USE OF SIMILARITY HASH TO ROUTE DATA FOR IMPROVED DEDUPLICATION IN A STORAGE SERVER CLUSTER

A technique for routing data for improved deduplication in a storage server cluster includes computing, for each node in the cluster, a value collectively representative of the data stored on the node, such as a geometric center of the node. New or modified data is routed to the node which has stored data identical or most similar to the new or modified data, as determined based on those values. Each node stores a plurality of chunks of data, where each chunk includes multiple deduplication segments. A content hash is computed for each deduplication segment in each node, and a similarity hash is computed for each chunk from the content hashes of all segments in the chunk. A geometric center of a node is computed from the similarity hashes of the chunks stored in the node.