What is Power path? EMC PowerPath is a server-resident software solution that enhances performance and information availability.

It integrates multiple path I/O capabilities, automatic load balancing

What is Vault drive?

Private space on the first five disk drives in the CLARiiON as an "emergency de-stage" area for the cache. The first four drives would be a direct mapping of the cache memory onto the disks, and the fifth drive would contain RAID-3 style parity information. So if and when a powerfailure occured, it was only necessary to hold up the storage processors (and the vault disks) long enough to safely store the customer's data. The vault is a save area across the first five disks to store write cache from the Storage Processors in the event of a Power Failure to the Clariion, or a Storage Processor Failure. The goal here is to place write cache on disk before the Clariion powers off, therefore ensuring that you dont lose the data that was committed to the Clariion and acknowledged to the host. The Clariions have the Standby Power Supplies that will keep the Storage Processors running as well as the first enclosure of disks in the event of a power failure. If there is a Storage Processor Failure, the Clariion will go into a panic mode and fear that it may lose the other Storage Processor. To ensure that it does not lose write cache data, the Clariion will also dump write cache to the Vault Drives.
What is the PSM Lun? The Persistent Storage Manager Lun stores the configuration of the Clariion. Such as Disks, Raid Groups, Luns, Access Logix information, SnapView configuration, MirrorView and SanCopy configuration as well. When this LUN was first introduced on the Clariions back on PSM Lun. Users have not been able to see it in Navisphere for awhile. However, you can grab the information of the Arrays Configuration by executing the following command. the FC4700s, it used to appear in Navisphere under the Unowned Luns container as Lun 223-

Define RAID? Which one you feel is good choice? AID (Redundant array of Independent Disks) is a technology to achieve redundancy with faster I/O. There are Many Levels of RAID to meet different needs of the customer which are: R0, R1, R3, R4, R5, R10, R6. Generally customer chooses R5 to achieve better redundancy and speed and it is cost effective. Explain iSCSI login, fabric login The login process include three steps 1. Start the iSCSI TCP/IP connection 2. Permit authentication of the iSCSI endpoints. 3. Negotiate the parameters to be used by the iSCSI endpoints. Types of Login Process: 1. Normal 2. Discovery Advantage of migration from DAS to SAN The reasons for moving from direct-attached storage (DAS) to a storage area network (SAN) are compelling. While effective for managing storage at the departmental level, DAS cannot accommodate the increasing enterprise-level need for scalability and flexibility to share excess storage capacity-outside of the particular server to which the storage is attached. In addition, DAS configurations are subject to frequent performance lags, due to inadequate caching and other performance bottlenecks in typical SCSI controller architectures. By moving storage to a SAN, administrators have the means and the bandwidth to share and allocate storage to a much larger audience on the network. Most SAN technologies also pave the way for flexible, seamless growth in the future-a significant consideration for most companies, given the rapid growth being forecast for storage requirements. However, companies considering the deployment of SAN-based storage are often stalled by the perceived challenge of moving from DAS to SANs. One of their chief concerns is potential disruption of business-critical applications. What's needed is simple and effective mechanism

that keeps downtime to a minimum and provides a safe path back to DAS should problems occur during SAN deployment, while at the same time providing scalability for future growth. What is Meta Lun A metaLUN is a type of LUN whose maximum capacity can be the combined capacities of all the LUNs that compose it. The metaLUN feature lets you dynamically expand the capacity of a single LUN (base LUN) into a larger unit called a metaLUN. You do this by adding LUNs to the base LUN. You can also add LUNs to a metaLUN to further increase its capacity. Like a LUN, a metaLUN can belong to a Storage Group, and can participate in SnapView, MirrorView and SAN copy sessions. MetaLUNs are supported only on CX-Series storage systems. A metaLUN may include multiple sets of LUNs and each set of LUNs is called a component. The LUNs within a component are striped together and are independent of other LUNs in the the component. The first component of any metaLUN always includes the base LUN. The number of components within a metaLUN and the number of LUNs within a component depend on the storage system type. Explain Clariion architecture The CLARiiON storage system is based on a modular architecture. The first building block of the architecture is the Disk Processor Enclosure, or DPE. The DPE houses the storage Processor(s) and the first Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) disks. Disk Array Enclosures (DAEs) are interconnected using Link Control Cards (LCCs).The module architecture allows the customer to add drives as needed to meet capacity requirements. When more capacity is required, additional disk array enclosures (DAE or DAE2) containing disk modules can be easily added. LCC or Link Control Cards are used to connect shelves of disks. In addition, the LCC monitors the FRUs within the shelf and reports status information to the storage processor. The LCC contains bypass circuitry that allows continued operation of the loop in the event of port failure. Newer CLARiiON arrays have two processors per Storage Processor, and do not use a DPE. Instead, it utilizes an SPE or Storage Processor Enclosure. The SPE does not contain any disk modules, so it must have at least one DAE2 and a maximum of 16 DAE2s. CLARiiON Architecture is based on intelligent Storage Processors that manage physical drives on the back end and service host requests on the front end, be it Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocols. Storage Processors communicate to each other over the CLARiiON Messaging Interface (CMI). Both the metaLUN. Any data that gets written to a metaLUN component is striped across all the LUNs in

front-end connection to the host and the back-end connection to the physical storage is 2Gb Fibre channel. Explain DMX ar chitecture The Symmetrix DMX features a high-performance, Direct Matrix Architecture (DMX) supporting up to 128 point-to-point serial connections. Symmetrix DMX technology is distributed across all channel directors, disk directors, and global memory directors in symmetrix DMX systems. 14. Explain Enginuity oper ation layers The Clariion Environment is governed by Flare Code and the Symmetrix / DMX by Enginuity Code. The Enginuity Code was developed internally at EMC 15. What is hard and soft zoning? In a hard zone, sometimes referred to as a port zone, zone members are specified by physical port number. In a soft zone, at least one zone member is specified logically by World Wide Name(WWN).

Hard Zones In a hard zone, all zone members are specified as switch ports; any number of ports in the fabric can be configured to the zone. When a zone member is specified included Hard no by port number, in only the individual the device port specified zone. the is

physical port to which it is connected. Switch hardware ensures that there is data transfer between unauthorized zone members. However, devices can transfer data between ports within the same zone. Consequently, hard zoning enforced.

zones

are

position-dependent,

that

is,

device

is

identified

by

provides the greatest security possible. Use it where security must be rigidly

Soft Zones In a soft zone, at least one zone member is specified by WWN. A device is included in a zone if either the node WWN or port WWN specified matches an entry in the name server table..

When a fabric. If

device zoning

logs is

in, in

it queries effect, only

the the

name server devices in

for the

devices within same zone(s)

the are

returned. Other devices are hidden from the name server query reply. When zone. Soft zones are name server-dependent and therefore provide more

a WWN is specified, all ports on the specified device are included in the

- new devices can be attached without regard to physical location. However, transfer from unauthorized zone members. Use soft zoning where flexibility

flexibility

the switch does not control data transfer so there is no guarantee against data is important and security can be ensured by the cooperating hosts. Explain WWN A World Wide Name, or WWN, is a 64-bit address used in fibre channel networks to uniquely identify each element in a Fibre Channel network. What is zoning and how to create?

WWN zoning uses name servers in the switches to either allow or block access to particular World Wide Names (WWNs) in the fabric.

A major advantage of WWN zoning is the ability to recable the fabric without having to redo the zone information. WWN zoning is susceptible to unauthorized access, as the zone can be bypassed if an attacker is able to spoof the World Wide Name of an authorized HBA. 18. What is VSAN and how to create? A virtual storage area network (VSAN) is a collection of ports from a set of connected Fibre

Channel Switches, that form a virtual fabric. Ports within a single switch can be partitioned into multiple VSANs, despite sharing hardware resources. Conversely, multiple switches can join a number of ports to form a single VSAN.

19. Hardware Models of clarion CX- 200,300,300i, 400,500,500i,600,700 Cx3-10,20,40,80 Cx4-120,240,480,960 Ax Fc series 20. What is FCID?

The FCID is a 24 bit (3 byte) field used to route frames through a FC network.

21. Explain Navishere/Symmtric Management console /ECC The Symmetrix Management Console is a very important step towards allowing customers take control of their Symmetrix V-Max Systems. With the new Symmetrix V-Max comes a new version of Symmetrix Management Console allowing customers to manage their EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems through a GUI web browser interface with tons of new added features and wizards for usability. The Symmetrix Management Console was developed back in the day as a GUI to view customers Symmetrix DMX environment, over years it has evolved more to be a functional and operational tool to interface the machine for data gathering but also to perform changes. EMC Solutions Enabler Symcli is a CLI based interface to the DMX and V-Max Systems, but the SMC complements the CLI by allowing customers to perform more or less similar functions through a GUI. The looks & feels of SMC also resemble ECC (EMC Control Center) and customers sometime refer it as a ECC-lite (SMC). 22. Initialization of clarion array

Attach the disk array to the server, and with probe-scsi-all you need to verify that your host recognizes the new devices. After that you boot the server with the -r option.

2. Once these has been done, you will need to edit the /kernel/drv/sd.conf to add the appropriate lines that match your disk array configuration. For instance: ctrl #, lun #, etc. 3. Reboot the server 4. You can verify with format (for instance) if the system is recognizing the new drives. 5. After this point, you will need to either partition all the disks or initialize them under the veritas volume manager. If you are doing the last, please make sure that you disable the dmp (Dynamic Multipathing), otherwise you will probably have problems with the disk array. 23. Explain rule 17 in DMX By selecting a combined FA count of 17, you are ensuring 'the best possible' redundancy within the array, although this is 'old school' it is still considered best practise, thus ensuring that there is no single point of failure. 31. What is Snap view? EMC SnapView is a hardware-based snapshot provider. For the Quick Recovery Agent for Windows, EMC SnapView 2.0 can be configured as the snapshot engine. Conceptually, the EMC snapshot will act as the QR Volume; the snapshot is activated during recovery. For ProxyHost, EMC SnapView is used to create snapshots, or clones (EMC SnapView 2.0 only), which are then backed up by the iDataAgent. Because the backup does not occur on the production server, resources on the production server are not affected by this operation. 32. What is Mirror view? In EMC SAN Storage technology, MirrorView/A is a remote copy of production data periodically replication from Host A to Host B. A Disaster could happen anytime and anywhere without any symptom, a precaution plan must be in place. MirrorView/A is a software developed by EMC, MirrorView/A is a software application that keeps a synchronize copy of a Logical Unit Number ( LUN ) in Clariion SAN Storage and periodically replicates another copy to a difference location or long distance office in order to provide Disaster Recovery (

DR ), with MirrorView technology, the organization able to recover from the serious disaster or accident with no business impact (Systems downtime). To get started with MirrorView/A, it works on the EMC CLARiiON box, to keep the data synchronization and safe from Disaster, the Target Clariion box must in other location. It provides data replication over long distances (hundreds to thousands of miles), provided the WAN backbone is strong enough to cater for the data transmission. In order to have the ideal Disaster Recovery ( DR ), the production Storage and Standby /DR (Disaster Recovery) storage systems should be geographically separated. This is to ensure that storage. image is known as copy image (Standby / DR sets). MirrorView/A supports one remote image per primary. The Production storage receives I/O from a server called the production server; and another SAN storage system maintains the secondary image. SAN storage system can optionally have a standby/ DR server connected to it or can be connected to its own server system. The secondary storage system can be kicking in when the primary storage become inaccessible. Once kick start the MirrorView/A feature, the remote site always has a consistent point-in-time copy of the primary data. Both production SAN storage and Standby/ DR SAN storage systems must installed and enabled MirrorView to entitle for the replication feature. Both Storage systems can be in different domains, which you manage with the User Interface (UI). 33. What is SAN Copy? EMC SAN Copy is a very powerful and effective tool for copying LUNs within the EMC CX arrays and between the EMC CX and other vendor-based SANs. It works very well within the EMC products and reasonably works well between EMC and other vendor products such as the Hewlett Packard's EVA arrays. Within the EMC environment, SAN administrators can replicate the entire LUN one time and then only replicate the changes afterwards. If there is more space available in the EMC CX array, the SANCopy software can pull the data from other vendor SANs. SANCopy supports full copy sessions within the EMC product line and between the EMC and the other vendor-based arrays. However, incremental copies are not possible between EMC and other vendor-based arrays. In Storage term, Primary image is the one mirrored (Production storage) ; and secondary MirrorView/A able to transfer the production data storage replicates to the Standby / DR

34. Explain Time finder and SRDF Time Finder is for local replication operations SRDF is for remote replication operations SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) is a family of EMC products that facilitates the data replication from one Symmetrix storage array to another through a Storage Area Network or IPnetwork. SRDF logically pairs a device or a group of devices from each array and replicates data from one to the other synchronously or asynchronously. An established pair of devices can be split, so that separate hosts can access the same data independently (maybe for backup), and then resynchronised. In synchronous mode (SRDF/S), the primary array waits until the secondary array has acknowledged each write before the next write is accepted, ensuring that the replicated copy of the data is always as current as the primary. However, the latency due to propagation increases significantly with distance. Asynchronous SRDF (SRDF/A) transfers changes made to the secondary array in units called never be as current as the primary copy, this method can replicate data over considerable distances and with reduced bandwidth requirements and minimal impact on host performance. Other forms of SRDF exist to integrate with clustered environments and to manage multiple and log files of a database application) The TimeFinder family of software provides trusted local storage replication leveraging the create local copies for DR testing/validation, backups, point-in-time recovery, database consistency checks, and test/development. The TimeFinder family consists of the following options:

delta sets, which are transferred at defined intervals. Although the remote copy of the data will

SRDF pairs where replication of multiple devices must be consistent (such as with the data files

high-end Symmetrix VMAX Architecture. The TimeFinder family enables IT organizations to

TimeFinder Clone High performance, full source copies TimeFinder Snap Economical space saving copies TimeFinder VP Snap Space-efficient snaps for VP devices

35. Difference in iSCSI and NAS SCSI is a network protocol that allows you to put hard disks in a NAS box or server as far away as you like - but they appear to the PC as if they're connected locally. Most home users will expanded to address drives across the globe if need be 38. Difference in iFCP and FCIP FCP is the Fibre Channel Protocol, which is really another name for running SCSI commands over Fibre Channel. Storage for open systems uses SCSI commands in most cases. FCIP (FC over IP) is taking the Fibre Channel packets containing the SCSI commands and sending them over Ethernet using IP. FCIP takes the Fibre Channel packet, regardless of what is in it, and FC packet and addressing stays intact. iFCP converts FC packet address to use IP addresses, and then sends the FC packet over IP and Ethernet. It then converts it back to FC with a different address based on a name server. The iFCP is usually done by a network guy. 39. What is fabric? The hardware that connects workstations and servers to storage devices in aSAN is referred to as a "fabric." The SAN fabric enables any-server-to-any-storage device connectivity through the use of Fibre Channel switching technology. . What is RAID? Explain RAID3, RAID5 and RAID1/0 RAID (redundant array of independent disks; originally redundant array of inexpensive disks) management of FCIP is usually done by the storage administrator, while the management of encapsulates it with TCP and IP and Ethernet. It's really a tunneling technology, such that the probably bury the disk box in the basement of under the stairs somewhere, but iSCSI can be

is a way of storing the same data in different places (thus, redundantly) on multiple hard disks. By placing data on multiple disks, I/O (input/output) operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance. Since multiple disks increases the mean time between failures (MTBF), storing data redundantly also increases fault tolerance.

A RAID appears to the operating system to be a single logical hard disk. RAID employs the ranging from a sector (512 bytes) up to several megabytes. The stripes of all the disks are interleaved and addressed in order.

technique of disk striping, which involves partitioning each drive's storage space into units

In a single-user system where large records, such as medical or other scientific images, are stored, the stripes are typically set up to be small (perhaps 512 bytes) so that a single record spans all disks and can be accessed quickly by reading all disks at the same time.

In a multi-user system, better performance requires establishing a stripe wide enough to hold the typical or maximum size record. This allows overlapped disk I/O across drives. There are at least nine types of RAID plus a non-redundant array (RAID-0):

RAID-0: This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance but no fault-tolerance. RAID-1: This type is also known as disk mirroring and consists of at least two drives that duplicate the storage of data. There is no striping. Read performance is improved since either disk can be read at the same time. Write performance is the same as for single disk storage. RAID-1 provides the best performance and the best fault-tolerance in a multi-user system.

RAID-2: This type uses striping across disks with some disks storing error checking and correcting (ECC) information. It has no advantage over RAID-3. RAID-3: This type uses striping and dedicates one drive to storing parity information. The embedded error checking (ECC) information is used to detect errors. Data recovery is accomplished by calculating the exclusive OR (XOR) of the information recorded on the overlap I/O. For this reason, RAID-3 is best for single-user systems with long record applications.

other drives. Since an I/O operation addresses all drives at the same time, RAID-3 cannot

RAID-4: This type uses large stripes, which means you can read records from any single drive. This allows you to take advantage of overlapped I/O for read operations. Since all write operations have to update the parity drive, no I/O overlapping is possible. RAID-4 offers no advantage over RAID-5.

RAID-5: This type includes a rotating parity array, thus addressing the write limitation in RAID-4. Thus, all read and write operations can be overlapped. RAID-5 stores parity information but not redundant data (but parity information can be used to reconstruct data). RAID-5 requires at least three and usually five disks for the array. It's best for multiuser systems in which performance is not critical or which do few write operations.

RAID-6: This type is similar to RAID-5 but includes a second parity scheme that is distributed across different drives and thus offers extremely high fault- and drive-failure tolerance.

RAID-7: This type includes a real-time embedded operating system as a controller, caching via a high-speed bus, and other characteristics of a stand-alone computer. One vendor offers this system.

RAID-10: Combining RAID-0 and RAID-1 is often referred to as RAID-10, which offers higher performance than RAID-1 but at much higher cost. There are two subtypes: In are mirrored. In RAID-1+0, the data is mirrored and the mirrors are striped. RAID-0+1, data is organized as stripes across multiple disks, and then the striped disk sets

RAID-50 (or RAID-5+0): This type consists of a series of RAID-5 groups and striped in RAID-0 fashion to improve RAID-5 performance without reducing data protection. RAID-53 (or RAID-5+3): This type uses striping (in RAID-0 style) for RAID-3's virtual disk blocks. This offers higher performance than RAID-3 but at much higher cost. RAID-S (also known as Parity RAID): This is an alternate, proprietary method for striped parity RAID from EMC Symmetrix that is no longer in use on current equipment. It appears that come from having a high-speed disk cache on the disk array. to be similar to RAID-5 with some performance enhancements as well as the enhancements

41. What is Hot Spare Disk? se hot spare disks to automatically replace failed disks in a RAID environment. . Upon a disk failure in a RAID array is detected, the RAID adapter will look into all disks it

controls for a hot spare disk. If one is available, the RAID adapter will replace the role of the failed disk in the RAID array with the hot spare disk. The data and parity are rebuilt from the survival member disks automatically. The RAID array is changed back to optimized state when the rebuild is complete.

Hot spare disks are useful only if their capacity is greater than or equal to that of the smallestcapacity disk in an array that becomes Degraded. In order to assign a disk for use as a hot spare, it must be formatted for advanced function. 49. What is iSCSI? SCSI is Internet SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities, developed by the Internet Engineering

Task Force (IETF). By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. The iSCSIprotocol is among the key technologies expected to help bring about rapid development of the storage area network (SAN) market, by increasing the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission 50. What is Disk Controller? A chip and associated circuitry that is responsible for controlling a disk drive. There are different controllers for different interfaces. For example, an IDE interface requires an IDE controller and a SCSI interface requires a SCSI controller. On Macintosh computer systems, the disk controller is built into themotherboard. disk is called a floppy disk controller (FDC). A controller for a hard disk is called a hard disk controller (HDC), and a controller for a floppy

51. How does data got saved in case of striping and incase of concatenation? A technique for spreading data over multiple disk drives. Disk striping can speed up operations that retrieve data from disk storage. The computer system breaks a body of data into units and spreads these units across the available disks. Systems that implement disk striping generally allow the user to select the data unit size or stripe width.

Disk striping is available in two types. Single user striping uses relatively large data units, and improves performance on a single-user workstation by allowing parallel transfers from different disks. Multi-user striping uses smaller data units and improves performance in multiple disk drives.

a multi-user environment by allowing simultaneous (or overlapping) read operations on