ENTERPRISE STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

EXERCISES
EXERCISE 1

Choose the correct answer

1. What is true regarding Network-Attached Storage (NAS)? Choose two.

a. It is a storage device with a direct physical link to a server, a workstation, or a personal computer
b. Dedicated storage server connecting to devices through a LAN or WAN
c. Some components of the NAS system are the Head Unit, the Network Interface Card, an optimized operating system
d. It is a network-based storage with block-level access

2. What is true regarding information availability? Choose two.

a. It is the ability to make information and related resources accessible as needed, when they are needed, where they are needed
b. The timeliness characteristic of the information availability means that information should be accessible to the right user when
required
c. MTTF is calculated by dividing the total uptime by the number of failures
d. For a Tier 3 datacenter (99.982% uptime), the yearly downtime is around 1.6 hours.

3. What is true regarding the data lifecycle?

a. It starts with the storage and ends with the destruction
b. It starts with the creation and ends with the archival
c. A security governance should be in force at each step
d. It is applicable only to documents processed in an enterprise

4. What is the availability for a system having 2 years MTBF and 1 month MTTR ?
a. 96%
b. 97.6%
c. 4%
d. More inputs are required to compute the availability
5. Which of the following describes the maximum amount of time a mission essential function can operate without the systems it
depends on before significantly impacting the organization?

a. MTBF
b. MTTR
c. RTO
d. RPO

6. Choose what is true regarding high availability. Choose two.

a. The network redundancy can be achieved through multipathing and load balancing
b. It is recommended to use different credentials to access the backup and the main
c. The physical site itself cannot be a point of failure
d. We can only perform full backups of our databases

7. We want to build a document storage system which will contain, on top of the NoSQL application database, a storage space where
documents will be stored. We want the database and the storage to be in the cloud for all its advantages. Choose two.
a. Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB can be used respectively for document storage and the database
b. Amazon S3 buckets mostly contain objects that are often written to
c. Amazon DynamoDB provides a degree of flexibility allowing to create items attributes at the time of the creation of the items
d. Objects stored in S3 buckets can be accessed only at sometimes predefined by AWS

8. What is true regarding the security in the storage? Choose two.

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 a. The path between the server and the storage controller can be secured through an isolated network, be it physical or virtual
through VLANs
b. In the symmetric encryption, an encryption function uses a fixed-size secret key to encrypt an arbitrary-size plain text to cipher
text
c. In Amazon S3, the access control lists (ACLs) are always enabled
d. There are no threats on the path between the user and the server as the storage is not done on the server but rather on the
disks

9. A file with a size of 20MB is stored on a disk space of 22MB. Assuming the storage system typically behaves as for that above file,
what is its storage efficiency?
a. 110%
b. 90.0%
c. 47.6%
d. More inputs are required to compute the storage efficiency

10. Which of the below approaches can be used to improve storage efficiency? Choose two.
a. Thin provisioning
b. Deduplication
c. Multipathing
d. Load balancing

11. The approach for improving storage efficiency where storage is provisioned based on how much space users need at any given time
is called
a. Thin provisioning
b. Deduplication
c. Zero-block elimination
d. Compression

12. The approach for improving storage efficiency where excessive copies of data are eliminated is called
a. Thin provisioning
b. Deduplication
c. Zero-block elimination
d. Compression

13. What is true regarding compression? Choose two.

a. With lossless compression, file sizes are reduced by compression algorithms without losing any information in the file
b. With lossy compression, original files can be fully reconstructed from the compressed file
c. Lempel-Ziv-Welch is a lossless compression algorithm
d. Compression and RAID efficiency are equivalent

14. Choose what is true regarding objects stored in S3 buckets. Choose two.
a. S3 buckets mostly contain objects that are often written to
b. Objects stored include images, backups, data, movies, CSV files
c. Through the Console, you can upload a file up to 160GB
d. Objects stored can be accessed only at sometimes predefined by AWS
15. Choose what is true regarding Amazon DynamoDB. Choose two.
a. Items have a fixed number of attributes
b. The left menu “Explore items” allow performing actions on table items
c. Deleting items is not possible once they are created
d. “String” and “Number” are some data types for attributes with Amazon DynamoDB

EXERCISE 2

1. What is a single point of failure?

2. List 05 single points of failure in a typical datacenter infrastructure. Suggest for each at least one approach for eliminating the single
point of failure.

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3. What does the disaster recovery consist in? List 03 typical causes of disaster.
4. What are the differences between file storage, block storage and object storage?
5. In which scenario is Network-Attached Storage (NAS) preferable to Direct-Attached Storage (DAS).
6. What is the best case scenario for using SAN ?
7. List 07 good practices in performing backups.
8. List and define 03 types of backup.
9. How does compression differ from deduplication?
10. Define inline deduplication and post-process deduplication.
11. What is the difference between confidentiality and integrity of information?
12. Indicate if the below statements are true or false
a. With symmetric encryption, the same secret key is used to encrypt the plain text and to decrypt the ciphertext
b. With asymmetric encryption, both the public and the private keys are shared with the sender by the recipient
c. RSA is an asymmetric encryption algorithm
d. An electronic signature allows a person to electronically express his/her agreement to the terms of a given document
13. What characterizes a hashing function ?
14. List 02 approaches to secure the path between the server and the storage controller, and the path between the storage controller to
the storage device.
15. In which cloud computing services do the customer have the least responsibility regarding the cloud infrastructure?

EXERCISE 3

We want to implement disaster recover on an SQL Server database, through automatic databases backups.

1. Connect with your Windows Authentication account

2. Create a user named seasuser which has sufficient permissions to create a database and to use the SQL Server Agent (to schedule
jobs).
a. The user should be created under SQL Server Authentication.
b. The user should have dbcreator role
c. The user should be mapped to the roles SQLAgentUserRole, SQLAgentReaderRole and SQLAgentOperatorRole in the msdb
database
3. Configure SQL Server to allow connection of users with SQL Server Authentication
4. Connect with seasuser and create the database seasdb, then 02 tables student and lecturer, and populate those tables with 03 rows
data.
5. Using the SQL Server Agent, create a job named seasdbbackupjob to perform the automatic backup of the database seasdb
a. When scheduling the job, consider 5 min backups from the time you are scheduling the job
b. Open the Job Activity Monitor interface and take a screenshot of at least two executions of the job seasdbbackupjob
6. What is the Transact-SQL script to perform the backup of the database seasdb to DISK in the file C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL
Server\MSSQL16.MSSQLSERVER\ MSSQL\Backup\seasdb.bak ?
7. Delete the table lecturer previously created (we assume a “disaster” caused losing data of the table lecturer).
8. Perform manual restoration of the database seasdb – confirm the deleted table teacher now reappears.

EXERCISE 4

We are creating on AWS an application to manage schools. We want to create a database to contain data of the application. For this
question we will focus on students and courses.

1. Through the AWS Management Console, create two tables named “student” and “course” with the below partition keys and sort
keys. The partition keys and sort keys are of type “String”. Submit 02 screenshots for the 02 tables.

Table Partition key Sort key

student snumber sname
course cnumber cname

2. Create two additional attributes “description” and “curriculum” of type “String” for the table “course”. Submit 02 screenshots while
creating each of the attributes.

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 3. Create 2 items with cname’s “Calculus” and “Cloud” for the table “course”. Submit 01 screenshot showing the list of the items of
“course”.
4. Delete the item “Calculus”. Submit a screenshot showing the updated list of items.
5. Update the item with cname “Cloud” to set the cname to “Cloud Computing”. Submit a screenshot showing the updated list of items.
6. Create 02 items for the table “student”. Submit a screenshot for each of them.
a. The first with additional attributes “phone” of type “String” and “level” of type “Number”
b. The second with the additional attribute “department” of type “String”

EXERCISE 5

As a company is growing and having collaborators all over the country, they would like to transfer their local document repositories to the
cloud, to allow their collaborators to access what they need for their work, from a single source. They are planning to subscribe to Amazon
S3 for this.

1. Through the AWS Management Console, create a bucket named “workbucket2390”. Keep access control lists disabled.
2. Upload two lightweight files (one PNG picture and one PDF document, less than 200KB each) to the bucket.
a. Submit a screenshot showing the list of 02 files.
b. Open the object representing each file and display the link to publicly access the file. Submit 02 screenshots showing for
each file, the link for its public access and 2 other information around which concerns the file.
c. Copy the link to the PDF document to another tab of the same browser and press Enter. Submit a screenshot of what is
displayed. The screenshot should also show the link in the browser search bar.
3. While keeping the additional browser tab with the link to the PDF document open, return to the previous tab and perform the below
actions and submit a screenshot for each .
a. Enable access control list
b. Unblock public access to the PDF file
c. Make the PDF file public
d. Refresh the public link to the PDF file in the other tab

EXERCISE 6

1. Write in Python a Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm. The below snippet may help.
a. w = NIL;
b. while ( read a character k )
c. {
d. if wk exists in the dictionary
e. w = wk;
f. else
g. add wk to the dictionary;
h. output the code for w;
i. w = k;
j. }
2. Write in Python a Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) decompression algorithm
a. read a character k;
b. output k;
c. w = k;
d. while ( read a character k )
e. /* k could be a character or a code. */
f. {
g. entry = dictionary entry for k;
h. output entry;
i. add w + entry[0] to dictionary;
j. w = entry;
k. }

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