DMCP case studies
DMCP · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Dell Modular Certification Program (DMCP) is a vendor credential structured around the building blocks of Dell infrastructure: storage and data protection, servers and compute, networking, cloud and virtualization, systems management and automation, security and compliance, and solution design. Rather than certifying a single product, it tests whether you can reason across these domains together - sizing a storage array that matches a compute cluster, choosing connectivity that will not bottleneck it, and describing how the whole stack is managed, secured, and supported. The DMCP case studies are 5 cases and about 3,397 words.
1Month-End Replication Lag and Snapshot Growth
Northline Retail operates 620 stores and runs its order-management platform on a Dell PowerStore 5000T at headquarters, with asynchronous replication to a PowerStore 3000T at a DR site 480 km away, and NetWorker backups to a PowerProtect DD3300. The WAN link is 1 Gbps and carries replication, backup catalog traffic, and store polling.
776 words, about 4 min2Purple Screen and Firmware Drift in a 24-Host Cluster
Contoso Precision runs three vSphere 8 clusters on 24 PowerEdge R750 hosts and manages them with OpenManage Enterprise. The host firmware baseline has drifted: BIOS is 1.12.2 on 19 hosts and 1.15.1 on five, iDRAC9 is 6.10 on most hosts and 7.00 on three, and NIC firmware differs across two batches.
703 words, about 4 min3One-Way Audio on a VLT Leaf Pair
At a university campus, each building is dual-homed to a pair of Dell PowerSwitch S5248F-ON leaf switches running VLT. The VLT pair connects northbound with two 40 GbE uplinks to a spine and uses a two-member 100 GbE VLTi.
666 words, about 3 min4Latency-Sensitive SQL and a Hybrid Cloud Decision
Helio Bank runs 40 VMware VMs on aging hardware: 12 SQL Server instances, 18 application servers, and 10 file and print servers. The SQL tier stores 20 TB, has a 1.2 ms write-latency SLO, and replicates with Always On availability groups.
629 words, about 3 min5Ransomware Near Miss and Backup Privilege Gaps
Mercy Ridge Hospital runs NetWorker with a PowerProtect DD6900 and protects 300 TB across 180 virtual machines and 40 physical SQL and file servers. After a phishing incident encrypted three file servers, restores took 26 hours and required an administrator to use a shared domain account because the backup console MFA rollout was deferred.
623 words, about 3 min