Patent ID: 8898107

Claim:
A method for managing data in a data storage system, the method comprising: receiving, at a data deduplication engine associated with the data storage system, data to be stored in the data storage system; and providing, by the data deduplication engine, deduplication advice to a software layer based on real-time analysis of the received data by: computing values corresponding to different respective portions of the received data; generating identifiers corresponding to different respective portions of the received data, with an identifier corresponding to a particular portion of data including the computed value corresponding to the particular portion of data and accompanying metadata associated with the particular portion of data; storing at least some of the identifiers in an index of a predetermined size; and in response to determining that a first identifier corresponding to a first portion of the received data was not already stored in the index before the first portion of data was received, indicating, as the deduplication advice provided before the first portion of the received data is stored in the data storage system, that the first identifier may be stored in the index and the first portion of the received data may be stored in the data storage system; and designating one or more identifiers for removal from the index, at least some of the identifiers being among those that have been least recently added to or updated in the index.