Dell Technical Test - SANs

[nmagner]

Hi Guys,

I have a technical test with Dell next Tuesday and I need the following information: SAN environments, RAID configurations, iSCSI-protocol and -initiators, and current MPIO-software and –policies?

What do I need to know about each topic as the test is 1 hour? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Niall

 

[Technician1]

You are obviously not ready for the test you might want to reschedule for after you've learned more.

 

[crazyman143]

Those are pretty broad topics. You'll need to do a good bit of research on each of them before you take the test unless it's a very easy test.

RAID is a method of spanning data across multiple hard disks, and usually you also implement redundancy, so that if a drive fails, you can replace it without losing all of the data.

iSCSI is a method for using the SCSI protocol over an ethernet network. I believe SCSI is basically a parallel interface for attaching disk drives to a computer.

With iSCSI, the initiator is usually that computer that is connecting to the iSCSI host. The initiator mounts a remote hard drive (or raid array) over the ethernet network and treats it as if it were a hard drive directly plugged into the computer.

 

[nmagner]

What are the various SAN environments?

 

[crazyman143]

SAN means Storage Area Network. Start with the wikipedia page on SAN networks, it covers a lot of it. I'm not sure what you mean by 'environments' probably the common types of san infrastructure or SAN switches? unfortunately I don't know a whole lot about SANs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network#Network_types