Patent ID: 8880797

Claim:
A method for de-duplicating redundant data in memory, storage, or both, comprising: providing a virtual machine including a virtualization layer on a computer architecture comprising memory for temporarily storing data, and storage for persistently storing data, the virtualization layer presenting a representation of at least a portion of the memory and at least a portion of the storage to a server application; running the server application in the virtual machine on the virtualization layer, the server application reading data from the portion of the storage into the portion of the memory and writing data to the portion of the storage from the portion of the memory through the virtualization layer; and running a data de-duplication application on the computer architecture to de-duplicate data in the memory and in the storage of the computer architecture, wherein the data de-duplication application treats the memory and the storage as separate systems, and wherein the de-duplication application eliminates redundant data in the memory relative only to the data stored in the memory and eliminates redundant data in the storage relative only to the data stored in the storage.