H19-308_V4.0 Practice Questions

SAN storage provides several major advantages over direct-attached storage. High resource utilization is achieved because multiple servers can share centralized storage resources instead of leaving capacity stranded on individual servers. High scalability is another advantage because capacity and performance can be expanded by adding disks, controllers, paths, or storage arrays without redesigning each host individually. High reliability comes from enterprise storage features such as redundant controllers, multipathing, RAID protection, hot-swappable components, and mature failover mechanisms. SAN also provides high performance because it delivers block-level access through dedicated storage networks such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or InfiniBand. This makes SAN especially suitable for databases, virtualization platforms, and mission-critical enterprise applications. Therefore, all four listed options are valid advantages of SAN storage.

The new-gen OceanStor hybrid flash storage supports enterprise RAID levels designed to balance performance, capacity efficiency, and fault tolerance. RAID 5 is suitable for scenarios requiring capacity efficiency with single-parity protection. RAID 6 provides stronger reliability by using dual parity, allowing the system to tolerate the failure of two disks in a RAID group. RAID-TP provides even higher protection through triple parity, allowing the system to tolerate three simultaneous disk failures, which is valuable for large-capacity disk pools and high-reliability enterprise environments. RAID 1 is traditional mirroring, but it is not the RAID level emphasized for new-gen OceanStor hybrid flash storage in this question set. Huawei’s RAID 2.0+ architecture focuses on distributed RAID protection and efficient reconstruction. Therefore, the supported options are RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID-TP.

DAS directly connects storage devices to servers without using a shared storage network. Therefore, DAS commonly uses direct-attached interface technologies such as SAS, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand, depending on the server and storage hardware design. SAS is widely used for direct disk or enclosure attachment. Fibre Channel can also be used in direct-attached configurations where a server connects directly to storage ports without an FC switching fabric. InfiniBand is a high-speed interconnect that can be used in specialized direct storage environments requiring high bandwidth and low latency. iSCSI is not normally classified as a DAS interface because it encapsulates SCSI commands over TCP/IP and is used for IP SAN connectivity through Ethernet networks. Therefore, the supported DAS interface protocols are SAS, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand.

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated network for block-level data access. Huawei OceanStor systems support a variety of block-access protocols to ensure compatibility with different infrastructure environments. Fibre Channel (FC) is the industry standard for high-performance enterprise SANs, offering dedicated, low-latency, and lossless delivery. iSCSI provides block-level storage over standard TCP/IP Ethernet networks, making it a flexible and cost-effective alternative for many organizations.

InfiniBand (Option B) is a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect protocol often used in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and specialized SAN clusters to connect compute nodes to storage pools at extremely high speeds. NFS (Option D) is excluded from this answer because it is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) protocol. NFS (Network File System) provides file-level access rather than block-level access. While modern Huawei systems like the OceanStor Dorado series are " Unified Storage " (supporting both SAN and NAS on the same hardware), technically, only A, B, and C are considered SAN protocols.