Information storage management

Explore Fibre Channel and SAN as high-speed, lossless network technology that interconnects servers, storage, and switches to enable centralized storage management and storage consolidation.

Fibre Channel connectivity options: point-to-point, arbitrated loop, and fabric topology, and understand how each supports port connections, hubs, and switch fabrics in SAN.

Explore how iSCSI enables storage access over an IP network using initiators and targets, with gateways bridging IP to FC and SCSI commands carried by TCP/IP.

Discover fibre channel architecture, integrating high-speed channel data with scalable network technology to support millions of devices and world wide names.

Explore NAS devices versus general purpose servers for file serving, highlighting centralized storage, high availability, clustering, and cross-platform client support across Unix and Windows.

Explore how a file system is mounted and organized into a tree rooted at a mount point, with access privileges for network file sharing.

Identify nas components: cpu, memory, network interfaces, and optimized operating system. Explain file and block i/o processing and unified, gateway, and scale-out nas deployments with nfs and cifs.

Explore content addressed storage (cas), an object based system that securely stores fixed content with a content address, delivering authenticity, integrity, location independence, single instance storage, and scalable data protection.

Explore object based storage devices (OSD) that store unstructured data as objects in a flat address space, enabling scalable, secure, and platform independent storage across nodes.

Configure fc san and iSCSI networks by setting fc switches, ports, zones, and lun masking; use cfgadm to probe devices and enable chap with Radius for unidirectional or bidirectional authentication.

Develop a business continuity strategy with backup and replication to safeguard information availability during planned and unplanned outages, using proactive and reactive measures in a virtualized environment.

Explore the client-server backup architecture, where the backup server coordinates storage nodes, devices, catalogs, and metadata to schedule backups, gather data, and restore.

Explore backup strategies in NAS environments for information storage management, including server-based, serverless, and NDMP two-way and three-way methods, and learn how metadata and storage devices optimize performance.

Explore backup targets including tape, disk, and virtual tape libraries, comparing performance, load times, and recovery benefits, and examine how VTL emulates tapes for faster backups meeting offsite requirements.

Explore direct, land based, sand based, and mixed backup topologies, including direct attached and lan free backups, and learn how centralized sharing and dedicated storage nodes optimize performance and cost.

Defines business impact analysis to identify critical processes, assess disruption impacts, and set recovery objectives (RPO, RTO) while outlining backup and replication strategies for information availability.

Reduce backup size and storage requirements, and network bandwidth, by data deduplication, using file-level and subfile techniques with fixed or variable length blocks.

Learn how retention periods derived from RPO shape backup strategies, balancing recovery point objectives, recovery time, and cost across online, offline, and point-in-time copy backups, including bare metal recovery.

Explore disaster recovery and business continuity planning by analyzing RPO and RTO, backup strategies, replication options, and site types to ensure data availability.

Analyze failure analysis to identify single points of failure in physical and virtual infrastructure, and implement redundancy, clustering, vm fault tolerance, nic teaming, and multipathing to ensure data availability.

Explore backup and archiving strategies that protect production data, meet RPO and RTO requirements, and employ full, incremental, and cumulative backups to manage retention and recovery.

Learn how to monitor and manage storage infrastructure to ensure availability, capacity, performance, and security. Develop proactive monitoring processes and use tools to meet service level agreements and optimize resources.

Manage storage infrastructure activities across availability, capacity, performance, security, and reporting. Align servers, databases, networks, and storage arrays with redundancy and backups for reliable performance.

Explore storage infrastructure management challenges from heterogeneous arrays to end-to-end visibility and rapid root-cause analysis, including zoning, LUN masking, and provisioning for non-virtualized and virtualized environments.

Explore how storage security blends storage networking with information security to protect confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability as part of the risk triad of threats, vulnerabilities, and assets.

Encrypt data near its origin to protect data at rest and in transit, using md5 or sha-256, and secure the management access domain with secure channels and event log monitoring.

Describe three storage security domains—application access management, backup, replication, and archive—and identify threats and controls across each domain, including access control, network segmentation, encryption, and role-based access control.

Enforce strict administrative access controls per storage component, audit admin actions, and integrate directory services to avoid single-point control, while securing management networks and backups from threats.

Explore end-to-end monitoring of storage infrastructure components, including accessibility, capacity, performance, security, and connectivity, with proactive alerts and root-cause analysis.

Master defense in depth in fc san security, including CSP fibre channel security protocol authentication, frame-by-frame integrity and confidentiality, plus two-factor authentication and fabric access controls.

Explore CHAP authentication in IP SAN, including one-way, two-way, and mutual authentication schemes, secret management, and MD5 hashing, then examine discovery domain functions and ISNS for device communication.

Explore how Nash secures data and storage networks with Kerberos-based authentication and acls, Unix and Windows permissions, auditing, and network firewalls, including dmz deployment.

Secure storage, virtualization, and cloud environments through access control, encryption, and network isolation. Explore RSA and VMware security tools for two-factor authentication, data protection, and app-aware firewalls.

Explore how cloud computing lowers IT costs through pay-per-use, boosts agility and scalability, and ensures high availability with multi-data-center redundancy, and covers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Explore cloud infrastructure mechanisms, including the logical network perimeter, virtual firewall, and virtual network, plus VPN-enabled isolation between cloud consumers and providers.

Explore cloud computing benefits, including pay-per-use cost reductions, agile scaling, and rapid provisioning, with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models and multi-data-center high availability across deployment options.

Highlight virtual servers as the foundational building block of the cloud, showing rapid on-demand instantiation from image files and independent customization across cloud consumers.

Explore the cloud usage monitor mechanism, a lightweight autonomous program that collects its resource usage data via monitoring, resource, and polling agents, storing metrics in a log database for reporting.

Explore resource replication via hypervisor-based virtualization, and examine readymade environments with pre-installed resources, development kits, and governance tools, plus containers and virtual machines.

Explore cloud challenges from both consumer and provider perspectives, including security and regulation, latency, and vendor lock-in; examine adoption considerations, deployment models, and cost and SLA implications.