A Fast Asymmetric Extremum Content Defined Chunking Algorithm for Data Deduplication in Backup Storage Systems

Chunk-level deduplication plays an important role in backup storage systems. Existing Content-Defined Chunking (CDC) algorithms, while robust in finding suitable chunk boundaries, face the key challenges of (1) low chunking throughput that renders the chunking stage a serious deduplication performance bottleneck, (2) large chunk size variance that decreases deduplication efficiency, and (3) being unable to find proper chunk boundaries in low-entropy strings and thus failing to deduplicate these strings. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new CDC algorithm called the Asymmetric Extremum (AE) algorithm. The main idea behind AE is based on the observation that the extreme value in an asymmetric local range is not likely to be replaced by a new extreme value in dealing with the boundaries-shifting problem. As a result, AE has higher chunking throughput, smaller chunk size variance than the existing CDC algorithms, and is able to find proper chunk boundaries in low-entropy strings. The experimental results based on real-world datasets show that AE improves the throughput performance of the state-of-the-art CDC algorithms by more than $2.3\times$ , which is fast enough to remove the chunking-throughput performance bottleneck of deduplication, and accelerates the system throughput by more than 50 percent, while achieving comparable deduplication efficiency.