The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) decided all backups should be taken at the storage array level rather than at the OS level. Which of the following backup types would fulfill these requirements?

A snapshot is a storage array-native operation that captures the state of a volume or LUN at a specific moment in time, operating entirely below the OS layer. This directly satisfies the CTO's requirement to move backup operations away from OS-level management. Snapshots are a built-in feature of SAN and NAS arrays and require no backup agent running on the server.

Incremental backups capture only data changed since the last backup run, but they are executed by OS-level backup software or agents, not by the storage array itself.

Differential backups capture all changes since the last full backup and are also an OS-level operation managed by backup software, not a native storage array function.

A full backup copies all data but is performed at the OS or application level via a backup agent, not natively at the storage hardware layer.