A new cluster is being deployed for the accounting department with the following characteristics:There is...

The question is asking for the best balance of capacity efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost control. Nutanix documentation explains that erasure coding is the storage-efficiency mechanism that increases usable capacity by using parity instead of full-copy replication overhead, making it a strong fit when data is relatively cold or infrequently modified. Nutanix also documents that erasure coding requires a minimum of six nodes when using replication factor 3, which corresponds to Fault Tolerance 2 designs. That makes Erasure Coding with six nodes the correct answer.

Deduplication is valuable for certain duplicate-heavy data sets such as VDI or repeated blocks, but the question emphasizes business-critical cold data and a tight budget. In that context, erasure coding provides the more directly documented capacity-efficiency benefit. The five-node options are eliminated by Nutanix’s minimum-node requirement for RF3 erasure coding. Since FT2 implies the higher fault-tolerance design and Nutanix requires six nodes for EC with RF3, A is the correct answer.