Deduplication reduces storage consumption by identifying duplicate data blocks and consolidating them so that redundant physical copies do not need to be retained. AOS uses fingerprints to recognize eligible duplicate blocks. Capacity deduplication applies this process to persistent data within a storage container, reducing the physical space consumed by workloads containing substantial repeated content.
Compression is different: it encodes a data block into a smaller representation but does not eliminate identical blocks by replacing them with a shared instance. Erasure Coding reduces the storage overhead associated with maintaining replicated cold data by substituting parity information for certain redundant copies. It is a resilience and capacity-efficiency mechanism, not duplicate-block elimination. Capacity Tiering concerns placement across storage tiers and does not consolidate identical content.
Deduplication should be enabled selectively because fingerprint generation and metadata processing introduce overhead. It is most beneficial for workloads with significant duplicate data, such as appropriate persistent-desktop or full-clone environments. Workloads already using space-efficient Nutanix clones may receive limited additional benefit.
The defining phrase in the question is “eliminating identical data blocks,” which is the standard function of deduplication.
NHCF/NCA reference: AOS storage efficiency, capacity deduplication, compression, and erasure coding. Official references: Deduplication and Storage Components .
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