emc storage architect Interview Questions and Answers
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What is EMC VMAX?
- Answer: EMC VMAX is a high-end storage array known for its performance, scalability, and reliability. It's a unified storage platform supporting block and file protocols, often used in demanding enterprise environments requiring high availability and data protection features like SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility).
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Explain the concept of SRDF/Metro/Remote.
- Answer: SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) is a family of EMC data replication technologies. SRDF/Metro provides near-synchronous replication over short distances for disaster recovery within a metropolitan area. SRDF/Remote provides asynchronous replication over longer distances, suitable for geographically dispersed disaster recovery sites.
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What is PowerPath?
- Answer: PowerPath is EMC's multipathing software. It manages multiple paths to storage from a host server, improving performance and ensuring high availability by providing failover capabilities in case of path failures.
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What are the different types of RAID levels and their pros and cons?
- Answer: RAID 0 (striping): Improves performance but offers no redundancy. RAID 1 (mirroring): Provides high redundancy but lower capacity. RAID 5 (striping with parity): Balances performance and redundancy, but susceptible to performance degradation with drive failures. RAID 6 (striping with dual parity): Higher redundancy than RAID 5, better tolerance to drive failures, but more complex and slightly lower performance. RAID 10 (striping of mirrors): Combines the benefits of RAID 1 and RAID 0, offering high performance and redundancy.
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Explain the concept of thin provisioning.
- Answer: Thin provisioning allocates storage space only when it's actually used, rather than allocating the full capacity upfront. This allows for efficient space utilization and simplifies storage management, but requires careful monitoring of storage consumption.
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What is a LUN (Logical Unit Number)?
- Answer: A LUN is a logical address assigned to a block of storage presented to a host server. It allows multiple servers to access different portions of the same storage array simultaneously.
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What is storage tiering?
- Answer: Storage tiering is a technique that automatically moves data between different storage tiers based on access frequency and other criteria. This optimizes storage costs by placing frequently accessed data on faster, more expensive storage and infrequently accessed data on slower, cheaper storage.
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Explain the difference between snapshots and clones.
- Answer: Snapshots are point-in-time copies of data that share storage space with the original data. They are space-efficient but may impact performance during creation and restoration. Clones are full copies of data that are independent of the original data, offering better performance but consuming more storage space.
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What is deduplication?
- Answer: Deduplication identifies and eliminates duplicate data blocks, reducing storage consumption and improving backup and recovery efficiency. It's particularly effective for virtual machine environments and backup data.
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