Which statement about deduplication and compression is true?

• A. Deduplication eliminates duplicate blocks; compression reduces data size; both are configurable independently.
• B. Deduplication makes data bigger.
• C. Compression cannot be disabled.
• D. They must be enabled together.

Answer: (A)

Data-reduction features work in different ways and can be controlled separately. Deduplication identifies duplicate data blocks and stores only one copy, replacing the duplicates with references, which reduces capacity when there’s redundancy. Compression shortens data by encoding it more efficiently, reducing the size of data stored without removing anything. Because they operate independently, you can enable or disable each one separately on a NetApp volume, and you can use them together or separately depending on the workload. This is why the statement that it’s true: deduplication eliminates duplicate blocks; compression reduces data size; both are configurable independently, is correct. In practice, dedup often helps with repeating patterns (like virtual disks), while compression helps with data that is naturally compressible; some data may benefit little from either technique, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re independent settings.