EMC Specialist - Technology Architect, PowerScale Solutions Sample Questions:

1. Your customer manages a print media environment, consisting of three Isilon clusters, which are out of support. The customer would like to have access to new software releases and feature sets. You have been asked to perform a full discovery of the customer's environment.
The customer's current Isilon clusters are as follows:
"Cust" (12 x 12000X) serves as upload media storage for different tenants.
"Working" (8 x 12000X + 6 x X200) serves as a working zone for extraction to RAW and printing media from it.
"Archive (16 x 72NL + Accelerator nodes) is used to store printed content for six months.
The customer operates in a Windows environment using SMB 2.0, two DNS servers per AD forest, three forest domains which are servicing three different environments. All servers are operating on a 1Gb network, three VLANs segregating the DEV/QA/PROD environments. Currently, there is no monitoring in place for performance measurement or optimization.
The requirements for this solution include:
- Better ROI and TCO
- Maintain same performance with possible improvements
- Renew HW/SW and get inclusive support
- Limit migrations
- Reduce space, power, cooling consumption
- Get new feature sets
- If migration required, use Parallel copy (multiple nodes, multiple threads multiple connections)
- Segregate tenant shares from other tenants
- Expand up to 1PB of total storage
What would you recommend be done to consolidate the three clusters into one?
Response:

A) - Expand the largest and most I/O intensive cluster using SmartFail- Consolidate the remaining two clusters using SyncIQ
B) - Build a new cluster for consolidation- Use SnapshotlQ to migrate the existing data onto the new consolidated cluster- Spoof DNS to point to the new cluster
C) - Expand the largest and most I/O intensive cluster using SmartFail- Consolidate the remaining two clusters using Multithreaded version of RoboCopy- Modify A-Record and propagate to all DNS servers to point to the new cluster
D) - Leave the clusters as is- Upgrade drive sizes to meet the customer requirements

2. What key considerations should be kept in mind when designing a 300TB solution?
Response:

A) Defining class of service Time of day services ROI and TCO Data retention and backup
B) SmartPools Smartconnect Snapshots Space for snapshots
C) Workflow management Defining class of service Time of day services RPO and RTO Data retention and backup
D) Always include 2% SSD SmartPools Smartconnect Snapshots InsightIQ

3. A customer is looking for a new storage solution to handle their growing storage requirements. The system should be able to cover storage needs for the next three years. The environment consists of 100 TBs of file system data spread across five file systems. On average, the file systems grow 1 TB a month.
In addition, they have a large VMware cluster supporting 200 VMs and a highly transactional database. The customer is looking for a solution that would provide good performance, scalability, manageability, and be cost-effective. The sales team is looking to you to recommend a solution.
Which recommendation will meet the customer's requirements?
Response:

A) VMAX with FAST VP and a NAS Gateway
B) Isilon cluster and scale-out as required
C) Isilon for file system data, and a VNX for DB and VMware workloads
D) VNX Unified platform with FAST Cache

4. Where are file system changes first stored?
Response:

A) L1 Cache
B) Journal
C) L2 Cache
D) Endurant Cache

5. Your customer has observed a degradation in response time while browsing for media files within the Production Media folder of the Isilon cluster. That directory now contains over five million files. It was confirmed that there are no network or edit station related causes.
What changes to the Isilon cluster will best accelerate the browsing performance?
Response:

A) Upgrade node access to 10 Gbps
B) Add Solid State Drives (SSDs) to the nodes
C) Upgrade RAM on the nodes
D) Add A-Series Performance Accelerator nodes

Solutions: