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

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.

Huawei OceanProtect utilizes source deduplication to optimize the data protection process. In traditional backup scenarios, the entire dataset is sent over the network to the backup target, which can consume significant bandwidth and time. With source deduplication, the storage system or backup agent identifies redundant data blocks at the source—before they are sent over the network.

By comparing new data chunks against a local cache of already-transmitted fingerprints, the system ensures that only unique, non-duplicate data is physically moved across the production-to-backup link. This significantlyreduces network bandwidth consumptionand effectively increases thelogical backup bandwidth, as the system can process larger volumes of data without being limited by physical network throughput. Consequently, thebackup window is shortened, allowing organizations to meet tight RPOs even in environments with limited network resources or massive data growth.

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 3DC (Three-Data-Center) solution is designed for high-level business continuity, typically involving a local HA site and a remote DR site. The documentation supports three main topological configurations to meet different reliability and performance needs:

Cascading Network (Option B):Site A (Production) replicates to Site B (Local DR), and Site B then replicates to Site C (Remote DR). This reduces the pressure on the production site (Site A) as it only manages one replication link.

Parallel Network (Option C):Site A replicates directly to both Site B and Site C simultaneously. This provides better protection for the data at Site C, but increases the load and bandwidth requirements on Site A.

DR Star Network (Option A):This is a specific variant of the multi-site protection architecture used in Huawei'sHyperMetro + Remote Replicationscenarios. It typically combines an active-active setup between Site A and B with an asynchronous link to Site C, ensuring that even if two sites fail, the third contains a survivable copy of the data.

The SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, which is primarily used for Windows-based file sharing, relies on a centralized authentication and authorization mechanism to manage permissions in an enterprise environment. In Huawei OceanStor NAS documentation, Active Directory (AD) is the primary domain controller system supported for the SMB protocol.

When a Huawei storage system joins an Active Directory domain, it can authenticate users and groups defined in the AD, allowing for seamless integration with Windows environments. WhileLDAP (Option A)andNIS (Option B)are supported by Huawei NAS for theNFSprotocol (typically used in Linux/Unix environments), the SMB protocol is inherently designed to work with the Kerberos and NTLM authentication provided by Microsoft’s Active Directory. This ensures that NTFS-style ACLs (Access Control Lists) can be properly mapped and enforced across the network.

In Huawei OceanStor storage systems utilizing RAID 2.0+ and the SmartMatrix architecture, the "write penalty" associated with traditional RAID is mitigated through Full-Stripe Writes. In a partial write (where only some data in a stripe is updated), a RAID 5 setup usually suffers a write penalty of 4 (Reading old data, reading old parity, writing new data, writing new parity).

However, Huawei's controllers utilize a large cache to aggregate incoming data. When enough data is collected to fill an entire stripe (e.g., 8 data chunks plus 1 parity chunk in an 8+1 RAID 5 setup), the system performs aFull-Stripe Write. In this scenario, the system calculates the parity in the CPU/cache and writes the entire stripe to the disks at once. Since no old data or old parity needs to be read from the physical disks before writing, the disk-levelwrite penalty is 0. This significantly enhances the write performance of hybrid arrays, especially those using mechanical HDDs which are highly sensitive to the latency of extra read/write operations.

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.

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.

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.

This statement aligns with the market analysis provided in Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific pre-sales documentation regarding the "Yottabyte Era". Huawei highlights that the nature of data is shifting away from structured databases toward massive volumes of unstructured data, such as high-definition video, medical images, IoT sensor logs, and AI training datasets.

By 2025, it is projected that80% of new data generatedwill be unstructured. This trend is the primary driver behind the development of the OceanStor Pacific series, which is ascale-out distributed storagesystem specifically designed to handle the capacity and performance requirements of unstructured data at scale. Traditional centralized arrays (SAN/NAS) are often ill-equipped to handle the sheer volume and file counts associated with this growth, necessitating the move toward distributed architectures that can scale horizontally to hundreds of petabytes.

This statement is true as it describes a core architectural component of the Huawei SmartMatrix fully-interconnected design. In the new-generation OceanStor hybrid flash systems, multiple controllers within a cluster must communicate at extremely high speeds to synchronize cache data and manage metadata across the entire storage pool.

To achieve the low latency required for these operations, Huawei utilizesRDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access)for controller interconnection. RDMA allows one controller to access the memory of another controller directly, bypassing the operating system's kernel and reducing CPU overhead. This high-speed back-end interconnection (often operating at 100 Gbps or higher) ensures that data can be mirrored between controllers almost instantaneously, which is critical for supporting symmetric active-active services and maintaining 99.9999% availability. By using RDMA, Huawei can deliver "flash-like" performance even in hybrid arrays by ensuring that the architectural bottlenecks of traditional controller communication are eliminated.

This statement is false because it confuses RTO (Recovery Time Objective) with RPO (Recovery Point Objective). In Huawei’s Disaster Recovery (DR) documentation, these two metrics are defined as follows:

RPO (Recovery Point Objective):Refers to the maximum amount of data loss an organization can tolerate, measured in time. It indicates the "point in time" to which data must be recovered (e.g., "we can only lose 1 hour of data").

RTO (Recovery Time Objective):Refers to the duration of time within which a business process must be restored after a disaster. It measures how long the system can be down before the business is significantly impacted (e.g., "the system must be back online within 4 hours").

The question describes the "point in time" (RPO) but labels it as RTO. In a high-availability solution likeHyperMetro, the RTO and RPO are both theoretically zero, meaning no data loss and no downtime.

According to Huawei’s technical documentation on storage media, Solid State Drives (SSDs) fundamentally differ from Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in their physical construction and data access methods. HDDs rely on mechanical components, including rotating platters and moving read/write heads. This mechanical nature introduces "rotational latency" and "seek time," which inherently limit the number of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS).

In contrast, Huawei’s OceanStor SSDs utilize flash memory chips (NAND Flash) and a high-performance controller. Because there are no moving parts, the "seek time" is eliminated, allowing for near-instantaneous data access. This results in significantly higher random IOPS and much lower latency (often measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds). Furthermore, Huawei’sFlashLink® technologyfurther optimizes the collaboration between the storage controller and the SSDs, ensuring that even as the drive fills up, the performance remains consistent and the latency remains low. Therefore, in any performance-oriented storage environment, SSDs are the preferred choice over traditional HDDs.

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.

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.