Patent attributes
A fingerprint trie is used to store fingerprints for data portions stored on a storage system for use in implementing data deduplication on a storage system. The fingerprint trie may be used to compare fingerprint values to determine duplicate data portions, for example, in response to I/O operations. Leaf nodes of the fingerprint trie may be keyed by fingerprints, and a value of each leaf node may be a reference to the physical storage location of the data portion from which the fingerprint was generated. When an I/O operation is received, a fingerprint may be generated for each of one or more data portions included in the I/O operation. A fingerprint trie may be searched, for example by traversing multiple nodes of the trie according to pointers provided by the nodes, to determine whether there is any matching fingerprint specified in the fingerprint trie.
