Among the things that you should be aware of is the planned environment, so you have to know details about the following information: 

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 

## Determine if your data is compressible 

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: 

GLYPH<SM590000> General assumptions 

GLYPH<SM590000> Tools 

## General assumptions 

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): 

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 

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. 

