The correct answer is A. Long term storage of data which is written once and read infrequently.
Erasure Coding is a feature that increases the usable capacity on a Nutanix cluster by reducing the amount of data replication. Instead of replicating data, Erasure Coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. The capacity savings of Erasure Coding is in addition to deduplication and compression savings1.
Erasure Coding is most beneficial for scenarios where the data is written once and read infrequently, such as long term storage of archival data, backup data, or cold data. This is because Erasure Coding has some trade-offs and limitations that may affect the performance and availability of the cluster. Some of these trade-offs and limitations are2:
Erasure Coding requires more CPU and memory resources than replication, as it involves more complex calculations for encoding and decoding data.
Erasure Coding increases the network bandwidth consumption, as it involves more data transfers between nodes for encoding and decoding data.
Erasure Coding reduces the resiliency of the cluster, as it can tolerate fewer node failures than replication. For example, a cluster with redundancy factor 2 can tolerate one node failure with replication, but only two disk failures with Erasure Coding.
Erasure Coding is not effective for workloads that have many overwrites or random writes, as it involves more overhead for updating the parity information.
Erasure Coding is not supported for some features, such as volume groups, file server VMs, or Metro Availability.
Therefore, if an administrator needs to configure a container on a Nutanix cluster, they should enable Erasure Coding only if the container will store data that is written once and read infrequently. This way, they can maximize the capacity savings of Erasure Coding without compromising the performance and availability of the cluster.