proceed without interfering with the deduplication benefits, thus resolving the contradiction between security and deduplication effectiveness.
3Speed
If all metadata is retained in memory, then access speed is improved, but memory consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple small metadata entries into consolidated application object metadata structures. By combining metadata for related zones into unified objects, the total metadata volume is reduced, allowing all metadata to fit in memory while maintaining fast access speeds. This merging approach resolves the contradiction between memory-resident metadata and memory consumption.
Data Source
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AI summary
A method, a system, an apparatus, and a computer readable medium for transmission of data across a network are disclosed. The method includes receiving a data stream, analyzing the received data stream to determine a starting location and an ending location of each zone within the received data stream, based on the starting and ending locations, generating a zone stamp identifying the zone, the zone stamp includes a sequence of contiguous characters representing at least a portion of data in the zone, wherein the order of characters in the zone stamp corresponds to the order of data in the zone, comparing the zone stamp with another zone stamp of another zone in any data stream received, determining whether the zone is substantially similar to another zone by detecting that the zone stamp is substantially similar to another zone stamp, delta-compressing zones within any data stream received that have been determined to have substantially similar zone stamps, thereby deduplicating zones having substantially similar zone stamps within any data stream received, and transmitting the deduplicated zones across the network from one storage location to another storage location.