H19-308_V4.0 HCSA-Presales-Storage V4.0 Questions and Answers

In Huawei OceanStor Hybrid Flash systems, performance optimization is achieved through intelligent resource management. Level-2 cache (Option A), known as SmartCache, utilizes SSDs as an extension of the system’s DRAM cache. By storing "hot" data on high-speed SSDs, the system significantly reduces the read latency for frequently accessed blocks that have been evicted from the primary memory cache.

Storage tiering (Option D), orSmartTier, automatically migrates data blocks between different storage tiers (SSD, SAS, and NL-SAS) based on their access frequency. It ensures that active data resides on the highest-performance media while moving inactive "cold" data to high-capacity drives. These two features are specifically designed to maximize IOPS and minimize response times. In contrast,Thin Provisioning (SmartThin)andData Deduplication (SmartDedupe)are "Storage Efficiency" features; their primary goal is to save physical space and improve capacity utilization. While essential for TCO, they do not inherently improve raw system performance and may involve a minor metadata overhead during processing.

According to Huawei’s BCManager and HyperReplication guides, "incorrect" statements must be identified to understand the distinction between disaster recovery (DR) and active-active solutions. Option B is incorrect because while HyperMetro supports automatic transparent failover (zero RTO) using a Quorum Server, standard synchronous remote replication typically requires manual intervention or third-party management software to trigger a switchover when the primary site fails. In synchronous replication, the secondary LUN is usually in a read-only state and cannot take over automatically without administrative action.

Option D is incorrectbecause it describes an "Active-Active" state. In a standard Remote Replication pair, only the primary LUN is accessible for host I/O (Read/Write), while the secondary LUN is locked to maintain data consistency. Only theHyperMetrofeature allows both LUNs in the pair to provide simultaneous read and write services to application servers across different sites. Regarding distance, while asynchronous replication is physically less constrained, synchronous and HyperMetro technologies are strictly limited by latency (typically requiring round-trip time <10ms and distance within 100km to 300km depending on the specific product line) to avoid severe application performance degradation.

Huawei’s object storage solution (OceanStor Pacific/OBS) is designed for massive scalability and high availability across geographic boundaries. Option C is correct because the Global Namespace feature abstracts the physical location of data, allowing users to access objects via a single URL/endpoint regardless of which Data Center or Availability Zone (AZ) the data physically resides in. This simplifies application development and data management at scale.

Options A and B are correctas the architecture supports multi-regional deployment. Data can be replicated between regions to ensure disaster recovery and data sovereignty. Unlike traditional SAN/NAS replication which is often limited by latency-sensitive synchronous protocols, object storage utilizes asynchronous transfer mechanisms optimized for the HTTP/S3 protocol. This leads toOption D being correct; because object storage replication is typically asynchronous and handles high latency well, sites can be separated by thousands of kilometers, making it an ideal solution for global data distribution and remote site backup.

Huawei OceanStor NAS systems provide a comprehensive Audit Log feature to track user activities for security and compliance purposes. This feature records metadata related to how files and directories are accessed and manipulated over the SMB or NFS protocols.

According to the Huawei technical reference, the audit mechanism captures a wide range of events, including:

File Opening (Option D):Records when a user accesses a file, including the timestamp and user ID.

File Modification (Option B):Tracks changes made to the content of a file.

File Renaming (Option A) and Deletion (Option C):Records structural changes to the file system, which is critical for identifying potential data theft or accidental loss.

By analyzing these logs, administrators can reconstruct the history of file operations to determine "who did what and when." This is a key component of Huawei’s data security framework, helping organizations meet internal auditing requirements and external regulatory standards.

Huawei distinguishes Scale-out Storage (OceanStor Pacific) from traditional Array Storage (Centralized SAN/NAS) based on its ability to handle the "Yottabyte Era" requirements of mass data.

Large Volume (Option A):While traditional arrays are limited by the number of controllers and disk enclosures they can address, scale-out storage is designed to aggregate thousands of nodes into a single global namespace, easily managing 10 PB or even EB-level data volumes.

TB-level Bandwidth (Option C):Distributed storage excels at throughput. By utilizing a high-speed interconnected network (InfiniBand or RoCE) and parallel access protocols like DPC, a scale-out cluster can deliver aggregate bandwidth in the range of TB/s, which is critical for HPC and big data analytics.

Elastic Scalability (Option D):Traditional arrays typically scale out to a few dozen controllers. OceanStor Pacific can scale out to 4,096 nodes in a single cluster, providing linear growth in both performance and capacity as nodes are added.

Performance in IOPS (Option B)is not adifferencein the sense that both systems provide IOPS; however, centralized all-flash arrays (Dorado) are often superior for low-latency, high-IOPS structured databases, whereas scale-out storage is primarily defined by its massive bandwidth and capacity scalability.

While it is technically possible to use a gateway to provide object interfaces over traditional storage, Huawei documentation explicitly states that this is not the mainstream delivery mode for the future of cloud-native data. Traditional SAN or NAS architectures are built on hierarchical file systems or block volumes, which face significant metadata performance bottlenecks and scalability limits when forced to handle billions of objects.

The "mainstream" and recommended approach by Huawei isNative Object Storage, such as that found in theOceanStor Pacificseries. Native object storage is built on a flat architecture from the ground up, allowing for massive horizontal scalability, a global namespace, and superior metadata handling through distributed indexing. Using a gateway is considered a legacy transition method or a "bridge" solution, but it lacks the efficiency, performance, and durability required for modern big data, AI, and cloud-native applications that natively use the S3 protocol.

Huawei OceanStor BCManager (Business Continuity Manager) is the dedicated software suite designed for managing disaster recovery and backup environments. While other tools perform different functions, BCManager is specifically engineered to orchestrate the entire DR lifecycle:

Management (eReplication):This component manages disaster recovery for various applications (like databases and VMs). It automates the recovery process, performs DR drills without interrupting services, and visualizes the DR topology.

Backup (eBackup):This component handles the backup of virtualized environments.

In contrast,DeviceManager (Option B)is the on-box management tool for single-array configuration.SystemReporter (Option A)is used for performance analysis and reporting.eService (Option D)is a cloud-based proactive monitoring and maintenance platform. Therefore, BCManager is the correct choice for specialized DR management.

Unlike traditional storage architectures that use an Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) model where a LUN is "owned" by a primary controller, Huawei OceanStor Dorado utilizes a Symmetric Active-Active architecture. In this design, LUNs do not have a specific owner. Instead, all controllers in a cluster can simultaneously receive and process I/O requests for the same LUN.

This is made possible by theSmartMatrix full-mesh interconnect, which allows any interface module to communicate with any controller, and any controller to access any disk. Because there is no concept of "LUN ownership," there is no need for time-consuming "LUN handovers" if a controller fails. This symmetry eliminates performance bottlenecks, ensures balanced load distribution across all hardware resources, and provides a smoother experience for host-side multipathing software. This architectural shift is a key differentiator for the Dorado series, enabling it to deliver consistent, high-speed performance even during controller maintenance or failure.

Huawei OceanStor Pacific is a distributed scale-out storage system optimized for mass unstructured data (File, Object, HDFS). While it provides robust "always-on" service capabilities, Option A is incorrect as it refers to a specific feature of centralized unified storage arrays like the OceanStor Dorado series. OceanStor Dorado is marketed as providing the industry's only "Active-active solution for SAN and NAS" within a centralized architecture.

In contrast, OceanStor Pacific ensures service continuity through distributed mechanisms:

Fast Failover (Option B):Technologies such as multi-module concurrent service takeover enable services on a faulty node to be taken over within 10 seconds, minimizing RTO.

HyperGeoMetro (Option C):This feature provides multi-replica cross-site active-active protection for object storage, allowing data to be accessed and modified at multiple sites simultaneously.

HyperGeoEC (Option D): This is a cross-site Erasure Coding (EC) multi-active solution that provides high reliability and space utilization for large-scale deployments.

Because OceanStor Pacific is designed for distributed unstructured workloads rather than integrated SAN/NAS block-and-file convergence in the traditional sense, Option A is the outlier.

HyperCDP (Continuous Data Protection) is a feature specifically designed for high-density, high-frequency data protection in Huawei OceanStor Dorado systems. While standard snapshots (HyperSnap) have limits on the total number of point-in-time copies and the frequency at which they can be taken, HyperCDP allows for the creation of snapshots at intervals as short as several seconds.

HyperCDP achieves this by utilizing a specialized metadata management system that minimizes the impact on system performance during the snapshot creation process. It can support up to 60,000 recovery points per LUN, providing a much finer granularity for data recovery than traditional backup or snapshot technologies. This is particularly useful for protecting against ransomware or logical data corruption, as it allows an administrator to roll back a database or volume to a state just seconds before the incident occurred.HyperReplication (Option B)is for remote DR,HyperLock (Option C)is for WORM/compliance, andHyperVault (Option D)is an integrated backup tool for older hybrid systems.

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated network for block-level data access. Huawei OceanStor systems support a variety of block-access protocols to ensure compatibility with different infrastructure environments. Fibre Channel (FC) is the industry standard for high-performance enterprise SANs, offering dedicated, low-latency, and lossless delivery. iSCSI provides block-level storage over standard TCP/IP Ethernet networks, making it a flexible and cost-effective alternative for many organizations.

InfiniBand (Option B)is a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect protocol often used in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and specialized SAN clusters to connect compute nodes to storage pools at extremely high speeds.NFS (Option D)is excluded from this answer because it is aNAS (Network Attached Storage)protocol. NFS (Network File System) provides file-level access rather than block-level access. While modern Huawei systems like the OceanStor Dorado series are "Unified Storage" (supporting both SAN and NAS on the same hardware), technically, only A, B, and C are considered SAN protocols.

The new-generation OceanStor hybrid flash storage is designed to support modern cloud-native workloads, including those running in containerized environments. To facilitate the connection between storage resources and container orchestrators like Kubernetes, Huawei supports several key plug-ins:

CSI (Container Storage Interface) (Option D):This is the industry-standard interface that allows the storage system to provide persistent volumes (PVs) to containers. By using the Huawei CSI plug-in, users can automate the provisioning, mounting, and management of LUNs (SAN) and File Systems (NAS) directly from Kubernetes manifests.

CDR (Container Disaster Recovery) (Option A):In addition to basic connectivity, Huawei provides the CDR plug-in to manage data protection for containerized applications. CDR enables backup and disaster recovery capabilities for persistent data, ensuring that if a container cluster or a data center fails, the application data can be recovered at a secondary site using replication or backup technologies.

Plug-ins like CSS or ECS (Options B and C) are generally related to other cloud services or specific compute instances and are not the primary container storage plug-ins associated with the OceanStor hybrid flash series.

This statement is false because Huawei's new-generation OceanStor hybrid flash storage features a converged (Unified) architecture that supports Native NAS capabilities directly within the storage controllers. In older storage generations or with competitors, an external "NAS Gateway" or "Filer" was often required to provide file services on top of block storage.

Huawei’sHyperMetro for NASis a gateway-free active-active solution. The file systems are managed natively by the storage OS (OceanStor OS), allowing both SAN and NAS services to benefit from the same high-availability features. By eliminating the need for an external gateway, Huawei simplifies the network topology, reduces hardware costs (TCO), and minimizes latency by removing an extra processing hop for file data. This native integration allows for seamless cross-site active-active deployments for file protocols like CIFS/SMB and NFS, just as it does for block protocols.

Huawei’s SmartQuota feature allows administrators to manage storage consumption at the directory, user, or user-group level using three types of thresholds:

Hard Quota (800 GB):This is a strict limit. Once the used capacity reaches this value, the storage system will immediately prevent any further write operations to that directory. Therefore, Option Dwilloccur.

Soft Quota (700 GB):This is a flexible limit combined with a grace period. When the limit is exceeded, the system issues an alarm butcontinues to allow data writesuntil the grace period expires or the hard quota is reached. Therefore, Option B willNOToccur.

Advisory Quota (600 GB):This is purely for monitoring and reporting. When reached, the system simply triggers an administrative alarm or notification; itnever restricts data writes. Therefore, Option C willNOToccur.

Option A is also correct because the directory is part of a 1 TB file system; it can never exceed the physical size of its parent container. Thus, only B and C are the actions that "will NOT occur."

This statement is false because RAID 0 and Mirroring (RAID 1) are fundamentally different concepts in Huawei storage technology. As defined in the Huawei technical manual, RAID 0 is "Striping." It breaks data into chunks and spreads them across multiple disks to increase performance. It has no redundancy.

"Mirroring" is the terminology specifically used for RAID 1. In a RAID 1 configuration, the system writes the exact same data to two separate physical disks simultaneously. This creates a 100% redundant copy (a mirror). If one disk fails, the other continues to provide data, ensuring zero downtime and no data loss. Huawei'sRAID 2.0+ virtualization technologycan implement striping and mirroring across different "chunks" or "extents" within a storage pool, but it maintains the technical distinction: RAID 0 is for performance through striping, while mirroring is for reliability through duplication. Therefore, characterizing RAID 0 as a mirroring technology is a technical inaccuracy.