DELL EMC E20-555 Isilon Solutions and Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects Online Training

1. A customer has a requirement for a new solution to handle their growing storage requirements. The solution should have the ability 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 wants the solution to offer 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?

2. How much space is consumed by a 4 KB file when the file data is written to the Isilon cluster?

3. Which type of infrastructure does the Isilon scalable appliance connect to on the front-end?

4. A customer needs to consolidate 300 TB of home directory servers and shared file systems used by development and test groups. A key requirement is to prevent the systems from consuming all free capacity and impacting home directory content.

Which Isilon node configuration should be proposed?

5. You are helping a customer create a cost-effective Isilon solution. The customer environment includes high IOPS-intensive, random access file-based applications.

Which Isilon storage node type will meet the customer's needs?

6. How many layers are in the Isilon clustering architecture?

7. Which node type provides CPU, memory, and Fibre Channel connectivity?

8. Which Isilon OneFS job, that runs manually, is responsible for examining the entire file system for inconsistencies?

9. A customer has a supported cluster with the maximum protection level.

How many simultaneous node component failures can Isilon OneFS sustain while still allowing full access to the entire file system and dataset?

10. A customer wants an N+3 protection level on their cluster.

What is the minimum number of nodes they need to achieve that level of protection?

11. What does Isilon OneFS use to re-write data when a disk read fails?

12. An Isilon customer wants a job to periodically check disk sectors to ensure they can be read.

What should be recommended to the customer?

13. An Isilon customer wants a job to periodically validates the checksum of every block in the file system.

What should be recommended to the customer?

14. A company needs the ability to separate administrative rights from data access rights.

Which Isilon feature enables this functionality?

15. Which Isilon OneFS administration methods are enforced by RBAC?

16. Independent of protocol, what does Isilon OneFS use to translate identities?

17. Which protocol is integrated with Isilon OneFS to provide on-access file functionality?

18. Which impact policies are available on an Isilon cluster?

19. An Isilon storage administrator is concerned about capacity after ingesting 200 TB of file data. They recently added more nodes to the cluster and now want to auto-balance it as soon as possible.

The cluster utilization percentages for an average 24-hour period are: 45% during 00:00 - 08:59 60% during 09:00 - 17:00 85% during 17:01 - 23:59

The administrator wants to keep cluster utilization at a minimum.

Which Impact Policy settings should be used to quickly complete the job without impacting the production workload?

20. Which Isilon job has a default priority of '1'?

21. A customer is planning an Isilon deployment for use with their Hadoop environment.

What is one advantage of using Isilon as the HDFS layer?

22. A customer has an Isilon cluster that they want to simplify a Hadoop workflow. The workflow analyzes large amounts of log data written to storage using FTP and results are viewed by Microsoft Windows clients?

How can this be achieved?

23. A company wants to reduce the footprint in their data center. They recently completed a proof of concept with Hadoop using Direct Attached Storage (DAS) for their Big Data initiative. You have determined that incorporating an Isilon cluster into their Hadoop environment would help in reducing this footprint.

Which Hadoop components can be consolidated onto the Isilon cluster to reduce the footprint?

24. Your customer is moving from a Restaurant/Bar business model to a Restaurant/Casino business model. You are helping architect the upgrade of a current 4-node X200 48 TB Isilon cluster, with 50% utilized for their video surveillance operations.

They want to upgrade from 15 FPS (NTSC) in H.264 codec, with a 15 days retention policy to 30 FPS (NTSC) in H.264 codec, with a 30 days retention policy.

How many nodes of the same type will you need to add in order to meet the required changes and not exceed 70% raw capacity?

25. Your customer is moving from a Restaurant/Bar business model to a Restaurant/Casino business model.

You are helping architect the upgrade of a current 4-node X200 48 TB Isilon cluster, with 50% utilized for their video surveillance operations.

They want to upgrade from 15 FPS (NTSC) in H.264 codec, with a 15 days retention policy to 30 FPS (NTSC) in H.264 codec with a 30 days retention policy.

Which storage capacity would be the best suited to meet the required changes and utilize 65-75% capacity?

26. You are working with a healthcare company that is interested in replacing all the backend storage for their PACS system.

In general, how should the solution be presented to the customer?

27. You meet with the IT Director of a large single site campus. The IT department has recently taken over Physical Security from the facilities department and plans a complete overhaul of the surveillance solution. They are looking to you as a storage architecture expert to provide the correct amount of storage needed. The IT Director asks you what items they need to provide in order to size this solution.

What data do you require from the customer?

28. A four-node Isilon cluster is being used in a Hadoop workflow with a parity protection of N+2:1. The HDFS protocol has been enabled and is being used to access data.

How many additional copies of data are written into the Isilon cluster using HDFS?

29. Your customer has a new business unit. They are gathering web log files to be analyzed. They are using Hadoop to do the analysis of the logs. The IT department is centrally storing the log files on a 5-node Isilon cluster. They have enabled the Hadoop cluster to access the files directly on the Isilon storage. The nodes are X400's with two SSD drives in each node and 96GB of RAM.

How many DataNodes does the Isilon cluster have?

30. A media and entertainment company has asked for help in creating a new Video On Demand (VOD) storage system. The storage would be delivered to 5000 subscribers simultaneously. They would like to store 5000 hours of full length, High Definition (HD) movies.

What would be the best price-to-performance nodes for this solution?

31. 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?

32. While validating the value (VTV) with a large educational customer, they have decided they would like to add a Disaster Recovery (DR) site to their existing Isilon environment. The existing cluster contains six X-Series nodes. They plan to have all workflows replicated to the DR site and both clusters will have identical shares, exports, and user authentication. The customer would like to test DR failover every six months by running their production environment from the DR site.

What would you recommend for the DR solution?

33. A hospital is considering using Isilon to store their archived medical images and Genomic Sequencing data. They currently have 56 TB of PACS images and 24 TB of genomic data, and expect to double their capacity requirements this year. They will replicate to a DR cluster, and plan to use N+2 protection. The production workload needs to be run at either site.

Which minimum cluster configuration, at each site, including software, would meet this customer's environment?

34. A hospital is considering using Isilon to store their long-term archive data for their GE PACS application. They currently have two million 17 MB studies. They expect capacity requirements to be 50% compounded growth per year. They plan to use N+2:1 protection, and would like this sized for three years of growth.

Which minimum cluster configuration would meet this customer's environment?

35. Which protocols are supported by Isilon OneFS for file access?

36. Which Isilon OneFS protection level allows you to withstand two drive failures but no more than one complete node failure?

37. An Isilon customer expressed an interest in more effectively managing their storage. Specifically, they would like to plan for future growth.

Which tool would allow the customer to forecast capacity requirements?

38. Which Isilon feature provides the ability to build a cluster using different node types and tiers to meet a customer's business objectives?

39. At which level can retention periods be applied with Isilon SmartLock?

40. A customer is trying to get Isilon SyncIQ to run on the two clusters they just purchased.

However, they are experiencing some problems. They have asked you to explain how the SyncIQ licensing works.

What information can be provided to the customer?

41. Where are file system operations initiated on an Isilon node?

42. For concurrent I/O, how do SmartCache and Endurant Cache differ?

43. Where is caching for disk blocks staged on an Isilon node?

44. 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?

45. What is the relative latency of a cache hit to L1 cache compared to a hit to L2 cache in an Isilon cluster?

46. Where does SmartCache stage its write cache?

47. Which type of data is stored in Endurant Cache of an Isilon node?

48. What is the overhead impact on the physical capacity when configuring data protection at +2:1 on a 6-node Isilon cluster?

49. A customer has 10 nodes in a cluster using N+2 protection.

What is the minimum number of nodes required to be online and in communication with one another to satisfy quorum?

50. In an Isilon cluster for N+2 protection, what is the minimum number of nodes?

51. A customer has a 7-node Isilon cluster configured with N+2:1 protection.

How many nodes can be offline with the data accessible and fully writeable?

52. What is the minimum number of connected and available nodes required to maintain quorum in a 25-node Isilon cluster?

53. An Isilon customer experienced a node failure. The failure requires that the affected node be permanently removed from the cluster.

What will occur in the cluster upon failure of the node?

54. A customer experiences a system failure on an Isilon storage node.However, the disk drives in the node are not affected.

What is the preferred method for restoring cluster integrity?

55. A customer plans to deploy N+2:1 protection on a 5-node Isilon cluster.

How much capacity will be used to store a 320 KiB file?

56. A customer plans to deploy N+2:1 protection on a 5-node Isilon cluster.

How much capacity will be used to store a 1024 KiB file?

57. An Isilon customer's administrator created the nested directory structure, shown in the exhibit, using SmartQuotas.

However, a user needs to write an additional 650 GB of data to "/ifs/data/acct/recv".





Which steps will enable the user to complete this task?

58. Your customer uses an existing Isilon cluster consisting of five NL-Series nodes to source broadcast media files for playback and streaming. The customer reports that the playback pauses and stutters regularly. It has been confirmed that there are no network or playback system issues.

Which of the choices listed is the appropriate choice to address the playback issues?

59. While configuring Isilon SmartConnect, a customer determined that their workload primarily consists of long-lived NFS and SMB connections.

Which load-balancing policy will provide the most efficient client distribution?

60. If Isilon SmartConnect is being configured in a customer environment, which records are required for a supported implementation?

61. A customer currently has 10 HPC nodes. They plan to purchase a 5-node Isilon X400 cluster for an HPC application running on Linux. They will persistent mount the Isilon cluster through NFSv3.

Which recommended configuration addresses the customer's requirements for high availability and throughput?

62. A customer is configuring Isilon SmartConnect. They have determined that their workload primarily consists of short-lived connections, such as HTTP and FTP.

Which load-balancing policy provides the most efficient client distribution?

63. An Isilon customer has an environment supporting a wide range of different workloads. They want to assign clients to performance tiers based on the resources needed.

What can the customer use to meet this requirement?

64. If Dynamic IP Address Allocation is being configured in Isilon SmartConnect, which policy setting needs to be determined?

65. An Isilon cluster component has the following characteristics: Spans 3 - 40 nodes Logical grouping of drives Automatically assigned Intelligently distributes disks to manage performance

Which cluster component is described?

66. An Isilon customer has an 8-node cluster of older X-Series nodes. They plan to upgrade the nodes over the next three years in the following stages: Stage 1: Add 2 X-Series nodes to meet performance growth Stage 2: Add 4 NL-Series nodes to meet archive capacity growth Stage 3: Add 10 New X-Series nodes as a hardware refresh Stage 4: Remove older X-Series nodes

At which point will a SmartPool license be required?

67. If business objectives such as value and SLAs are considered, which Isilon license feature provides the ability to manage performance and the cost of data in a cluster?

68. An Isilon customer wants the ability to provide low latency I/O for their files due to a workflow involving small, random reads and writes.

Which SSD strategy is most effective for this use case?

69. By default, which method is used by Isilon OneFS for SSDs?

70. A customer has a data retention period of three years. They want a solution in which files cannot be deleted, changed, or modified.

Which Isilon SmartLock version should they implement?

71. An Isilon customer implemented a retention period at the directory level. They set individual retention periods on individual files within those directories.

Which retention periods will be enforced?

72. An Isilon customer wants to more effectively manage their storage and thereby achieve performance improvements.

Which tool will help improve workflow performance on their cluster?

73. In an Isilon environment, how is InsightIQ installed?

74. On an Isilon cluster, how much space should be reserved for snapshots by default?

75. How does Isilon SnapshotIQ use storage for snapshots?

76. A customer is considering moving their NAS data over to Isilon systems. They want to know if the Isilon systems have any limitations regarding snapshots.

What explanation can be provided?

77. A customer created one month of snapshots; one snapshot every 8 hours for 30 days on an Isilon cluster using SnapshotIQ. They are now deleting the snapshots randomly and experiencing overhead to the cluster.

How can the snapshots be removed while avoiding the overhead caused by this process?

78. An Isilon customer wants to have different snapshot policies and schedules on the same directory.

Why is this possible on an Isilon cluster?

79. Using Isilon SnapshotIQ, how many snapshots can be created at the directory level?

80. A customer has an SMB file directory with 375 TB of data on the primary cluster with a protection level of N +3:1. They want to replicate this directory to the secondary cluster. They are interested in the possibility of setting protection levels on the target cluster.

Which target directory protection level information can be provided?

81. A customer created eight SyncIQ policies on a 6-node Isilon cluster. The policies all start at midnight. The customer is experiencing issues where several jobs are paused while others continue to run. This is delaying the overall replication of data.

What is the most likely reason for the pausing of some of the SyncIQ jobs?

82. A customer has 10 files that are each 10 MB in size. They created two clones of each file on their source cluster. They now want to use SyncIQ to replicate the original files and the cloned files to a target cluster.

Excluding protection overhead, how much disk space will the files use on the target cluster?

83. Which block size is used by Isilon SyncIQ to transfer data?

84. A customer has two data centers (Site A and Site B). There is an Isilon cluster in each data center and they use SyncIQ to replicate data between the two data centers.

You have been reviewing their disaster recovery plan and found the following:

The policies specify that SyncIQ runs a replication job every 2 hours and that the job finishes within 1 hour. Three additional hours will be needed to get servers and the network redirected to work from Site

What is the Recovery Point Objective in this plan?

85. A customer has two data centers (Site A and Site B). There is an Isilon cluster in each data center and they use SyncIQ to replicate data between the two data centers.

You have reviewed their disaster recovery plan and found the following: The policies specify that SyncIQ runs a replication job every 3 hours and that the job finishes within 1 hour. Three additional hours will be needed to get servers and the network redirected to work from Site B.

What is the Recovery Point Objective in this plan?

86. An Isilon customer has set up a replication policy between a primary cluster and a secondary cluster. After the initial synchronization of the clusters, the primary cluster starts to display some issues. The customer initiates a failover operation between the two clusters.

During the failover, the primary cluster becomes fully operational again. The customer wants to stop the failover operation between the two clusters.

What is the best way to stop the failover operation and continue using the primary cluster?

87. An Isilon customer created a scheduled SyncIQ policy to replicate data from an Enterprise-mode SmartLock directory. The source cluster is now unusable and the target cluster does not automatically allow writes to the data in the replicated SmartLock directory.

What is the reason why the target cluster did not automatically allow writes of the data?

88. An Isilon customer has two 5-node clusters; one for production and one for disaster recovery (DR). The customer's workflows are replicated to the DR cluster through SyncIQ on individual schedules. They shut down their production cluster for a scheduled DR test, failed over to the DR cluster, and continue their DR testing.

Assume both clusters have identical shares, exports, and user authentication. Additionally, assume the client applications have been stopped and the DNS re-pointed.

Which SyncIQ Policy method should be used to continue production operations?

89. An Isilon customer has two 5-node clusters; one for production and one for disaster recovery (DR). The customer's workflows are replicated to the DR cluster through SyncIQ on individual schedules. They have shut down their production cluster for scheduled maintenance, failed over to the DR cluster, and are currently operating from the DR site.

Assume both clusters have identical shares, exports, user authentication. In addition, assume the client applications have been stopped and the DNS re-pointed.

What is the easiest SyncIQ Policy method to continue operations on production?

90. You set up a meeting to gather information on a new project with the IT manager and plan to use a workflow profile assessment (WPA) to document the requirements.

Why is it recommended to talk to as many stakeholders as possible?

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

92. You meet a customer for the first time. They explain that their current environment for NAS does not meet their needs. You want to make sure that Isilon is a good fit for their needs.

What would be a good prequalifying question to ask?

93. You meet a customer for the first time. They explain that their current environment for NAS does not meet their needs. You want to make sure that Isilon is a good fit for their needs.

What would be a good prequalifying question to ask?

94. You are reviewing an opportunity with a trusted advisor. You both discover gaps in the initial solution design.

Each iterative discussion with the customer helps you define the solution better. The documents produced capture the customer's requirements.

What else needs to occur to refine the sizing considerations?

95. When conducting high-level interviews with stakeholders of a project, what are the key questions that should be asked?

96. When designing Isilon solutions, what issues should you pay special attention to?

97. When designing Isilon solutions, which issue should you pay special attention to?

98. Your customer purchased an Isilon cluster with eight X400 nodes for Home Directories. Your follow-up discussions have uncovered an opportunity to expand the cluster to support the Legal Department. As you prepare to complete the Workflow Profile Document, you meet with the customer to discuss data protection.

Which key areas should you address?

99. You have had several discussions with your customer in the processor design industry. They have stated that they want a Scale-Out NAS platform for their design environment. Their most significant responses were "We have 125 design engineers accessing large diagrams and we need high throughput to support them. Can we also get the highest performance available? We need to stay ahead of our competitors." Other areas you discussed were their data retention policies and workflow after the chip design is completed. They plan to archive the design files but the files must stay on line.

What is your initial node recommendation?

100. You have gathered information from your customer about their current NAS environment. They indicated they are having performance and time-out issues with their clients accessing the storage. Currently over 5000 clients are simultaneously accessing the NAS; however, this will double in the next year.

Based on this information, what recommendations for a new Isilon cluster would you give to the customer based on this information?

101. A cost-conscious customer is exploring Isilon for their PACS archive. The workflow consists of one hundred cases a day, each including fifty 60MB image files.

However, each image will have five-hundred 64kB metadata files associated with it. They currently have six years worth of archived data. They will need to migrate to the new solution and they need to plan for an additional three years of archive capacity.

Which solution would you recommend to fit their capacity needs?

102. You are sizing an Isilon cluster for a new customer. Analyzing their workflow you determine that they have a large block random read workload.

What is the most important factor to consider when sizing this solution?

103. A customer is inquiring about expanding their primary cluster consisting of six S-Series nodes in order to improve performance. They have a second cluster with 11 X-Series nodes. Both clusters leverage 1GbE, but the customer recently installed a 10GbE network that can be utilized. They also have multiple Fibre Channel SAN arrays in their environment.

They have a variety of workloads on each cluster and are in the process of determining which workloads belong on which cluster. They have discovered that one of the workloads- a SQL database that resides on the X-Series node cluster - is experiencing timeouts due to latency. The database vendor has suggested limiting latency to 5ms or less to eliminate these timeouts.

How do you advise the customer?

104. You are designing a new Isilon system to store mobile device video clips. The files average 800MB in size and the application team tells you to plan for up to 15,000 new files per day. The product manager for this new service wants enough capacity for the first year and reminds you that response time for storing and retrieving the files is important for customer satisfaction.

The files will be accessed frequently for the first 48 hours after creation, and then very infrequently after seven days. You plan to use N+2:1 protection, and will configure a SmartPools policy to move inactive files to an archive tier within the cluster.

Which configuration best fits the project requirements?

105. You have been working with a customer to size a new Isilon cluster for their environment. You recently determined that a cluster with three X400 nodes with 1TB drives and 48 GB RAM would be a perfect starting point for their workflow, but will have extra capacity. The customer just informed you that they have decided to also use the cluster for a small home directory environment and implement SmartQuotas.

Which configuration changes should you consider?

106. Your customer has an existing Isilon cluster comprised of five NL-Series nodes. They have a new project that will quadruple their current throughput requirements. Upon reviewing reports in InsightIQ, you see that the aggregate external network throughput is peaking at 600MB/s. The customer states that data is only active for the first 7 days, but they keep it indefinitely.

Which recommendation best supports their growth requirements?

107. A potential customer has about 540TB of NetApp running in ONTAP 7-Mode. They are willing to let you gather some workload data. They have LDAP and Active Directory authentication and primarily Windows Clients. They are very interested in Automated Tiering and Large Scale Archives. They are not certain about the workflows from the Marketing Department. The Content Team will only say they need to acquire 300 TB within 90 days. They do not know the average file size or the number of aggregates they are managing.

Which tools would you use to gather information to do your Isilon sizing?

108. A potential customer has 540TB Raw capacity of NetApp running in ONTAP 7-Mode. They are willing to let you gather some workload data. Their authentication sources are LDAP and Active Directory. Their users are primarily Windows Clients. They are very interested in Automated Tiering and Large Scale Archives. They are not certain about the workflows from the Marketing Department. The Content Team will only say they need to acquire 300 TB within 90 days. They do not know the average file size or the number of aggregates they are managing.

Which tool(s) would you use next to complete your sizing?

109. A potential customer uses a solution from an EMC competitor for NFS storage in their main data center. The existing arrays are five years old, and the customer would like to consolidate them into a single new system. The entire workload is generated by eight Linux hosts connected to the arrays that process video files. The customer informs you they are not able to collect performance information from the existing arrays.

Which tools can capture the workload requirements?

110. You get a call from a customer that has just added 200 user connections to the cluster. They want to know how fast they are writing data with these new users.

What tool would you use to gather this information?

111. You are called into an opportunity, you would like to get more information on the data skew of the filer. The customer has a supported filer.

What assessment tool would you use to generate this information?

112. A customer has grown 2 PB in the last year. The cluster performs well most times of the day, but occasionally during the day, the customer notices a decrease in performance. You have been told that ‘tree-deletes’ are taking too long and can only be run on weekends.

What would you recommend to speed up the ‘tree-deletes’?

113. A customer has eight X400 24GB RAM that supports 400 client connections today The customer plans to add 400 more clients in the next few months. They are looking at adding an A-Series node to the cluster to help with client connections.

Before they start adding client connections, what hardware change do you recommend?

114. You are asked to size a cluster for a file sharing environment. nfsstat indicates that no more than 10% of the requests are namespace operations (e.g. GETADDR, SETADDR). There will be 10,000 active Linux users, connecting over NFS.

Which cluster configuration would you recommend?

115. Your customer's site uses an old X-Series cluster, and they are interested in consolidating their two primary workflows. iostat shows that one of the applications is sensitive to latency, while isi statistics indicates sensitivity to disk response times. There are approximately 1000 users accessing 70 TB of file data.

Which node type would you recommend?

116. A customer is making a decision between Isilon and a competitor’s offering. They currently have 100TB of usable capacity and are forecasting 100% growth per year for the next three years, which will require them to lease additional space in their co-located data center. The CFO finds ROI and TCO to be important decision criteria.

Which statement best emphasizes the value of Isilon for this customer?