H19-308_V4.0 Huawei HCSA-Presales-Storage V4.0 Free Practice Exam Questions (2026 Updated)

Huawei distinguishes Scale-out Storage (OceanStor Pacific) from traditional Array Storage (Centralized SAN/NAS) based on its ability to handle the "Yottabyte Era" requirements of mass data.

Large Volume (Option A):While traditional arrays are limited by the number of controllers and disk enclosures they can address, scale-out storage is designed to aggregate thousands of nodes into a single global namespace, easily managing 10 PB or even EB-level data volumes.

TB-level Bandwidth (Option C):Distributed storage excels at throughput. By utilizing a high-speed interconnected network (InfiniBand or RoCE) and parallel access protocols like DPC, a scale-out cluster can deliver aggregate bandwidth in the range of TB/s, which is critical for HPC and big data analytics.

Elastic Scalability (Option D):Traditional arrays typically scale out to a few dozen controllers. OceanStor Pacific can scale out to 4,096 nodes in a single cluster, providing linear growth in both performance and capacity as nodes are added.

Performance in IOPS (Option B)is not adifferencein the sense that both systems provide IOPS; however, centralized all-flash arrays (Dorado) are often superior for low-latency, high-IOPS structured databases, whereas scale-out storage is primarily defined by its massive bandwidth and capacity scalability.

Unlike traditional storage architectures that use an Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) model where a LUN is "owned" by a primary controller, Huawei OceanStor Dorado utilizes a Symmetric Active-Active architecture. In this design, LUNs do not have a specific owner. Instead, all controllers in a cluster can simultaneously receive and process I/O requests for the same LUN.

This is made possible by theSmartMatrix full-mesh interconnect, which allows any interface module to communicate with any controller, and any controller to access any disk. Because there is no concept of "LUN ownership," there is no need for time-consuming "LUN handovers" if a controller fails. This symmetry eliminates performance bottlenecks, ensures balanced load distribution across all hardware resources, and provides a smoother experience for host-side multipathing software. This architectural shift is a key differentiator for the Dorado series, enabling it to deliver consistent, high-speed performance even during controller maintenance or failure.

Storage Area Network (SAN) storage is designed to provide block-level data access to servers, appearing to the operating system as a locally attached hard drive. Huawei OceanStor SAN solutions (both FC-SAN and IP-SAN) are optimized for high-performance, low-latency applications.

Databases (Option C), such as Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2, are primary use cases for SAN storage because they require high IOPS and low latency for transactional processing. The block-level access allows the database management system to have granular control over data placement and caching.VMware virtualization (Option B)is another core scenario. SANs provide the shared storage necessary for advanced features like VMotion, High Availability (HA), and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). In these environments, multiple ESXi hosts connect to a centralized SAN to access VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) volumes. While Option A (Big Data) and Option D (File Sharing) often use Distributed Storage (OceanStor Pacific) or NAS, the high-concurrency, structured nature of Databases and Virtualization makes them the definitive scenarios for SAN.

The high-end OceanStor Dorado 18000 series is designed with the SmartMatrix 4.0 full-mesh architecture, which provides the industry's highest level of controller redundancy. In a standard configuration with 8 controllers (housed in two enclosures), the system can tolerate extreme failure scenarios without service interruption:

Individual Failures (Option A, C):The system easily handles the failure of one or two controllers as the remaining controllers take over the workload transparently.

Extreme Controller Failure (Option B):Due to the full-mesh interconnect where all controllers share a global memory cache and can access all backend disks, the system can tolerate the failure of up toseven out of eight controllers. As long as one controller remains active, services continue.

Enclosure Failure (Option D):Because the architecture is mirrored across controller enclosures, theentire failure of one controller enclosure(containing 4 controllers) is tolerated.

This level of resilience ensures that mission-critical applications remain online even in the face of catastrophic hardware events, maintaining 99.9999% availability.

In Huawei OceanStor systems, a snapshot is not a full physical copy of the data. Huawei uses a technology called HyperSnap, which typically employs a "Copy-on-Write" (COW) or "Redirect-on-Write" (ROW) mechanism.

When a snapshot is created, the system generates a point-in-time (PIT) logical image of the source LUN. It does not immediately duplicate the data blocks; instead, it records the state of the data at that specific moment. If data in the source LUN is subsequently modified, the original data is preserved (in COW) or new data is written to a new location (in ROW) to maintain the integrity of the snapshot. Because only the metadata and the changed blocks are managed, snapshots are created near-instantaneously and consume very little initial space.

A "full copy" would be referred to as aClone (HyperClone)or aLUN Copy, both of which require a 1:1 ratio of physical storage space relative to the source and take significant time to complete. Therefore, a snapshot is a virtual, point-in-time image, not a full physical duplicate.

Huawei OceanStor NAS systems provide a comprehensive Audit Log feature to track user activities for security and compliance purposes. This feature records metadata related to how files and directories are accessed and manipulated over the SMB or NFS protocols.

According to the Huawei technical reference, the audit mechanism captures a wide range of events, including:

File Opening (Option D):Records when a user accesses a file, including the timestamp and user ID.

File Modification (Option B):Tracks changes made to the content of a file.

File Renaming (Option A) and Deletion (Option C):Records structural changes to the file system, which is critical for identifying potential data theft or accidental loss.

By analyzing these logs, administrators can reconstruct the history of file operations to determine "who did what and when." This is a key component of Huawei’s data security framework, helping organizations meet internal auditing requirements and external regulatory standards.

The new-generation OceanStor hybrid flash storage is designed to support modern cloud-native workloads, including those running in containerized environments. To facilitate the connection between storage resources and container orchestrators like Kubernetes, Huawei supports several key plug-ins:

CSI (Container Storage Interface) (Option D):This is the industry-standard interface that allows the storage system to provide persistent volumes (PVs) to containers. By using the Huawei CSI plug-in, users can automate the provisioning, mounting, and management of LUNs (SAN) and File Systems (NAS) directly from Kubernetes manifests.

CDR (Container Disaster Recovery) (Option A):In addition to basic connectivity, Huawei provides the CDR plug-in to manage data protection for containerized applications. CDR enables backup and disaster recovery capabilities for persistent data, ensuring that if a container cluster or a data center fails, the application data can be recovered at a secondary site using replication or backup technologies.

Plug-ins like CSS or ECS (Options B and C) are generally related to other cloud services or specific compute instances and are not the primary container storage plug-ins associated with the OceanStor hybrid flash series.

The Huawei OceanStor Dorado series is engineered for 99.9999% availability using multiple layers of reliability. Option A is correct as RAID-TP (Triple Parity) is a unique Huawei feature that uses three parity chunks to tolerate the simultaneous failure of any three SSDs in a disk group. Furthermore, the SmartMatrix full-mesh architecture in high-end models allows the system to remain operational even if seven out of eight controllers in a controller enclosure fail, ensuring extreme service continuity.

Option B is correctbecause Huawei utilizesGlobal Wear Levelingto distribute writes across all SSDs to extend their lifespan, andAnti-Wear Levelingto prevent multiple SSDs from reaching their end-of-life simultaneously, which avoids multi-disk failure risks.Option C is correctas the system supportsHyperMetro(Active-Active) for both block (SAN) and file (NAS) services, providing zero RTO and RPO across sites.Option D is correctbecause Dorado supports high-reliability disk enclosure connection technologies; in a multi-enclosure setup, the system can tolerate the failure of an entire disk enclosure without data loss by using intelligent data distribution across different enclosures.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado high-end models (such as the 18000 series) utilize the SmartMatrix 4.0 architecture to provide industry-leading resilience. Option A is correct because these models can tolerate the failure of an entire controller enclosure (containing 4 controllers) without interrupting services, as the other enclosure in the cluster continues to handle all I/O. Option B is correct because Dorado features a Symmetric Active-Active design where any LUN is not owned by a specific controller; instead, any controller in the cluster can directly access any LUN, eliminating the performance bottleneck caused by traditional ALUA (Asymmetric Logical Unit Access) and ensuring load balancing.

Option C is correctas Huawei employsSmart Disk Enclosuresequipped with their own CPU and memory. These enclosures can offload tasks like data reconstruction (RAID rebuilds) from the main controllers, significantly speeding up recovery times and reducing the performance impact on host I/O during a disk failure.Option D is incorrectbecause OceanStor Dorado is anAll-Flasharray; it does not support HDDs and therefore does not perform tiering between flash and mechanical media (which is a function of the OceanStor Hybrid Flash series).

Huawei’s SmartThin technology is a thin provisioning feature that allows storage administrators to allocate more logical capacity to servers than is physically available in the storage pool. Traditionally, "thick provisioning" reserves the entire capacity of a LUN the moment it is created, leading to significant "stranded" or wasted space if the application does not immediately use it.

With SmartThin, the storage system only consumes physical blocks when data is actually written to the disk. This "on-demand" allocation ensures that physical resources are shared across multiple LUNs more efficiently. For example, a 10 TB LUN might be presented to a database, but if the database only contains 2 TB of data, only 2 TB of physical space is consumed. This significantly improves theStorage Resource Utilization Rateand reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by delaying the need to purchase additional physical disks until the actual consumed capacity approaches the physical limits of the array.

While it is technically possible to use a gateway to provide object interfaces over traditional storage, Huawei documentation explicitly states that this is not the mainstream delivery mode for the future of cloud-native data. Traditional SAN or NAS architectures are built on hierarchical file systems or block volumes, which face significant metadata performance bottlenecks and scalability limits when forced to handle billions of objects.

The "mainstream" and recommended approach by Huawei isNative Object Storage, such as that found in theOceanStor Pacificseries. Native object storage is built on a flat architecture from the ground up, allowing for massive horizontal scalability, a global namespace, and superior metadata handling through distributed indexing. Using a gateway is considered a legacy transition method or a "bridge" solution, but it lacks the efficiency, performance, and durability required for modern big data, AI, and cloud-native applications that natively use the S3 protocol.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado supports Non-disruptive Upgrade (NDU), which allows the storage system’s software (firmware) to be upgraded while services are running. In a traditional storage environment, an upgrade might require a system reboot or cause a failover that interrupts I/O for several seconds or minutes. However, Dorado's NDU leverages the multi-controller architecture and advanced caching mechanisms.

During an NDU, the system upgrades controllers one by one or in batches. While one controller is being upgraded and rebooted, its workloads are transparently taken over by other active controllers in the same cluster. Because the host-side multipathing software handles the path failover and the storage system maintains cache mirroring, the application servers experience zero downtime and negligible performance impact. This feature is essential for mission-critical environments that require 24/7 availability and cannot afford scheduled maintenance windows for routine software updates.

This statement is false because the Air Gap isolation zone is one of the most critical components of the Huawei OceanProtect ransomware protection solution. Huawei provides a comprehensive "four-layer" protection framework for data resilience, where Air Gap technology serves as the final, most secure layer.

TheAir Gapfeature creates a security isolation zone for backup data. Under normal operations, the replication link between the production backup storage and the isolation zone storage is physically or logicallydisconnected(the "gap"). The link only opens during a specific, scheduled window to replicate "clean" data from the production site to the isolation zone, and it is immediately closed once replication is finished. This ensures that even if ransomware compromises the main network and production storage, the data in the Air Gap isolation zone remains "invisible" and unreachable to the attacker. Combined with secure snapshots and WORM, this allows organizations to recover their business from an uninfected copy of the data, making Air Gap a core supported feature of the OceanProtect portfolio.

When classifying storage by its underlying architecture rather than its transmission protocol, Huawei distinguishes between two main structures. Centralized SAN (Option D) refers to the traditional controller-based array, such as the OceanStor Dorado or OceanStor Hybrid series. In this architecture, all storage resources are managed by a centralized pair or cluster of controllers within a single enclosure system. This provides high stability and specialized data services but has physical limits on the number of controllers and disks it can scale to.

Distributed SAN (Option B), such as theOceanStor Pacific(formerly FusionStorage), utilizes a scale-out architecture. It aggregates the local storage of multiple standard x86 or ARM servers into a massive, unified virtual storage pool. This architecture eliminates the bottlenecks of centralized controllers, allowing for near-infinite scalability in both performance and capacity by simply adding more nodes. WhileIP SANandFC SANare valid terms, they classify storage by thenetwork protocolused (Ethernet/IP vs. Fibre Channel) rather than the organizational architecture of the storage system itself.

According to the Huawei OceanStor Pacific series data sheet and reliability manuals, the system utilizes Elastic Erasure Coding (EC) for data redundancy protection. This technology is more efficient than traditional RAID and allows for higher levels of tolerance in a distributed environment.

Specifically, a single OceanStor Pacific storage system can be configured to tolerate the simultaneousfailure of up to four nodes(or four cabinets in a multi-cabinet deployment) without data loss or service interruption. When a node fails, the system automatically triggers a background reconstruction process to restore redundancy using the remaining healthy nodes. The flexibility of dynamic EC ratios (N+M) allows the system to adjust to these faults while maintaining optimal space utilization and reliability.

Huawei’s OceanProtect backup storage solution is designed for the F2F2X (Flash-to-Flash-to-Anything) era. This concept represents a shift from the traditional Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) backup model to a faster, more flexible architecture.

In the F2F2X model, data is backed up from the primary Flash storage (Dorado) to the dedicated backup Flash storage (OceanProtect) to ensure rapid backup and recovery. The "X" in F2F2X officially stands for "Anything," representing the final destination for long-term data retention or off-site disaster recovery. In the context of Huawei’s pre-sales training and hybrid cloud strategy,Cloud (Option A)is the primary "X" promoted to customers. By replicating backup copies to a public or private cloud (such as Huawei Cloud OBS), organizations can achieve cost-effective, long-term archiving and off-site protection without managing physical tape libraries. While "X" can technically be tape or another disk, the strategic emphasis for the new-gen solutions is the seamless integration with cloud ecosystems.

Huawei provides tailored solutions for Medical PACS based on the specific performance and scale requirements of healthcare providers. OceanStor Dorado NAS (Option D) is recommended for the "Hot Data" or active tier of a PACS system. Because medical images between 100 KB and 1 MB require high-concurrency access and extremely low latency for immediate clinical review, the FlashLink® technology and all-flash architecture of the Dorado series provide the necessary IOPS to prevent bottlenecks during peak hours.

OceanStor Pacific (Option C)is the primary recommendation for the massive, long-term unstructured data storage required by PACS. A single hospital can generate petabytes of data over several years. OceanStor Pacific’s scale-out architecture allows it to handle billions of small files efficiently using a global namespace, and its high-ratio Erasure Coding (EC) ensures maximum capacity utilization and lower TCO for archives. While Hybrid Flash (Option A) can be used, it is often superseded by the superior performance of Dorado or the superior scalability of Pacific in modern medical environments. FusionCube (Option B) is an HCI solution more suited for edge computing or virtualization rather than specialized, large-scale medical imaging repositories.