This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides best practice guidance for planning, installing, and configuring the IBM System Storage® TS7600 ProtecTIER® family of products. This guide provides the current best practices for using ProtecTIER software version physical general availability (pGA) 3.3 and the revolutionary and patented IBM HyperFactor® deduplication engine, along with other data storage efficiency techniques, such as compression and defragmentation. The System Storage TS7650G ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway and the System Storage TS7620 ProtecTIER Deduplication Appliance Express are disk-based data storage systems that are configured for three available interfaces: The Virtual Tape Library (VTL) interface is the foundation of ProtecTIER and emulates traditional automated tape libraries. The OpenStorage (OST) application programming interface (API) can be integrated with Symantec NetBackup to provide backup-to-disk without having to emulate traditional tape libraries. The File System Interface (FSI) supports Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) as backup targets. When you build a ProtecTIER data deduplication environment, this guide helps your IT architects and solution designers plan for the best options and scenarios for data deduplication for their environments. This guide helps you optimize your deduplication ratio, and at the same time reduce the hardware, power and cooling, and management costs. This guide provides expertise that was gained from the IBM ProtecTIER Field Technical Sales Support (FTSS) group, development, and quality assurance (QA) teams.