A data architect is planning a new deployment of data storage virtualization before a cloud migration to a public cloud. The requirement is to provide deduplication and backup policy management that i

Software-defined storage abstracts the storage control plane into a software layer that operates independently of the data VMs, enabling administrators to enforce deduplication, compression, and backup policies at the storage tier without coupling those functions to individual VMs - precisely the separation required before migrating workloads to a public cloud.

Containerized storage packages storage services within containers for portability but does not inherently provide centralized deduplication or backup policy management separate from the workload VMs.

Thick provisioning pre-allocates the full storage capacity upfront at VM creation time and has no built-in deduplication or independent backup policy management capabilities.

RAID 10 is a hardware-level disk redundancy and performance strategy that provides fault tolerance through mirroring and striping but includes no deduplication or backup policy management features.