7 October, 2025

Part 1 of 5: “Tell me you understand DRR (Data Reduction Rate) without actually telling me”

“Yeah, easy – so like encoding pictures and movies into jpeg and mpeg?”  Well yes and no,…..”

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DRR, or Data Reduction Rate – a term that encompasses a set of methods, algorithms and techniques with the objective of reducing or shrinking data, so that it consumes less storage.

“Yeah, easy – so like encoding pictures and movies into jpeg and mpeg?”  Well yes and no, there could be some encoding, but generally that kind of encoding is ‘lossy’ and we can’t have bits of your data missing just to make it smaller!

“Ok – so just zipping stuff up?”  That’s certainly a big part of most DRR techniques yes.  Compression algorithms like those we’re familiar with on the desktop like Zip are a great way of reducing a files size.  The problem with those are that they can be pretty slow, and the last thing you want on an enterprise storage system is having to wait for your files to be zipped up and unzipped whenever you open and close them.  So generally if a compression algorithm is used, it needs to be so quick that it’s hardly noticeable.

“How about a clever way of figuring out that if I have two identical files, then I only store one copy, and pretend its two with just a link to it or something?”.  Great idea!  That’s de-duplication.  In fact the clever engineering folks figured out a way to do that across much smaller sets of data than what we see as your two ‘files’.  The boffins have also figured out how to look for patterns across a whole storage array, and de-duplicate based on that.

“What about snap-shots, clones and thin-provisioning?  That must have a big impact on DRR right?”.  Oh yes, and in fact its here where some of the most dramatic data reduction can take place.  The thing is, it’s a bit of a cheat to count this kind of data reduction on an array for  a few reasons; firstly, if you create ten clones of a volume have you really achieved a 10:1 reduction? And secondly, thin provisioning is a pretty arbitrary thing, if I provision a 100TiB volume and its only really using 10TiB of space – is that 10:1 DRR?

The lesson here is to apply some scrutiny to a vendors DRR calculations and what they are made of.  In part 5 of this blog series I explain why Pure Storage’s Data Reduction is superior to any others on the market!

So now that you get the basics of DRR, read parts 2-5 to understand why many procurement departments are wasting thousands of dollars and generating thousands of tons of CO2 pollution for no sensible reason whatsoever.

Orange Squash?  Squeeze?

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