If Company ABC's SAN is nearly at capacity, what is a cost-effective alternative to purchasing a new SAN?

Enabling deduplication on storage pools is a practical approach for Company ABC to optimize its storage capacity without the immediate need for purchasing a new Storage Area Network (SAN). Deduplication is a data compression technique that eliminates duplicate copies of repeating data, thereby reducing the overall amount of data stored.

By implementing deduplication, the organization can make more efficient use of existing storage resources. This process identifies and removes redundant data, allowing the remaining unique data to occupy less space. As a result, the effective capacity of the SAN is increased, which can defer or eliminate the need for additional hardware investment. This can be particularly beneficial in environments where many similar files are stored, such as virtual machine images or backups.

In contrast, increasing redundancy typically involves adding components or systems to enhance data safety but does not address storage capacity. Resizing existing volumes might allow for better distribution of data but does not fundamentally increase available space. Upgrading to a higher-level RAID could improve performance and fault tolerance but often requires new hardware and may not effectively address capacity constraints. Therefore, enabling deduplication stands out as a cost-effective alternative for optimizing the existing SAN resources.