An organization is experiencing slow application performance due to overloaded primary storage.

Primary storage performance degrades as more capacity is consumed and as I/O contention increases across a growing, heterogeneous mix of active and inactive data. Archiving relocates infrequently accessed, fixed data out of expensive, high-performance primary storage onto separate archive media, which reduces the working set that primary storage must index, scan, and serve, freeing I/O bandwidth and capacity for genuinely active workloads. This is the standard tiered-storage remedy for the described symptom and does not require destroying or permanently losing any data, since archived content remains retrievable when needed. Configuring alerts (A) provides visibility into the utilization problem but does not resolve it; it is a monitoring, not a remediation, action. A single-tier system with archiving 'enabled' (C) is an internally inconsistent option, since true archiving requires separating data onto a distinct tier or storage class rather than keeping everything on one undifferentiated tier. Deleting old files (D) may free space but is destructive, risks permanent data loss, and ignores retention or compliance obligations that archiving is specifically designed to satisfy while still relieving primary storage load. Moving data to archive storage is therefore the correct, non-destructive fix.

Reference topic: Replication and Data Archiving - Storage Tiering and Archiving for Performance.