A file server is being migrated from physical hardware into a private cloud. Baselining of the server shows the disks average 90% full at all times. The contents of the file server consist mostly of…

Compression reduces the size of individual files by encoding data more efficiently, but the files are already described as compressed audio, meaning further compression will yield negligible additional savings.

Thin provisioning allocates physical storage incrementally as data is written rather than reserving the full amount upfront, which optimizes allocation efficiency but does not reduce the actual amount of data that needs to be stored.

Data deduplication works by computing hash signatures of data blocks or files and comparing them against a stored index; when a duplicate is detected, only a pointer to the existing copy is stored rather than the redundant data. Because the file server contains many duplicate copies of the same files across different directory locations, deduplication will consolidate these into single stored instances, potentially yielding very high storage savings. This is the most targeted technology for reducing storage consumption caused by redundant copies, which is the primary problem described.

Tokenization is a security technique that substitutes sensitive data values with non-sensitive tokens for compliance purposes, and it has no effect on reducing storage capacity utilization.