Storage Technology Basics

What this chapter covers

Storage Technology Basics is 5% of the Huawei HCIA-Cloud Computing H13-511 exam. It covers storage media and their performance, the DAS, NAS and SAN architectures, block, file and object access, the parts of a storage system, and the key technologies behind them: RAID groups and LUNs, thin and thick provisioning, multipathing and storage protocols.

Questions are single-answer, multiple-answer without a stated count, true/false, drag and drop and typed fill-in-the-blank, often "Which of the following statements is true?". This exam has no exhibit figures, so every question is plain text.

It has 2 outline topics, and one page covers them.

How the topics fit together

Disks are the raw capacity. A storage system groups them, carves them into LUNs or file systems, and presents them to hosts over a network protocol. In FusionCompute, that presented storage becomes a datastore that holds VM disks.

The storage virtualization topic in the FusionCompute chapter builds directly on this chain, so make sure each step is clear.

How to use these pages

Each topic page has the same shape, so you can skim for what you need.

• What it is: the idea in plain words.
• How it works: the mechanism, with tables and examples.
• What to remember for the exam: the facts to memorize.
• Common mistakes: the classic traps.
• Check yourself: three questions to test your understanding.

For each protocol you meet, say whether it carries blocks or files and what network it runs on. The exam often asks which architecture a protocol belongs to.