NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide Chapter 1

What are the two categories of data? What are the five core technology elements of the Data Center Infrastructure? What are the seven requirements of storage technology? What are the benefits of ILM

Chapter 2

What are some examples of hosts? What are the physical and logical components of a host? What are the common connectivity protocols used in computing environments? What is the difference between seek time and rotational latency? What is the difference between internal and external data transfer rates?

Chapter 3

What is a RAID array? What benefits do RAID arrays provide? What is the primary difference between RAID 3 and RAID 5? What is advantage of using RAID 6? What is a hot spare?

Chapter 4 What are the parts of an Intelligent Storage System? What are the differences between a high-end and a midrange storage array? What is the difference between a read cache hit and a read cache miss? What is the difference between Least Recently Used and Most Recently Used algorithms? What is the difference between Write-through and Write-back cache?

Chapter 5

What are the physical elements of DAS? Give an example of when DAS is a good solution. Describe internal DAS connectivity. Describe external DAS connectivity. List SCSI Device Models with Different Port Configurations. How many devices can SCSI support? Which SCSI ID has highest priority?

Chapter 6

Name three key features of a SAN implementation.

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide

What is a fabric? Describe how a SAN can be connected? What is a purpose of ISL What is a function of layer-2 in FC architecture Define the purpose of zoning? What is a Core-Edge Fabric?

Chapter 7

What is the difference between an Integrated and Gateway NAS solution? Which NAS type would you deploy if you already have a SAN and storage array? Which NAS type is the simplest to deploy? Which file serving environments typically uses CIFS and NFS?

Chapter 8 What is the difference between a native and bridged iSCSI implementation? Explain the benefits and drawbacks of using: NIC, TOE and iSCSI HBA Name two iSCSI discovery mechanisms What are two types of iSCSI names, and which one is similar to a Fibre Channel name? What are the physical elements of FCoE? Explain the benefit of using CNA card

Chapter 9

What are the key features of a CAS implementation? What are the benefits of a CAS Storage Strategy? What are 2 business applications that would benefit from CAS technology? What are the logical elements of a CAS system? How does data get stored in a CAS environment?

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide Chapter 11

Which concerns do business continuity solutions address? Availability is expressed in terms of 9s. Explain the relevance of the use of 9s for availability, using examples. What is the difference between RPO and RTO? What is the difference between Disaster Recovery and Disaster Restart? Provide examples of planned and unplanned downtime in the context of storage infrastructure operations. What are some of the Single Points of Failure in a typical data center environment?

Chapter 12

What are three primary purposes for backup? What are the three topologies that support backup operation? Describe three major considerations of backup/recovery. What are the advantages and disadvantages in tape and virtual tape backups? What are the three levels of granularity found in Backups? How backup is performed using virtual tape library?

Chapter 13

Describe the uses of a local replica in various business operations. How can consistency be ensured when replicating a database? What are the differences among full volume mirroring and pointer based replicas? What is the key difference between full copy mode and deferred mode? What are the considerations when performing restore operations for each array replication technology?

Chapter 14 What is the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous mode? Discuss one host based remote replication technology? Discuss one array based remote replication technology? What are differences in the bandwidth requirements between the array remote replication technologies discussed in this chapter? Discuss the effects of a bunker failure in a three-site replication for the following implementation: Multihopsynchronous + disk buffered Multihopsynchronous + asynchronous Multitarget

Chapter 15

What are the primary security attributes?

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide

What are the three data security domains? What are the basic SAN security mechanisms? How is security implemented in NAS? What are the two authentication mechanisms in IP SAN?

Chapter 16 List the parameters for monitoring storage infrastructure components? List the storage infrastructure components that need to be managed? What is the purpose of reporting? What Storage Array tasks need to be performed in order to allocate storage to a new server? What SAN Management tasks need to be performed in order to allocate storage to a new server?

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide Case Studies RAID Arrays (Chapter 3) Acme Telecom is involved in mobile wireless services across the United States and has about 5000 employees worldwide. This company is Chicago based and has 7 regional offices across the country. Although Acme is doing well financially, they continue to feel competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features. Current Situation/Issues:

The company uses a number of different applications for communication, accounting, and management. All the applications are hosted on individual servers with disks configured as RAID 0. All financial activity is managed and tracked by a single accounting application. It is very important for the accounting data to be highly available. The application performs around 15% write operations, and the remaining 85 % are reads. The accounting data is currently stored on a 5-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB, and the total size of their files is 730 GB. The company performs nightly backups and removes old informationso the amount of data is unlikely to change much over the next 6 months. The company is approaching the end of the financial year and the IT budget is depleted. Buying even one new disk drive will not be possible. How would you suggest that the company restructure their environment?You will need to justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability of the new solution. RAID level to use: Advantages: Disadvantages:

NET400 Storage Technology Foundations Student Manual / Review Guide RAID Arrays (Chapter 3) Acme Telecom is involved in mobile wireless services across the United States and has about 5000 employees worldwide. This company is Chicago based and has 7 regional offices across the country. Although Acme is doing well financially, they continue to feel competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features. Current Situation/Issues:

The company uses a number of different applications for communication, accounting, and management. All the applications were hosted on individual servers with disks configured as RAID 0. The company changed the RAID level of their accounting application based on your recommendations 6 months ago. It is now the beginning of a new financial year and the IT department has an increased budget. You are called in to recommend changes to their database environment. You investigate their database environment closely, and observe that the data is stored on a 6-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB and the total size of their files is 900 GB. The amount of data is likely to change by 30 % over the next 6 months and your solution must accommodate this growth. The application performs around 40% write operations, and the remaining 60 % are reads. The average size of a read or write is small, at around 2 KB. How would you suggest that they restructure their environment?A new 200 GB disk drive costs $1000. The controller can handle all commonly used RAID levels, so will not need to be replaced.What is the cost of the new solution?Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and data availability of the new solution. RAID level to use: Advantages: Disadvantages: