The IBM® System Storage® TS7650G ProtecTIER® Deduplication Gateway and the IBM System Storage TS7650 ProtecTIER Deduplication Appliance are disk-based data storage systems configured for three available interfaces: The Virtual Tape Library (VTL) interface is the foundation of ProtecTIER and emulates traditional automated tape libraries. The Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) API can be integrated with Symantec NetBackup to provide backup-to-disk without having to emulate traditional tape libraries. The newly available File System Interface (FSI) supports Common Internet File System (CIFS) as a backup target. For your existing ProtecTIER solution, we provide best practices and suggestions to boost the performance and the effectiveness of the data deduplication with regards to your application platforms for your VTL, OST, and FSI systems. When building a new ProtecTIER data deduplication environment, this publication helps IT architects and solution designers plan for the best option and scenario for data deduplication for their environments. This guide helps you optimize your deduplication ratio, while reducing the hardware, power and cooling, and management costs.