IBM Assessment: Storage Technical V1 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A customer reports intermittent application timeouts after migrating a critical database from direct-attached SSDs to a shared SAN. Host metrics show normal CPU and memory, but storage latency occasionally spikes from 2 ms to 80+ ms for several seconds. The SAN uses multipathing and a mix of workloads (VMs and backups). What is the MOST appropriate first architecture-level investigation to identify the root cause?

A storage design requires high availability across two independent fabrics and must support nondisruptive maintenance on SAN switches. During a planned switch firmware upgrade, several hosts lose all paths to multiple LUNs despite having dual HBAs and multipathing configured. Which design/verification step would MOST likely have prevented this outage?

A customer wants to modernize storage for mixed workloads: a latency-sensitive OLTP database, a large VDI environment, and an unstructured archive tier. They require data reduction, encryption at rest, and the ability to replicate critical data to a DR site with low operational overhead. Which IBM storage product/approach BEST aligns with these requirements while minimizing tool sprawl?

A customer is using virtualization-based storage services (pooling, thin provisioning, snapshots, replication) and wants to add a third-party array behind the virtualization layer. Their top concern is maintaining consistent availability and performance SLAs during backend array maintenance. What is the MOST critical compatibility/architecture consideration before onboarding the third-party array?

A customer needs to protect a set of VMware datastores with very low RPO and fast recovery. They also require frequent test/dev refreshes without impacting production performance. Which combination of capabilities BEST meets these goals with minimal production impact?

During implementation of a new block storage environment, a team enables thin provisioning and aggressive oversubscription to speed onboarding. Months later, multiple hosts experience sudden write failures and filesystems go read-only. The array shows pool capacity at 100% used with multiple thin volumes. What is the BEST corrective action plan that addresses both immediate recovery and long-term prevention?

A Linux host with multipathing connects to an IBM block storage system. After presenting new LUNs, the host sees the devices but multipath does not create a consolidated /dev/mapper device. The SAN team confirms zoning and masking are correct. Which is the MOST likely configuration issue to check on the host?

A customer configures host clusters to use shared LUNs. After a storage maintenance event, cluster nodes intermittently report SCSI reservation conflicts and occasional data corruption alerts. Investigation shows two different clusters can see the same LUN due to an access control mistake. Which control is MOST effective to prevent this class of incident in the future?

After enabling encryption at rest on a storage system, performance complaints arise specifically during high-write periods. Read latency remains mostly unchanged. Array health is green, and no port congestion is observed. What is the MOST plausible explanation and the best next troubleshooting step?

A storage admin receives alerts: response times are high and throughput is inconsistent for a subset of volumes. The workload is a batch job that runs nightly and coincides with backup windows. On the array, cache is not saturated, but backend disk utilization is very high with long queue depths on one RAID group. What is the MOST effective remediation that addresses the root cause while preserving resilience?