You meet a customer for the first time. They explain that their current environment for NAS does
not meet their needs. You want to make sure that Isilon is a good fit for their needs.
What would be a good prequalifying question to ask?

You are reviewing an opportunity with a trusted advisor. You both discover gaps in the initial
solution design.
Each iterative discussion with the customer helps you define the solution better. The documents
produced capture the customer’s requirements.
What else needs to occur to refine the sizing considerations?

When conducting high-level interviews with stakeholders of a project, what are the key questions
that should be asked?

When designing Isilon solutions, what issues should you pay special attention to?

When designing Isilon solutions, which issue should you pay special attention to?

Your customer purchased an Isilon cluster with eight X400 nodes for Home Directories. Your
follow-up discussions have uncovered an opportunity to expand the cluster to support the Legal
Department. As you prepare to complete the Workflow Profile Document, you meet with the
customer to discuss data protection.
Which key areas should you address?

You have had several discussions with your customer in the processor design industry. They have
stated that they want a Scale-Out NAS platform for their design environment. Their most
significant responses were “We have 125 design engineers accessing large diagrams and we
need high throughput to support them. Can we also get the highest performance available? We
need to stay ahead of our competitors.” Other areas you discussed were their data retention
policies and workflow after the chip design is completed. They plan to archive the design files but
the files must stay on line.
What is your initial node recommendation?

You have gathered information from your customer about their current NAS environment. They
indicated they are having performance and time-out issues with their clients accessing the
storage. Currently over 5000 clients are simultaneously accessing the NAS; however, this will
double in the next year.
Based on this information, what recommendations for a new Isilon cluster would you give to the
customer based on this information?

A cost-conscious customer is exploring Isilon for their PACS archive. The workflow consists of one
hundred cases a day, each including fifty 60MB image files. However, each image will have fivehundred 64kB metadata files associated with it. They currently have six years worth of archived
data. They will need to migrate to the new solution and they need to plan for an additional three
years of archive capacity.
Which solution would you recommend to fit their capacity needs?

You are sizing an Isilon cluster for a new customer. Analyzing their workflow you determine that
they have a large block random read workload.
What is the most important factor to consider when sizing this solution?