Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

For a 5-node cluster with RF2 configuration, how would enabling Erasure Coding affect data space efficiency?

1. It would decrease usable space

2. It would maintain usable space

3. It would increase usable space

4. It requires no impact on usable space

The correct answer is: It would increase usable space

In a 5-node cluster configured with RF2 (Replication Factor 2), each piece of data is duplicated across two nodes to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. When Erasure Coding is enabled, rather than simply duplicating data, the system breaks the data into smaller fragments and adds parity fragments. This allows the system to reconstruct the data from a smaller number of fragments compared to storing full copies. When Erasure Coding is applied in an RF2 environment, it significantly improves space efficiency. Since the data is no longer fully duplicated but rather stored in a more fragmented and mathematically encoded form, you can benefit from a higher usable storage capacity. This method reduces the overhead imposed by the replication factor, thus increasing the usable space available for other data. It emphasizes how Erasure Coding reduces the storage footprint while still ensuring that the data can be reconstructed in the event of node failures. Hence, enabling Erasure Coding effectively increases the usable storage space within the cluster, making it a more efficient choice when looking to optimize space usage.