What is the purpose of capacity planning?
To predict storage needs before al the space is consumed.
You do this by estimating the personnel, storage, computer hardware, software, and connection infrastructure resources required over some future period of time.
What are some different kinds of information may servers store?
User home directories
Department project directories
Multimedia content
Archived content
Collaboration software content
What is a key factor in capacity planning for servers?
The role of the server.
What technologies help administrators enforce capacity management rules?
Disk quotas: Enforce a consumption limit
Data deduplication: Eliminates duplicate information found in blocks of data for more efficient storage capacity use
Compression: Reduces the space consumed by files by using compression algorithms
What is STaaS?
Storage as a service.
Provides scalable, inexpensive, and managed storage solutions that may reduce the amount of on-premises storage required.
Services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, AWS, Microsoft OneDrive.
What are different RPM for devices?
5400 RPMs -7200 RPMs: common in laptops and desktops
10,000 RPMs- 15,000 RPMs: common in servers
Compare SSD and HDD.
Noise—SSD is quieter
Power—SSD consumes less power
Capacity—SSD and HDD are about equal
Cost—HDD is cheaper per GB of capacity
Durability—SSD is less susceptible to physical damage
HDDs are appropriate for servers that demand a high capacity at an economical rate, especially when performance is less of a concern.
SSDs are appropriate in servers that support performance-oriented applications, especially those without too many write functions.
What are hybrid drives and what are the primary types?
Hybrid drives combine the best attributes of HDDs and SSDs
Dual- drive hybrid: 2 physical drives are installed (one SSD and one HDD) The user or the OS then manages what data is stored on each drive.
SSD Hybrid: The SSD and the HDD are contained in the same physical device. Data management is handled by the storage device itself.
What is DAS and what are types of DAS?
Direct attached storage aka internal storage.
ex.
SATA—Serial Advanced Technology Attachment.
Uses a dedicated connection for reading from the drive and a separate dedicated channel for writing to the drive.
Offers 6 Gbps speed and is half duplex.
Commonly found in workstations or servers where cost is important and speed is not.
SAS—Serial Attached SCSI.
Offers12 Gbps and is full duplex.
More scalable supports up to 128 devices.
Has error checking capabilities.
Good choice when performance is important but cost is still a consideration.
NVMe—Non-Volatile Memory Express:
The future standard for server drive interfaces.
Offers 32 Gbps Designed for use with SSD.
Relies on PCIe bus (which makes it so powerful).
Transfers are basically 1 Gbps per PCIe lane.
Its benefits are only realized for large file transfers.
What is the M.2 specification?
Next generation form factor, defines a interface conection for SSDs, SATA, and NVMe drives.
Connects easily to server, laptop, and desktop motherboards by using the USB, PCIe 3.0, and SATA interfaces.
What is the difference between M.2 B standard and M.2 M standard?
M.2 B- has 6 pins on the smaller tab
M.2 M- has 5 pins on the smaller tab
PCIe
An expansion bus on the motherboard.
Expansion cards may be attached to the bus, including NICs, graphics cards, and SSD controllers.
Devices connected to the PCIe bus may communicate at up to 15.75 Gbps
PCIe devices tend to be more expensive than the more common SATA III storage solutions.
Tell me about eSATA.
Transfers data at the 6 Gbps rate defined by SATA III.
Considered to be a workstation-level technology.
USB3 and USB-C have largely replaced eSATA as external storage busses.
What USB standard uses A or B connectors?
USB 1, 2 , and 3
Which USB standard is type C introduced?
USB 3
What speed does USB 1 work up to?
Up to 12 Mbits/s
What speed does USB 2 work up to?
Up to 480 Mbits/s
What speed does USB 3 work up to?
Up to 5 Gbits/s
What speed does USB 4 work up to?
Up to 40 Gbits/s
Which USB standard uses strictly type C connectors?
USB 4
What is the use of SD cards for servers?
Could be used to facilitate data transfers from external devices.
External card readers may also attach to servers via USB connectors.
What is JBOD?
Just a bunch of Disks.
A term for a collection of HDDs that are often different sizes and specifications.
Not organized into a normal RAID array, they are instead aggregated together into one or more logical drives.
Easy to scale, and manage it is flexible.
There are no performance or fault tolerance benefits.
What is the difference between hardware and software RAID?
Software RAID:
Relies on the OS to manage the RAID array.
Less expensive
Fewer components to manage
Less flexible
Consumes system and OS resources
Hardware RAID:
Relies on a separate controller to manage the array. ( A PCIe card or MB chip).
Faster
More flexible
Does not consume server resources
More expensive
More components to manage
More complex
What is SMB and NFS?
Both are file sharing protocols.
SMB = Server message block
is the standard Windows protocol for sharing.
Accessible for Linux using Samba
Uses TCP port 445
Network file System.
Common in Unix environments.
Includes the ability to protect the shared directories by using permissions.
Configured in Linux by using the /etc/exports file
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Server Admin Concepts8
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Virtualization and cloud computing22
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Physical and Network Security Concepts22
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Managing Physical Assets45
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Managing Server Hardware38
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Configuring Storage Management36
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Installing and Configuring an Operating system52
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Troubleshooting OS, Application, and Network Configurations43
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Managing Post- Installation Administrative tasks58
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Managing Data Security16
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Managing Service and Data Availiblity47
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Decommissioning Servers6
