USN 1 S I CSPE17

Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur – 572 103

(An Autonomous Institution affiliated to Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, Approved by AICTE, New Delhi, Accredited by NBA, New Delhi,
An ISO9001:2008 Certified)

Seventh Semester B.E. – Computer Sc. & Engineering Examinations Nov/Dec. 2015
Storage Area Network
Time: 3 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Not : 1. Question No. 1 is Compulsory
e
2. Answer any 4 full questions from question No. 2 to Question No. 6

1 a) How does Active/active cabling support both load sharing and no load sharing.
b) Compare RAID10 and RAID5 with respect to write performance and space requirement.
c) What is LUN masking? What is the main advantage of LUN masking?
d) List the buses required in a physical I/O path from CPU to storage system.
e) Write two important advantages of point to point fibre channel topology over SCSI cabling.
f) Why FCIP is called a tunneling protocol?
g) What is volume manager? Write the main function of volume manager. 2x7
h) Define storage virtualization.
i) What is the role of agent software in asymmetric virtualization? 1x2
j) How is storage network different from data network?
k) What are the functions of media manager in network back-up? 2x2

2 a) Bring out the differences between server centric and storage centric IT architecture. 6
b) Explain the architecture of intelligent disk subsystems with a neat diagram. 6
c) How parity disk replaces all mirror disks of RAID 10? Will it increases the performance and
fault tolerance? Justify. 8

3 a) Illustrate how disk subsystem, accelerates write and read access to hard disks by having
caches in their controller. 6
b) Discuss the various topologies of fibre channel SAN. 6
c) What are the characteristics of fibre channel I/O? Explain fibre channel protocol stack. 8

4 a) What are the disadvantages of IP storage? 4

b) What are the various characteristics of the NAS system? Explain the performance bottleneck
in file servers and appropriate solutions to accelerate file sharing system. 10
c) Bring out the differences between fibre channel SAN and Network attached storage. 6

5 a) How is virtualization on file level different from that of block level? 6

b) Write advantages and disadvantages of storage virtualization.
i) At server level ii) In storage devices. 10
c) Why is data copying preferred to real-time data sharing in production environments? Give
any four reasons. 4

6 a) Explain how availability of data is achieved during the failure of the following:
i) Failure of a server ii) Failure of a disk subsystem. 10
b) With a neat diagram discuss server-free and LAN-free back-up approaches. 10
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