Storage
True/False: Powerstore, Powervault and Powerscale are all unified storage arrays.
What is False
What is the "Brain" of the server?
What is the CPU
How did Dell update the branding of our CSG portfolio and why?
What is we simplified the nomenclature to three product lines.
We did this because customers gave feedback that the old branding was confusing.
Does PowerStore support traditional RAID?
No
Does Unity XT support traditional RAID?
Yes
True/False: You can directly attach a powerstore to a server(host).
What is False
Can customers add drives individually in a traditional storage array? If No, what increments can they add in?
No, they have to add in RAID width increments
What is specialize performance users
2-part question:
1. Is the PowerStore 500T eligible for the Lifecycle Extension program or data-in-place upgrade?
2. Is the Unity XT 480 eligible for a data-in-place upgrade?
1. No
2. Yes
What is the smallest SED drive available on the Unity XT? (either Flash or HDD)
None! The Unity uses specialized encryption hardware and does not use SED drives at all
What is the term for adding capacity and performance to a storage array?
What is scaling up and out
What is the specialized processor used for videos and animation that is front and center for AI servers?
What is the GPU
What are the different models of Dell Pro Max that I can buy?
What is Dell, Plus and Premium
Explain the different protocols PowerStore Supports
iSCSI, FC, NFS, SMB, vVols
No! They're not needed for all-flash models since there aren't storage tiers to manage
What does the DRR (Data reduction ratio) quantify? (what does it actually do?)
What is the deduplication and compression a system achieves.
Which storage appliances have single drive add-on capabilities?
PowerVault, Unity XT, PowerStore, and VxRail
Can you run the read cache and auto-tiering software at the same time?
No, you have to choose one or the other at the time of deployment
2-part question:
1. What is storage tiering?
2. What is it like in PowerStore?
1. Tiering is a system/method of assigning data to various types of storage media (e.g. SSD, SAS, NL-SAS) based on a range of requirements for cost, availability, performance, and recovery.
2. PowerStore has no tiering because there is only one type of storage media supported (NVMe SSDs)!
What is the distributed sparing method called in Unity?
Dynamic Pools
When it comes to licensing like VMware does the core count in your storage array matter?
What is No
Describe the differences between the three main storage architectures (DAS, NAS, SAN)
DAS (direct attached storage): storage unit is physically connected to hosts
NAS (network attached storage): single storage device that serves files over internet
SAN (storage area network): dedicated network for multiple devices in the DC
How can PowerVault service file data?
The file protocol must be serviced at the host level, while the backend block data is stored on the PowerVault.
List off what is NOT an applicable workload for the DRR guarantee (3 general types of data)
Rich media (image, video, audio, PDF, PPT, Word, Excel, TIFF, etc.), host/application-level compressed data (databases tend to do this), and host/application-level encrypted data
How does does Unity from a logical perspective handle file workloads? Its unified, but what happens internally?
Unity creates an E-Server inside itself with its resources to act as a "Virtual" server which does the file workload. PowerStore uses this same method to be "Unified"