A company is implementing a disk-based backup strategy that requires maximum efficiency of the backup storage. Which technology provides this capability?

Clustering groups multiple nodes for high availability and performance distribution but does not reduce the volume of storage consumed by backup data.

Deduplication analyzes backup data at the block or byte level and retains only one copy of each unique data segment, replacing all subsequent duplicate occurrences with references to that stored copy. This directly reduces the physical storage footprint of backup data, making it the most effective technology for maximizing backup storage efficiency.

Cloning creates an exact full copy of a dataset, which increases storage consumption rather than optimizing it.

Replication copies data to a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes, which doubles storage usage rather than improving efficiency.