Patent ID: 8762345

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a data set at a storage system; in response to receiving the data set, detecting one or more anchor locations in the data set by an anchor detection circuitry of the storage system, wherein the anchor detection circuitry is a hardware device dedicated to detecting the one or more anchor locations; transferring each anchor locations to a data de-duplication module executed by a processor of the storage system; determining if the anchor location is located in a database; if the anchor location is not located in the database, adding the anchor location to the database; if the anchor location is located in the database, examining, by the de-duplication module executed by the processor, bits preceding the anchor location utilizing a first delta value and the bits following the anchor location utilizing a second delta value to identify duplicate data; and in response to identifying the duplicate data, removing the duplicate data from the data set prior to storing the data set on a storage device operatively connected to the storage system.