A customer is inquiring about expanding their primary cluster consisting of six S-Series nodes in
order to improve performance. They have a second cluster with 11 X-Series nodes. Both clusters
leverage 1GbE, but the customer recently installed a 10GbE network that can be utilized. They
also have multiple Fibre Channel SAN arrays in their environment.
They have a variety of workloads on each cluster and are in the process of determining which
workloads belong on which cluster. They have discovered that one of the workloads- a SQL
database that resides on the X-Series node cluster – is experiencing timeouts due to latency. The
database vendor has suggested limiting latency to 5ms or less to eliminate these timeouts.
How do you advise the customer?

A.
Consider migrating data from Isilon to one of their SAN platforms or proposing a new solution to
handle the performance requirements of SQL.

B.
Merge the S-Series nodes and X-Series nodes into one cluster, upgrade the 1GbE to 10GbE,
and leverage SmartPools to allow for the cluster to determine where data should reside.

C.
Suggest the customer consider leveraging SSDs in the new nodes they purchase and GNA to
boost the performance of each cluster.

D.
Recommend they increase the amount of DRAM in the cluster or consider an Accelerator node
in order to increase the amount of cache in their cluster.

Explanation: