50 IBM Assessment: Storage Technical V1 Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A customer is comparing block storage and file storage for a virtualization cluster. Which statement correctly describes a key difference between block and file storage?

A team wants to reduce latency for a mission-critical database by placing the most frequently accessed data on faster media automatically. Which concept best matches this requirement?

Which IBM offering is primarily designed as software-defined storage that runs on x86 servers and can provide block, file, and object services?

A storage administrator is asked to explain why RAID is used in enterprise arrays. What is the primary purpose of RAID?

A customer wants to modernize their midrange SAN with consistent low latency and data reduction (compression/deduplication) while keeping Fibre Channel host connectivity. Which IBM product family best fits this requirement?

After presenting new LUNs to a Linux host over multipath SAN, the host intermittently loses access during a path failure. Which configuration issue is the MOST likely cause?

A customer requires the ability to recover files from ransomware encryption that went unnoticed for several days. Which backup/DR approach is MOST appropriate?

A virtualization administrator reports datastore latency spikes after adding more VMs. The storage array shows low CPU utilization, but front-end port utilization is consistently near saturation. What is the BEST next action?

A customer needs a design that can sustain a full site failure with minimal data loss and low recovery time for a critical application. They have two data centers with low-latency links. Which approach BEST meets these goals?

A storage team enables compression and deduplication on a volume, but applications show unexpected write latency increases. Array monitoring shows the system is near its CPU limit during peak ingest. What is the MOST appropriate recommendation?

A customer asks why their backup window is shrinking after moving some workloads to flash. Which metric most directly explains why backup performance may still be limited even with faster storage?

In an IBM SAN environment, what is the primary purpose of zoning on the Fibre Channel fabric?

A customer needs to replicate data between two sites over a long-distance WAN with potential high latency and occasional packet loss. Which replication approach is generally the best fit for maintaining application responsiveness?

A mid-size company wants an all-flash IBM block storage system that is straightforward to deploy for VMware and provides enterprise features like snapshots and replication. Which IBM product family best matches this requirement?

A customer wants to simplify managing multiple heterogeneous IBM and non-IBM storage arrays under a single software-defined layer while enabling data mobility and consistent services (e.g., replication). Which IBM technology is intended for this role?

A storage admin is mapping a new LUN to a host and wants to follow SAN best practices to avoid accidental data exposure to other servers. What is the recommended approach?

A customer reports that a newly attached host cannot see any provisioned volumes. The SAN switch shows the host logged in, and the storage array shows the volumes are created. Which step should be checked next first?

A team is implementing snapshots for quick recovery from logical corruption. They want to minimize performance impact and storage consumption while keeping multiple recovery points. Which practice is most appropriate?

After enabling compression on a storage pool, a customer sees higher latency during peak hours. The array is not capacity constrained. Which is the most likely contributing factor?

A customer is designing a highly available SAN-attached storage environment for a mission-critical database. They want to avoid single points of failure from host to storage. Which design best meets this goal?

A customer asks what a storage "LUN" represents in a SAN environment. Which description is MOST accurate?

An administrator is asked to recommend a best practice to avoid performance hotspots in a storage pool used by multiple critical applications. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A customer wants to reduce the storage footprint of many similar virtual desktop images while keeping them as block volumes. Which technology is MOST aligned with this requirement?

A host connected to two SAN fabrics intermittently loses access to a volume during controller failover events. The storage array shows both fabrics healthy. What is the MOST likely host-side cause?

A storage engineer must present a new block volume to a Linux host over Fibre Channel. Which sequence is MOST appropriate?

A customer needs synchronous replication between two sites to minimize data loss. They ask what trade-off to expect compared to asynchronous replication. What is the BEST answer?

A storage system’s performance dashboard shows normal IOPS but elevated latency during peak hours. Host CPU and network are normal. Which storage-side metric would be MOST useful to check next to confirm contention at the backend disks?

A customer wants to design a SAN zoning policy that improves security and reduces the blast radius of misconfigurations. Which practice is BEST?

A company needs to protect against a ransomware event that can encrypt primary volumes and attempt to delete backups. They want a storage-side control that makes certain backup copies non-modifiable for a defined retention period. What capability BEST matches this requirement?

After replacing an SFP on a Fibre Channel switch port, a host intermittently sees path flaps. Switch logs show frequent link resets on that port. Which is the MOST likely cause?

A customer is learning about storage protocols and asks which statement best describes an iSCSI SAN compared to Fibre Channel. What is the best answer?

An administrator wants to reduce the risk of data corruption due to an unclean shutdown when using write caching on a storage array. Which feature most directly addresses this risk?

A customer wants a quick way to monitor IBM storage hardware health (fans, PSUs, drives) and call-home support events with minimal manual effort. Which approach best fits this requirement in most environments?

A new storage engineer is asked why multipathing software is recommended for SAN-attached hosts. What is the primary benefit?

A customer needs to connect multiple IBM storage systems to a single management plane for inventory, alerting, and basic capacity analytics. They prefer SaaS with minimal on-premises components. Which IBM offering best matches?

A VMware cluster experiences intermittent datastore APD/PDL events after a SAN maintenance window. Basic connectivity is restored, but the events return under load. Which next step is MOST appropriate to isolate the root cause?

A storage team plans to use thin-provisioned volumes to improve utilization. Which operational practice BEST reduces the risk of an outage due to thin pool exhaustion?

A customer is designing a solution that must keep serving data during a single disk failure and also tolerate an additional disk failure while a rebuild is in progress. Which RAID level best meets this requirement?

A company needs to modernize an application that will store billions of unstructured objects and requires S3-compatible access with high durability. Which IBM storage solution is the BEST fit?

After replacing a failed SAN switch, hosts can see the target storage ports but only some LUNs are visible. The storage array reports the host WWPNs logged in. Which cause is MOST likely?

A storage administrator is explaining why RAID is not a backup. Which statement best supports this point?

An IBM Storage FlashSystem customer wants to reduce latency for a critical database by ensuring read operations are served from faster media whenever possible. Which feature most directly addresses this requirement?

A team is zoning a SAN for a new host to access an IBM storage array. Which zoning approach is generally considered a best practice to improve security and simplify troubleshooting?

A company needs to protect against a site outage with minimal data loss while also keeping WAN bandwidth usage low. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A host intermittently loses access to a volume. The storage array shows the volume is online, but the host logs indicate frequent path failovers. What is the most likely cause?

A customer wants to deploy object storage for long-term retention of unstructured data with S3-compatible access and high durability across nodes. Which IBM product best fits this requirement?

During implementation, an administrator wants to minimize the risk of host data corruption when presenting new LUNs to a cluster. Which action is the best practice before putting the volumes into production?

A FlashSystem environment reports pool capacity is unexpectedly growing even though application data is stable. The team uses frequent snapshots for dev/test. What is the most likely explanation?

A customer requires near-instant recovery from ransomware and wants backups that are resistant to deletion or alteration by compromised administrator credentials. Which design best addresses this requirement?

After migrating workloads, a customer wants to validate end-to-end performance from host to IBM storage while isolating whether the bottleneck is in the fabric, host, or array. Which troubleshooting approach is most effective?