EMC quietly released an update to its RecoverPoint platform last month that includes a deduplication feature to reduce WAN bandwidth consumption.

Here’s some information taken from the updated RecoverPoint Admin Guide that describes RecoverPoint Deduplication:

What is the new RecoverPoint Deduplication feature?

Deduplication is a consistency group policy that eliminates the transfer of repetitive data to a remote site, saving bandwidth. When deduplication is enabled for a consistency group, every new block of data is stored in both the local and the remote RPAs. Each block that arrives at the local RPA is analyzed, and whenever duplicate information is detected, a request is sent to the remote RPA to deliver the data directly to the remote storage, instead of sending the data to the remote site. This “data-learning” technique can eliminate much of the bandwidth traffic, under the right conditions. The effectiveness of the deduplication process depends highly upon the application environment and the repetitiveness of the data. Dynamic data (such as interactive web traffic) will yield a smaller bandwidth reduction ratio, while static data (such as backups) will yield a higher bandwidth reduction ratio. Performance increases in environments with large amounts of duplicate data, and after the local and remote RPAs have had an opportunity to “learn” the data.

When should I use deduplication?

Generally speaking, it is worthwhile to enable deduplication when the following conditions are true:
<ul>
	<li>You have limited bandwidth resources, or would like to save bandwidth.</li>
	<li>Your consistency group contains a remote copy, to which you are replicating asynchronously.</li>
	<li>All of the RPAs in your replication environment are running on a GEN4 or GEN4 FCOE hardware platform.</li>
</ul>
Note: If the data that you are replicating is non-repetitive, deduplication may not be effective.

What do I need to know before enabling deduplication?
<ul>
	<li>Deduplication is only relevant for remote replication.</li>
	<li>Deduplication is only relevant for asynchronous replication.</li>
	<li>Deduplication is only supported in RecoverPoint environments in which all RPAs (of both the remote and local RPA clusters) are RPAs running on the GEN4 or GEN4 FCOE hardware platforms.</li>
	<li>If an RPA running on a hardware platform other than GEN4 or GEN4 FCOE is added to a RecoverPoint cluster while deduplication is enabled, the deduplication process will fail and no warning will be issued to the user.</li>
	<li>Both the enabling and disabling of deduplication causes a short pause in transfer and a short initialization.</li>
	<li>Compression must be enabled before deduplication can be enabled.</li>
	<li>Your RecoverPoint license must support compression, to support deduplication.</li>
</ul>