In an NFSv3 only environment, what is the recommended limit for active NFSv3 connections, per Isilon node?

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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

The CIO approaches you with a new requirement. They would like to reuse the tape library that was previously used for archiving to now be used to back up some of their data.

What do you recommend to the Director of IT as the best architecture to achieve this goal?

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You have received a critical task that requires immediate analysis of system performance. Captured data will later be processed by MiTrend, but a current assessment is not available.

Which utility will quickly provide IOPS associated with reads and writes, CPU utilization, and I/O scheduler wait time?

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You are sizing a PowerScale Gen6 cluster for a small organization that is concerned about the availability of the journal during an extended power outage.

What is a consideration when sizing?

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What is the sector size of an Isilon 8 TB drive?

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A European Sports TV network is considering Isilon for their Media Edit Storage for their editing workloads. They are also considering Isilon for near-line media archiving.

The network receives XDCAM HD footage which is loaded onto their existing Transcoding Storage platform. New footage that needs to be edited will be transferred from their Transcoding Storage platform to the proposed Media Edit Storage platform at the rate of ten simultaneous XDCAM HD files via FTP. Edited files will be transferred back to the Transcoding Storage platform at the rate of ten simultaneous XDCAM HD files via FTP.

The network currently has 15 Final Cut Pro edit stations, 15 Avid edit stations. Proxy software will be used to allow Isilon to act as the storage for the Final Cut Pro and Avid media. Three of those edit stations will be performing content compositing as needed.

The network expects 70 hours of new content per week, and 50 hours of edited content per week. They intend to keep the new and edited content on the proposed Media Edit Storage as a performance tier for 30 days. They would like to retain all new and edited footage proposed Media Edit Storage as a near-line tier for two years.

In addition to the current workloads, the network expects to implement a new Media Asset Management (MAM) solution and has requested the Isilon cluster be capable of supporting 120 MBps read and 120 MBps write to support the MAM requirements.

The customer wants to be able to put completed content into a non-editable folder. However, they want to give access to an administrator to delete content if required.

What do you recommend to the customer?

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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?

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A customer has 1,000 at 2 KB files, 5,000 at 4 KB files, and 4,000 at 7 KB files. They want to know the total amount of space on disk with a requested protection level of N+2d:1n.

How much on-disk space will be consumed for the data and protection overhead, excluding metadata?

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When installing nodes into a Dell EMC rack, which node type requires the use of a Titan-HD rack?

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Which data access pattern uses moderate prefetching?

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