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

This statement accurately reflects the technical characteristics of traditional incremental backup strategies found in Huawei data protection guides. An Incremental Backup only copies the data that has changed since the last backup (whether that was a full or an incremental backup).

While this saves significant time and storage space during thebackup window, it adds complexity duringrestoration. To fully restore a system to its latest state, the administrator must first restore the lastFull Backupand then sequentially apply every subsequentIncremental Backupin the correct order. If any single incremental tape or file in the chain is missing or corrupted, the restoration cannot be completed beyond that point. Because the system must process multiple data sets to reconstruct the final image, the total recovery time (RTO) is indeed longer and the process is slower compared to restoring from a single Full Backup.

This statement is true according to Huawei’s storage networking fundamentals. iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) encapsulates SCSI commands into TCP/IP packets for transmission over standard Ethernet networks. Because it leverages the universal TCP/IP stack, iSCSI can operate across existing routers, switches, and long-distance WAN links without requiring the specialized, expensive hardware associated with Fibre Channel (such as FC switches and Host Bus Adapters).

This reliance on standard Ethernet infrastructure provides iSCSI with superiorscalability and flexibility. For example, iSCSI allows storage to be accessed over any distance where an IP connection exists, which is inherently simpler than the complex "FCIP" tunneling required to extend FC over long distances. Additionally, as Ethernet speeds continue to evolve rapidly (10GbE to 25GbE, 100GbE, and beyond), iSCSI can easily scale its performance by upgrading standard networking components. While Fibre Channel often offers lower latency and better raw performance in dedicated local environments, the ease of expansion and integration into existing IP networks makes iSCSI the more scalable choice for broad data center environments.

Huawei’s Multi-protocol Lossless Interworking is a standout feature of the OceanStor Pacific series, allowing one copy of data to be shared across different protocols (File, Object, HDFS).

No Semantic or Performance Compromise (Option B):Historically, protocol conversion (e.g., using a gateway) led to performance loss or "semantic loss" where certain file attributes or object tags were dropped. OceanStor Pacific implements native support for multiple protocols at the metadata level, ensuring full semantic compatibility and high-speed access regardless of the protocol used.

Zero Data Copy (Option C):This feature allows one piece of data to be written via one protocol (e.g., ingested via S3) and read via another (e.g., analyzed via HDFS) without moving or copying the data to a separate system. This eliminates "data silos" and greatly improves data processing efficiency.

Gateway-free (Option D):Because the interworking is native to the storage OS, no external protocol gateways are required. This simplifies the management architecture and reduces the hardware footprint.

Option A is incorrectbecause documentation generally advises against mixing structured (Database) and unstructured data in the same pool for optimal performance, though the system is primarily optimized for unstructured workloads.

Huawei OceanProtect incorporates specialized algorithms to achieve industry-leading backup and recovery speeds. Source deduplication (Option A) is a primary performance driver because it filters out redundant data at the source, ensuring that only new data blocks are transmitted, which directly reduces the time required to complete a backup job.

Adaptive data locality rearrangement (Option D)is a unique feature that optimizes how data is written to and read from the physical disks within the OceanProtect array. During the backup process, the system calculates data dispersion in real-time and arranges data blocks on the disks to ensure they are stored sequentially. This is critical because it allows for high-speed sequential reads duringdata recovery, significantly improving the performance of HDDs which typically struggle with random I/O. While media deduplication (Option B) and secure snapshots (Option C) are essential for storage efficiency and security, they are not the primary features credited with the raw performance "leap" in backup and recovery speed.

This statement is false because the Air Gap isolation zone is one of the most critical components of the Huawei OceanProtect ransomware protection solution. Huawei provides a comprehensive "four-layer" protection framework for data resilience, where Air Gap technology serves as the final, most secure layer.

TheAir Gapfeature creates a security isolation zone for backup data. Under normal operations, the replication link between the production backup storage and the isolation zone storage is physically or logicallydisconnected(the "gap"). The link only opens during a specific, scheduled window to replicate "clean" data from the production site to the isolation zone, and it is immediately closed once replication is finished. This ensures that even if ransomware compromises the main network and production storage, the data in the Air Gap isolation zone remains "invisible" and unreachable to the attacker. Combined with secure snapshots and WORM, this allows organizations to recover their business from an uninfected copy of the data, making Air Gap a core supported feature of the OceanProtect portfolio.

Huawei’s HyperLock feature provides WORM (Write Once, Read Many) functionality for NAS file systems. When a file is placed in the WORM state, the storage system strictly enforces a policy where the file's data can be accessed and read by authorized users, but any attempt to modify, overwrite, or delete the file is blocked by the storage controller.

In the Huawei OceanStor system, a file enters the WORM state after it is "locked." Once locked, the file remains in a read-only state for a defined retention period. During this time, not even an administrator can modify the file's content or reduce its protection duration. This is critical for meeting regulatory compliance (such as SEC Rule 17a-4) and for protecting sensitive data against ransomware, as it ensures that once data is archived, it remains immutable and verifiable. Only after the retention period has expired can the file be deleted, though it can still never be modified.

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.

Huawei provides tailored solutions for Medical PACS based on the specific performance and scale requirements of healthcare providers. OceanStor Dorado NAS (Option D) is recommended for the "Hot Data" or active tier of a PACS system. Because medical images between 100 KB and 1 MB require high-concurrency access and extremely low latency for immediate clinical review, the FlashLink® technology and all-flash architecture of the Dorado series provide the necessary IOPS to prevent bottlenecks during peak hours.

OceanStor Pacific (Option C)is the primary recommendation for the massive, long-term unstructured data storage required by PACS. A single hospital can generate petabytes of data over several years. OceanStor Pacific’s scale-out architecture allows it to handle billions of small files efficiently using a global namespace, and its high-ratio Erasure Coding (EC) ensures maximum capacity utilization and lower TCO for archives. While Hybrid Flash (Option A) can be used, it is often superseded by the superior performance of Dorado or the superior scalability of Pacific in modern medical environments. FusionCube (Option B) is an HCI solution more suited for edge computing or virtualization rather than specialized, large-scale medical imaging repositories.

This statement reflects the architectural evolution of Huawei OceanStor systems. The Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) protocol was designed decades ago for mechanical drives (HDDs). It uses a single command queue with a depth of 32 commands, which was sufficient for the physical limitations of rotating platters and moving heads.

In contrast,Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)was designed specifically for flash media. It replaces the legacy SCSI stack to eliminate bottlenecks. NVMe supports up to 64,000 queues, each with 64,000 commands, allowing for massive parallelism. Huawei OceanStor Dorado (All-Flash) systems utilizeEnd-to-End NVMe(from the SSD to the controller, and from the controller to the host via NVMe-oF) to achieve microsecond-level latency. While modern flash arrays can still use SCSI (via FC or iSCSI) for compatibility, the full performance potential of an all-flash array is only realized through NVMe. Therefore, in modern storage design, SCSI is the legacy standard for HDDs/Hybrid arrays, while NVMe is the optimized standard for All-Flash arrays.

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.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado utilizes RAID 2.0+ block virtualization technology, which supports Dynamic RAID Reconstruction. In a traditional RAID environment, if a disk fails, the RAID group continues to operate in a "degraded" mode until the disk is replaced. However, in Dorado's RAID 2.0+, the system uses a distributed spare space policy where spare capacity is spread across all disks in the pool.

When one SSD fails in a storage pool originally configured with RAID 6 (7 data chunks + 2 parity chunks), the system identifies that it no longer has enough physical disks to maintain a 7+2 stripe width. To maintain the same level of protection (dual parity) while utilizing the remaining 8 disks, the system dynamically adjusts the RAID policy for new writes and reconstructed data toRAID 6 (6+2). This ensures that the data remains protected by two parity chunks even with a reduced disk count. This "shrinkage" of the stripe width allows the system to remain in a "healthy" protected state rather than staying in "degraded" mode indefinitely.

Huawei documentation highlights several key advantages of object storage for modern data requirements. Option A is correct because object storage primarily uses RESTful APIs (HTTP/HTTPS), which are firewall-friendly and accessible globally over the internet, unlike NFS/CIFS/SMB which are generally restricted to local area networks (LANs).

Option B is correctbecause object storage allows forextensible metadata. Users can attach custom tags to objects, enabling powerful data searching and automated lifecycle management without needing an external database to track file attributes.Option D is correctbecause object storage uses aflat namespacerather than the tree-shaped directory structure of NAS. In a flat structure, adding more nodes to the system does not increase the complexity of data retrieval, allowing for nearly infinite horizontal scalability. Option C is incorrect in this context because the tree-shaped directory is actually a limitation of NAS that causes performance degradation at high scales, whereas object storage avoids this hierarchy to improve expansion capabilities.

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.

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.

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.