A Method for High‐Throughput Deduplication for Primary File Server by Using Prefetch Cache

SUMMARY We propose a method of high‐throughput file‐level deduplication for primary file servers, called partial data background prefetch (PDBP). To achieve high throughput of deduplication, the method reduces the number of disk I/Os issued during deduplication process. Before running deduplication process, the proposed method prefetches a part of data of shred files referred by deduplicated files. After that, the method processes the files that are larger than a file‐size threshold defined by administrators. In this paper, we evaluate a deduplication processing time by using a simulation model of PDBP. Consequently, we confirm that the processing time of PDBP is reduced by about 50% compared to a conventional file deduplication method when the threshold is set to 4 KB.