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 asked about a potential new customer and you would like to get more information on the
data skew of their filer. They have 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’?

A customer has eight X400 24GB RAM nodes that support 400 client connections. They will be
adding 400 more clients in the next few months. They are looking at adding an A-Series node to
the cluster to help with client connections. Before they start adding client connections, what
hardware change do you recommend?

You are asked to size a cluster for a file sharing environment. nfsstat indicates that no more than
10% of the requests are namespace operations (e.g. GETADDR, SETADDR). There will be
10,000 active Linux users, connecting over NFS.
Which cluster configuration would you recommend?

Your customer’s site uses an old X-Series cluster, and they are interested in consolidating their
two primary workflows. iostat shows that one of the applications is sensitive to latency, while isi
statistics indicates sensitivity to disk response times. There are approximately 1000 users
accessing 70 TB of file data. Which node type would you recommend?

A customer is making a decision between Isilon and a competitor’s offering. They currently have
100TB of usable capacity and are forecasting 100% growth per year for the next three years,
which will require them to lease additional space in their co-located data center. The CFO finds
ROI and TCO to be important decision criteria.
Which statement best emphasizes the value of Isilon for this customer?

A potential customer requires 4 PB of usable capacity to store media files. The workloads are a
combination of streaming video delivery and long term archive of video assets.
There is very little space available in the customer’s datacenter, so physical density is very
important. The customer is concerned about performance impact and potential data loss when
using 3 TB or larger drives.
What Isilon capabilities can address the customer’s concerns?

A potential customer requires 800 TB of usable capacity to store medical images for their network
of health clinics. The IT department has limited staff and currently manages four storage arrays
from other vendors. During a meeting with the Director of IT you learn that the company is
considering a solution from a competitor of EMC using two of the existing arrays and two new
arrays. Which Isilon capabilities would show a better ROI for the customer?

Your customer’s initial use case was Home Directories. They implemented the cluster with four
1Gbps ports and LACP. They are planning to expand their cluster to support their core file
services. They plan to upgrade their network infrastructure to 10 GbE to facilitate this.
What are two design impacts this change will have?