DEA-1TT5 Storage Management and Monitoring 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is 'SLA' (Service Level Agreement) in the context of storage services?
- A technical specification for storage hardware purchased from a vendor
- A formal agreement defining the performance, availability, and support levels that a storage service must deliver to its consumers (Correct answer)
- A storage licensing agreement between software vendors
- A security audit checklist for storage systems
Correct answer: A formal agreement defining the performance, availability, and support levels that a storage service must deliver to its consumers
An SLA defines measurable commitments for storage services including uptime targets, performance thresholds (IOPS, latency), recovery objectives, and support response times.
Question 2: What is the purpose of 'alerting thresholds' in storage monitoring?
- To limit the number of alerts generated per day to reduce noise
- To define performance or capacity levels that trigger notifications, enabling proactive action before problems impact production (Correct answer)
- To set the maximum IOPS allowed before throttling kicks in
- To configure the sensitivity of disk error detection
Correct answer: To define performance or capacity levels that trigger notifications, enabling proactive action before problems impact production
Alerting thresholds generate notifications when metrics like capacity utilization, latency, or error rates cross defined levels, allowing administrators to address issues before they become outages.
Question 3: What does 'MTBF' (Mean Time Between Failures) indicate for storage hardware?
- The average time to repair a failed disk drive
- The statistical average time a component operates before experiencing a failure, used to estimate reliability (Correct answer)
- The maximum time allowed before performing preventative maintenance
- The time between scheduled firmware updates on storage controllers
Correct answer: The statistical average time a component operates before experiencing a failure, used to estimate reliability
MTBF is a reliability metric representing the average operational time between failures; higher MTBF indicates more reliable hardware, informing purchasing decisions and spare part stocking strategies.
Question 4: What is a 'storage audit' and what does it typically examine?
- A financial audit of storage hardware purchasing costs
- A systematic review of storage utilization, configuration, security settings, data placement, and compliance with policies (Correct answer)
- A physical inspection of the storage hardware for damage
- An automated scan for viruses on storage arrays
Correct answer: A systematic review of storage utilization, configuration, security settings, data placement, and compliance with policies
A storage audit examines capacity utilization, data growth trends, RAID configurations, replication health, access controls, encryption status, and policy compliance to identify risks and optimization opportunities.
Question 5: What is 'chargeback' in IT storage management?
- Charging customers when data is retrieved from archive storage
- The practice of billing individual business units or departments for the storage resources they consume (Correct answer)
- A billing process for returning unused storage capacity to a vendor
- A fee charged when storage capacity is provisioned above the agreed allocation
Correct answer: The practice of billing individual business units or departments for the storage resources they consume
Storage chargeback allocates storage costs to the business units that consume them, creating cost accountability and incentivizing efficient storage use rather than unlimited hoarding of storage capacity.
Question 6: What is a 'firmware update' for a storage array and why should it be carefully managed?
- An operating system upgrade for the management server
- A software update for the storage controller's embedded operating code, which can fix bugs and add features but requires careful planning to avoid disrupting production (Correct answer)
- A BIOS update for the servers connected to the storage array
- A driver update installed on each host connected to the array
Correct answer: A software update for the storage controller's embedded operating code, which can fix bugs and add features but requires careful planning to avoid disrupting production
Storage firmware updates modify the embedded software running on storage controllers and drive firmware, requiring thorough compatibility testing, a defined rollback plan, and maintenance window scheduling to minimize risk.
DEA-1TT5 Storage Management and Monitoring 2
What is 'SLA' (Service Level Agreement) in the context of storage services?