DE-DUPLICATION IN VIRTUALIZED SERVER AND VIRTUALIZED STORAGE ENVIRONMENTS

A data de-duplication application de-duplicates data on the primary storage read/write pathway of a virtualized server environment and/or in pooled storage capacity of a virtualized storage environment. A virtualized server environment includes multiple server applications operating on a virtualization layer provided on a computer architecture that includes memory for temporarily storing data and storage for persistently storing data. A virtualized storage environment includes multiple storage devices and a virtualization layer that aggregates all or a portion of the storage capacity of each storage device into a single pool of storage capacity. In the virtualized environments, the de- duplication application identifies redundant data in memory, storage, and/or pooled storage capacity and replaces the redundant data with one or more pointers pointing to a single copy of the data. The de-duplication application operates on fixed or variable size blocks of data and de-duplicates data either post-process or in-line.