EMC Isilon Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects Sample Questions:

1. -- Exhibit -
We have been engaged by a research hospital to help upgrade their Isilon installation. They currently have 12 previous generation Isilon nodes with 200TB of capacity and run on a 1Gbps network. They currently have 6 Illumina Hi-Seq Sequencers and an HPC cluster to process data. They would like to expand Isilon to 2PB of active data and 1PB of archive data. They use a third party data and metadata management service (IRODs) to stage data for analysis. The Isilon cluster is mainly used for analysis work with the HPC cluster.
-- Exhibit -
The customer has a limited budget. What would be the best price/performance solution for their active data?

A) 14 NL-Series nodes with 24GB of RAM
B) 12 X-Series nodes with no SSD drives and 24GB of RAM
C) 17 X-Series nodes with SSD drives and 48GB of RAM.
D) 14 X-Series nodes with no SSD drives and 96GB of RAM

2. -- Exhibit -
A large manufacturing company is an existing Isilon customer with a cluster consisting of four NL400 nodes with 4TB drives. The cluster is using N+2:1 protection level and the file system shows that it is 60% utilized. Home directories and file shares comprise 75% of the existing content and the remainder is inactive deep archive. The company has 1,000 employees using Windows and Mac clients participating in a single Active Directory (AD) forest.
During a meeting with the CIO and Director of IT you discuss the company's recent acquisition - an engineering firm that specializes in Computer Aided Design (CAD). The engineering firm has 400 UNIX workstations that produce technical drawings which are currently stored on another vendor's SAN solution. The all UNIX environment uses NIS for authentication and name resolution. They do not currently use DNS or LDAP. The engineering company has an old storage system that has been experiencing problems and the CIO would like you to migrate the data onto the Isilon cluster. The CIO would like to eliminate all tape and recover the data onto disk.
The CIO is concerned about security of the company's intellectual property, especially with the rapid adoption of mobile devices and external cloud content sharing services such as DropBox, Egnyte, and SugarSync. They would like to implement an alternative that provides external file sharing and mobile device synchronization while maintaining security control over the company's data.
The Director of IT reports that users are storing non-work related content on the Isilon cluster. They would like to limit the amount of capacity that each user can consume in their home directory and want to ensure you provide the capability to easily visualize which users are over their allotment. The company's Windows users currently leverage Windows Shadow Copy to recover files that have been accidentally deleted. The IT department wants to ensure that Mac and incoming UNIX clients have the same functionality.
The Director of IT also mentions that users are reporting slow response times when browsing their home directories and shared folders. They are concerned that Isilon cannot scale to support their combined requirements.
The customer provides the following environment summary from the engineering firm's recently departed IT staff:
20 TB of Home Directory data
100 TB of active CAD projects
400 TB of archived data stored on tape at an offsite warehouse -- Exhibit -
Based on the meeting with the customer, which Isilon cluster configuration would you recommend?

A) 4 x NL400 nodes with 36 x 4TB drives
B) 9 x S200 nodes with 2 x SSD and 22 x 900GB SAS
C) 4 x X400 nodes with 2 x SSD and 34 x 4TB drives 1 x Additional NL400
D) 6 x X400 nodes with 36 x 4TB drives 1 x Backup Accelerator

3. 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?

A) Are you using a KVM to access your storage?
B) What type of racks are in your datacenter?
C) What applications access this storage?
D) How many NICs do your clients have?

4. Your customer's initial use case was Home Directories. They implemented the cluster with four 1Gbps ports and LACP. They are planning to expand their cluster to support their core file services. They plan to upgrade their network infrastructure to 10 GbE to facilitate this.
What are two design impacts this change will have?

A) LACP and multiple links may be used to increase redundancy, but will not provide more overall
performance to the system.
FCoE should be considered for the External Network Ports on the nodes.
B) Dual 10GbE ports on each node will enable throughput of 20Gbps. Only connect half of the nodes to the network.
C) Maximum performance is obtained by only using a single 10GbE interface per node. LACP and multiple links may be used to increase redundancy, but will not provide more overall performance to the system
D) Maximum performance is obtained by only using a single 10GbE interface per node. Isilon can support up to 400MB/s per node

5. A healthcare services provider is implementing an X-Series cluster. Currently they have approximately 200 customers and they are growing at 30% per year. They have 200 TB of storage utilized. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations require they keep all patient data for seven (7) years. They would like to keep all genomic sequencing data stored with N+3 protection, not to exceed 75% utilization.
What is the minimum initial configuration you would recommend?

A) 13 X400 nodes; 1 TB drives
B) 13 X200 nodes; 3 TB drives
C) 7 X400 nodes; 1 TB drives
D) 6 X400 nodes; 4 TB drives

Solutions: