De-duplication in a virtualized storage environment

A computer architecture, comprising:

• a host system configured to write data to, and read data from, a portion of a pooled storage capacity, and the host system comprising:
• a data de-duplication application operable to de-duplicate data in the portion of the pooled storage capacity, wherein a data de-duplication operation performed by the data de-duplication application comprises:
• identifying first data in the pooled storage capacity that is identical to second data in the pooled storage capacity;
• deleting the second data from the pooled storage capacity;
• and
• replacing the second data with the pointer pointing to the identical first data;
• and
• a virtualization layer that is operable to:
• pool storage capacity by virtualizing a plurality of storage devices;
• and
• present a representation of the portion of the pooled storage capacity to the data de-duplication application.

A computer architecture, comprising:

• a host system configured to write data to, and read data from, a portion of a pooled storage capacity, and the host system comprising:
• a data de-duplication application operable to de-duplicate data in the portion of the pooled storage capacity, wherein a data de-duplication performed by operation of the data de-duplication application comprises:
• identifying first data in the pooled storage capacity that is identical to second data in the pooled storage capacity;
• deleting the second data from the pooled storage capacity;
• and
• replacing the second data with the pointer pointing to the identical first data;
• a thin virtualization driver that is operable to:
• pool storage capacity by virtualizing a plurality of storage devices;
• and
• present a representation of the portion of the pooled storage capacity to the data de-duplication application;
• and
• an out-of-band appliance operable to provide storage mappings to the thin virtualization driver.

A method for de-duplicating redundant data in a virtualized storage environment, the method comprising:

• in response to receipt of a write request includes write data and a virtual memory address of the write data:
• mapping the virtual memory address to a physical memory a address within a pooled storage capacity that comprises a virtualization of a plurality of storage devices;
• and
• determining that a second block of data included in the write data of the write request is identical to a first block of data that is stored in the pooled storage capacity;
• and
• storing a pointer in the pooled storage capacity at the physical memory address instead of storing the second block of data, the pointer pointing to the first block of data.