Company ABC’s SAN is nearing capacity, and will cause costly downtimes if servers run out disk space. Which of the following is a more cost effective alternative to buying a new SAN?

Company ABC’s SAN is nearing capacity, and will cause costly downtimes if servers run out disk space. Which of the following is a more cost effective alternative to buying a new SAN?
A . Enable multipath to increase availability
B . Enable deduplication on the storage pools
C . Implement snapshots to reduce virtual disk size
D . Implement replication to offsite datacenter

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

Storage-based data deduplication reduces the amount of storage needed for a given set of files. It is most effective in applications where many copies of very similar or even identical data are stored on a single disk.

It is common for multiple copies of files to exist on a SAN. By eliminating (deduplicating) repeated copies of the files, we can reduce the disk space used on the existing SAN. This solution is a cost effective alternative to buying a new SAN.

Incorrect Answers:

A: Multipathing enables multiple links to transfer the data to and from the SAN. This improves performance and link redundancy. However, it has no effect on the amount of data on the SAN.

C: Snapshots would not reduce the amount of data stored on the SAN.

D: Replicating the data on the SAN to an offsite datacenter will not reduce the amount of data stored on the SAN. It would just create another copy of the data on the SAN in the offsite datacenter.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication