The company's primary goal is to quickly free up capacity on their on-premises AFF array by leveraging their large amount of cold (infrequently accessed) data. BlueXP tiering is the service designed specifically for this purpose. It uses NetApp's FabricPool technology to automatically and transparently move inactive data blocks from the high-performance SSDs in the AFF array to a low-cost cloud object storage tier. This action reclaims capacity on the primary performance tier for new applications while keeping the data accessible, directly addressing the customer's requirement without needing to purchase new on-premises hardware.

B. BlueXP backup and recovery: This service creates a separate copy of data for protection and recovery purposes; it does not free up space on the source production volume.

C. BlueXP replication: This service (using SnapMirror) creates a duplicate of the data for disaster recovery, which consumes more storage overall, rather than freeing up capacity.

D. BlueXP copy and sync: This is a data migration and synchronization tool. It is not an automated, transparent tiering solution for optimizing capacity on a live volume.

1. NetApp BlueXP Documentation, "Learn about BlueXP tiering": "BlueXP tiering can free up space on your high-performance on-premises ONTAP clusters by tiering inactive data to low-cost object storage in the cloud or on your premises. This can reduce your storage costs without sacrificing performance or availability."

Source: NetApp BlueXP Documentation. Retrieved from: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/bluexp-tiering/index.html

2. NetApp ONTAP Documentation, "FabricPool overview": "FabricPool is a NetApp ONTAP data tiering technology that enables you to automatically tier data from a high-performance all-flash (SSD) aggregate to a low-cost object store tier based on whether the data is frequently accessed. Data that is not accessed frequently (cold) is tiered to the cloud tier."

Source: NetApp ONTAP concepts documentation. Retrieved from: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/fabricpool/index.html

3. NetApp BlueXP Documentation, "BlueXP backup and recovery overview": "BlueXP backup and recovery is a service that delivers backup, restore, and disaster recovery capabilities for your data. You can back up data from your on-premises ONTAP clusters and from your Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems to object storage in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on premises."

Source: NetApp BlueXP Documentation. Retrieved from: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/bluexp-backup-recovery/index.html