Dell PowerScale Operate cheat sheet

One namespace does not imply uniform protection or permissions.

Access zones have logical context and shared physical dependencies.

SmartConnect client distribution differs from SmartPools data placement.

Protection jobs, quotas and cloud tiering have distinct roles.

Local snapshots and asynchronous replication have different recovery scopes.

Retention modes need actual irreversible-effect and privilege review.

Use health, protection, job and client evidence together.

Rolling maintenance is staged, not a universal zero-disruption promise.

Choose the actual block, file or object interface.

Raw, usable, logical and consumed capacity differ.

Multipathing, zoning, mapping and file permissions address different stages.

Redundancy, snapshots, replicas and backups cover different failure scopes.

Identification, authentication, authorisation and accounting are four distinct steps.

MFA needs two different factor categories, not two instances of one.

RBAC suits stable job roles; ABAC suits context-dependent, fine-grained rules.

Kerberos uses a KDC with TGT and service tickets for SSO.

Symmetric ciphers handle bulk data; asymmetric ciphers solve key distribution and signatures.

Signing uses a specified signature scheme with the signer’s private key; verification and custody are essential to origin evidence.

ECB leaks patterns; use authenticated modes such as GCM or encrypt-then-MAC.

Internet-facing services belong in a DMZ; data stores sit in a filtered internal zone.

VLANs alone are not a trust boundary - add DAI, private VLANs and 802.1 X.

IPsec AH gives integrity only; ESP adds confidentiality.

IDS is passive and alerts; IPS is inline and blocks.

NAT is not a security control and temporary rules must be removed.

Asset inventory and configuration baselines underpin every operational control.

Changes need an appropriate authorization path, recovery planning and relevant evidence.

Emergency changes still require retrospective documentation within a defined window.

Monitor log sources for silence, not just for events.

Distinguish historical Revision 2 phases from current NIST incident-response guidance integrated with broader risk management.

Containment precedes eradication in almost every scenario.

Capture volatile evidence (memory, connections) before disk and before power-off.

Distinguish tolerated data loss from tolerated interruption.

A recovery point and restore time must both meet the stated targets.

A same-failure-domain snapshot alone does not cover loss of that domain.

Verify complete restore procedures and actual dependency behavior.