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?

You are designing a new Isilon system to store mobile device video clips. The files average
800MB in size and the application team tells you to plan for up to 15,000 new files per day. The
product manager for this new service wants enough capacity for the first year and reminds you
that response time for storing and retrieving the files is important for customer satisfaction.
The files will be accessed frequently for the first 48 hours after creation, and then very infrequently
after seven days. You plan to use N+2:1 protection, and will configure a SmartPools policy to

move inactive files to an archive tier within the cluster.
Which configuration best fits the project requirements?

You have been working with a customer to size a new Isilon cluster for their environment. You
recently determined that a cluster with three X400 nodes with 1TB drives and 48 GB RAM would
be a perfect starting point for their workflow, but will have extra capacity. The customer just
informed you that they have decided to also use the cluster for a small home directory
environment and implement SmartQuotas.
Which configuration changes should you consider?

Your customer has an existing Isilon cluster comprised of five NL-Series nodes. They have a new
project that will quadruple their current throughput requirements. Upon reviewing reports in
InsightIQ, you see that the aggregate external network throughput is peaking at 600MB/s. The
customer states that data is only active for the first 7 days, but they keep it indefinitely.
Which recommendation best supports their growth requirements?

A potential customer has about 540TB of NetApp running in ONTAP 7-Mode. They are willing to
let you gather some workload data. They have LDAP and Active Directory authentication and
primarily Windows Clients. They are very interested in Automated Tiering and Large Scale
Archives. They are not certain about the workflows from the Marketing Department. The Content
Team will only say they need to acquire 300 TB within 90 days. They do not know the average file
size or the number of aggregates they are managing.
Which tools would you use to gather information to do your Isilon sizing?

A potential customer has 540TB Raw capacity of NetApp running in ONTAP 7-Mode. They are
willing to let you gather some workload data. Their authentication sources are LDAP and Active
Directory. Their users are primarily Windows Clients. They are very interested in Automated
Tiering and Large Scale Archives. They are not certain about the workflows from the Marketing
Department. The Content Team will only say they need to acquire 300 TB within 90 days. They do
not know the average file size or the number of aggregates they are managing.
Which tool(s) would you use next to complete your sizing?

A potential customer uses a solution from an EMC competitor for NFS storage in their main data
center. The existing arrays are five years old, and the customer would like to consolidate them into
a single new system. The entire workload is generated by eight Linux hosts connected to the
arrays that process video files. The customer informs you they are not able to collect performance
information from the existing arrays.
Which tools can capture the workload requirements?

You get a call from a customer that has just added 200 user connections to the cluster. They want
to know how fast they are writing data with these new users.
What tool would you use to gather this information?

You are called into an opportunity, you would like to get more information on the data skew of the
filer. The customer has a supported filer.
What assessment tool would you use to generate this information?

A customer has grown 2 PB in the last year. The cluster performs well most times of the day, but
occasionally during the day, the customer notices a decrease in performance. You have been told
that ‘tree-deletes’ are taking too long and can only be run on weekends.
What would you recommend to speed up the ‘tree-deletes’?