Restoration of deduplicated data

Restore operations that require data to be reassembled from a sequential-access disk (FILE) storage pool that is set up for data deduplication have different performance characteristics than restore operations from a FILE storage pool that is not set up for deduplication.

In a FILE storage pool that is not set up for data deduplication, files are typically restored in a sequential process. In a FILE storage pool that is set up for data deduplication, however, data is distributed throughout the storage pool. As a result, the input/output (I/O) is more random, which can lead to slower restore times. In addition, more server processor resources are consumed when data is restored from a deduplicated storage pool. This occurs because the data is checked to ensure that it has been reassembled properly by using MD5 algorithms.

Although restore operations of small files from a deduplicated storage pool might be relatively slow, these operations are still typically faster than restore operations of small files from tape because of the added tape mount and locate time.