Given a limited amount of storage, a technician wants to maximize capacity for multiple hosts and utilization efficiency. Which of the following would BEST achieve this?

LUN load balancing optimizes I/O performance by distributing requests across LUNs or paths, but it does not directly increase storage capacity or utilization efficiency.

Encryption secures data but can sometimes increase storage overhead or impact performance; it does not maximize raw capacity or utilization efficiency.

Compression reduces the size of data to save space, which is a data reduction technique, but thin provisioning is a more fundamental approach to maximizing capacity utilization at the provisioning stage.

Thin provisioning allows logical storage to be presented to hosts that is larger than the physically available storage, only consuming physical space as data is actually written. This maximizes capacity utilization by preventing unused pre-allocated space and enables over-allocation for efficiency.