Reliability Impact of Data Deduplication Techniques

Data deduplication is applied in storage systems that have to operate efficiently in terms of space consumption and cost. In addition, fault tolerance techniques are widely applied to guarantee high reliability. This paper addresses this situation by a study of the impact of data deduplication on the storage system reliability. The central question is, whether data deduplication influences the reliability at all, and if it does, how can it be quantified. First, the impact of data deduplication on reliability is shown for several specific application scenarios. Second, the influence of deduplication on fault tolerance techniques is studied. It is shown that both techniques provide synergy effects when applied in a coordinated way.