D-PSC-DS-01 Dell PowerScale Design v2 Practice Questions
Prepare for D-PSC-DS-01 with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $230 USD
- Level
- Specialist (Dell Technologies Proven Professional)
- Valid for
- Aligned with Dell Proven Professional certification lifecycle
Domains covered on the exam 5
- Discover Customer Infrastructure and Requirements14%
- PowerScale Infrastructure Design and Plan18%
- Platform Infrastructure36%
- PowerScale Management, Identity Management, and Advanced Applications24%
- Monitor and Workflow Analysis tools8%
- 1
A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for their primary PowerScale cluster. The business requires an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 15 minutes. They want to ensure that if the primary site goes down, clients can be redirected to the DR site and continue working, with the ability to easily fail back once the primary site is restored. Which software feature must be included in the design?
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Correct answer: A
SyncIQ is the OneFS software feature responsible for asynchronous replication between PowerScale clusters. It supports aggressive RPOs (like 15 minutes) and provides the specific failover and failback mechanisms required for a robust disaster recovery solution.
- 2
Review the following customer requirements for a new PowerScale implementation:
- Move data older than 1 year to an on-premises ECS object storage system to free up primary capacity.
- Deduplicate home directory data to maximize storage efficiency.
- Prevent marketing users from exceeding 5 TB of storage.
Which combination of OneFS software features must you license and configure to meet ALL these requirements? (Select THREE)
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Correct answer: A, B, D
CloudPools is required to tier data to an external object store (like Dell ECS or public cloud). SmartDedupe is required to deduplicate the home directory data. SmartQuotas is required to enforce the 5 TB capacity limit for the marketing users.
CloudPools is required to tier data to an external object store (like Dell ECS or public cloud). SmartDedupe is required to deduplicate the home directory data. SmartQuotas is required to enforce the 5 TB capacity limit for the marketing users.
CloudPools is required to tier data to an external object store (like Dell ECS or public cloud). SmartDedupe is required to deduplicate the home directory data. SmartQuotas is required to enforce the 5 TB capacity limit for the marketing users.
- 3
When designing a SmartConnect deployment for a workload heavily utilizing the SMBv3 protocol, which IP allocation method is considered the Dell best practice?
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Correct answer: B
SMB is a stateful protocol. If a node fails in a Dynamic IP pool, the IP address moves to a surviving node, but the SMB state (locks, handles) does not move with it. This causes the client to reconnect to a new node that doesn't recognize its state, leading to application errors. Therefore, Static IP allocation is the strict best practice for SMB, forcing the client to resolve a new IP and establish a clean connection if a node fails (unless SMB Continuous Availability is specifically configured).
- 4
An architect is sizing a new PowerScale solution for a healthcare customer. The workload consists of a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). The customer has 4 PB of existing image data that is rarely accessed after 90 days, but they generate about 5 TB of new, highly active data daily that requires sub-millisecond latency for immediate physician review. Which node architecture best meets these requirements while optimizing for cost?
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Correct answer: C
This is the optimal design. The highly active new data requiring sub-millisecond latency is best suited for F-series (all-flash) nodes. The massive 4 PB of rarely accessed data is best suited for A-series (archive) nodes to keep costs down. SmartPools is the OneFS feature that automates the tiering of this data based on age or access patterns.
- 5
A financial analytics firm is planning to migrate their high-frequency trading data analysis workload to Dell PowerScale. The workload profile shows a massive amount of small files (average size 4KB to 8KB) that are heavily metadata-driven. Which architectural consideration is most critical when sizing the PowerScale cluster for this specific workload?
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Correct answer: C
In OneFS, files smaller than 128KB (depending on protection level and node pool) are typically mirrored rather than FEC striped. This means a 4KB file with 3x mirroring takes 12KB of raw space, plus 8KB of inode metadata (which is also mirrored). Therefore, small file workloads require significantly more raw capacity per logical terabyte than large file workloads.
- 6
A media and entertainment company requires a storage solution for 8K video rendering. They need a system capable of extreme sequential throughput to feed their render farm. Which PowerScale node family is specifically engineered and best suited as the active tier for this unstructured data use case?
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Correct answer: A
The F-series (All-Flash) nodes are designed for extreme performance, delivering the massive sequential throughput and low latency required for demanding workloads like 8K video rendering, HPC, and AI/Analytics.
