Among the things that you should be aware of is the planned environment, so you have to  know details about the following information: Compression is one option of Data Reduction Pools, and the deduplication algorithm is used  to reduce the on-disk footprint of data written to by thin provisioning. In IBM SAN Volume  Controller and Storwize systems, this is an inline deduplication approach rather than  attempting to compress as a background task. DRP provides unmap support at the pool and  volume level, and out-of-space situations can be managed at the DRP pool level. Compression can be enabled in Data Reduction Pools on a per-Volume basis, and Thin  Provisioning is a prerequisite. The input size has changed to a fixed 8 KB. Compression is  suited to Flash workloads (IOPS) and a typical 2:1 compression ratio will result in ~4 KB  operations and Streaming 256 KB chunks of 8 KB blocks for consistent write performance. Data compression techniques depend on the type of data that has to be compressed and on  the desired performance. Effective compression savings generally rely on the accuracy of  your planning and the understanding if the specific data is compressible or not. There are  several ways to decide if your data is compressible or not: IBM SAN Volume Controller and Storwize systems compression is lossless and as the name  implies, it involves no loss of information. It can be losslessly compressed and the original  data can be recovered after the compress/expend cycle. Good compression savings may be  achieved in the following environments (and others): However, you should take care if the data is already compressed. The savings will be less or  could even be negative. Pictures (for example, GIF, JPG, PNG, and so on), audio (MP3,  WMA, and so on) and video or audio (AVI, MPG, and so on) and even compressed databases  data might not be good candidates for compression.  Chapter 3. Storage pools  89 Determine if your data is compressible GLYPH<SM590000> Is your data compressible? GLYPH<SM590000> Is your data deduplicable? GLYPH<SM590000> What are the workload and performance requirements – Read / Write ratio – Blocksize – IOPS, MBps, and response time GLYPH<SM590000> Flexibility for the future GLYPH<SM590000> Thin Provisioning GLYPH<SM590000> Child Pools  GLYPH<SM590000> General assumptions GLYPH<SM590000> Tools GLYPH<SM590000> Virtualized Infrastructure  GLYPH<SM590000> Database and Data Warehouse GLYPH<SM590000> Home Directory, Shares, as well as shared project data GLYPH<SM590000> CAD/CAM GLYPH<SM590000> Oil and Gas data GLYPH<SM590000> Log data GLYPH<SM590000> SW development GLYPH<SM590000> Text, some picture files  General assumptions