Which term denotes growing the capacity by adding more resources to support load, rather than increasing individual resource power?

• A. Data Plane/Forwarding Plane
• B. Open SDN
• C. Management Plane
• D. Horizontal Scaling

Answer: (D)

Growing capacity by adding more resources to support load is horizontal scaling, also called scale-out. Instead of making one server more powerful, you add additional servers or nodes and spread the workload across them, typically with a load balancer. This approach boosts fault tolerance and makes it easier to scale capacity as demand grows, especially in cloud or distributed environments. The other terms refer to different areas: the data plane handles actual data forwarding, Open SDN is a networking architecture, and the management plane covers configuration and control. So the description aligns with horizontal scaling.