Huawei HCIP-Storage cheat sheet

RAID 5 tolerates one member drive failure; usable capacity = (N − 1) × smallest member capacity. RAID 6 tolerates two member drive failures.

Huawei RAID-TP tolerates three simultaneous drive failures and is intended for high-capacity NL-SAS drives where rebuild windows are long.

RAID 2.0+ divides each drive into chunks, groups chunks into extents, and rebuilds only used extents across many drives, shortening reconstruction time.

SAN presents block LUNs over FC or iSCSI; NAS presents file shares over NFS or SMB/CIFS.

Thin provisioning allocates physical capacity on first write; subscription rate = mapped logical capacity ÷ physical capacity, so over-subscription requires capacity monitoring.

Throughput (MB/s) ≈ IOPS × I/O size (MB); at 8 KB and 10,000 IOPS, throughput is about 78 MB/s.

Write-back cache improves write latency but requires cache mirroring and power protection; write-through writes to disk before acknowledging.

Align LUN partitions and filesystems to 4 KB boundaries to avoid read-modify-write penalties on RAID stripes.

SmartTier moves hot extents to high-performance tiers and cold extents to capacity tiers based on migration policies and I/O statistics.

OceanStor Dorado is Huawei's all-flash block storage family for latency-sensitive databases and virtualized workloads.

OceanStor 5000/6000/18000 hybrid families provide block storage with SSD and HDD tiers; the 18000 series targets high-end mission-critical workloads.

OceanStor Pacific is a scale-out distributed storage family for file, object, and HPC or analytics workloads.

OceanStor 9000 is a scale-out NAS platform for large file sharing, media, and archive workloads.

OceanProtect is Huawei's dedicated backup storage family and provides backup appliances with ransomware protection features.

SmartThin, SmartTier, SmartQoS, SmartCache, and SmartPartition are OceanStor software features for capacity, tiering, performance, and isolation.

HyperSnap, HyperClone, HyperCopy, HyperReplication, and HyperMetro are data protection and replication features in the OceanStor portfolio.

OceanStor DeviceManager is the per-device GUI; eSight provides unified management for multiple storage and network devices.

FC node ports include N_port (host or node), F_port (fabric switch), E_port (inter-switch link), and NL_port (loop).

WWN zoning controls access by worldwide port name; port zoning uses switch domain and port index; single-initiator, single-target zones are the safest baseline.

iSCSI targets listen on TCP port 3260; CHAP provides one-way or mutual authentication.

Jumbo frames require MTU 9000 on host NIC, switch ports, and storage ports; a mismatch causes fragmentation or dropped packets.

Huawei UltraPath is host multipath software for OceanStor block arrays; it aggregates paths, balances I/O, and handles failover.

iSCSI initiators are identified by IQN; FC initiators are identified by WWPN.

LUN masking or mapping binds a LUN to a host or host group; an unmapped LUN is invisible to the host.

FC-NVMe carries NVMe commands over FC fabrics; NVMe/TCP carries them over Ethernet using TCP.

Separate storage traffic from business traffic with VLANs or dedicated physical ports; LACP aggregates links but does not replace multipath.

RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time; RTO is the maximum acceptable service downtime.

HyperSnap creates point-in-time snapshots; HyperClone creates a full physical copy that can be split from the source.

HyperReplication provides remote replication; synchronous mode gives near-zero RPO but adds write latency.

HyperMetro is active-active local or metro replication; both sites serve I/O and a quorum server arbitrates split-brain.

The 3-2-1 rule: keep three copies, on two different media, with one copy offsite.

Full backup copies all selected data; incremental copies changes since the last backup; differential copies changes since the last full.

WORM and air-gapped copies protect backup data from modification or deletion by ransomware.

Backup encryption protects data at rest and in transit; key management must be separated from the backup data.

Synthetic full backup creates a new full image from the previous full plus incrementals without re-reading the source.

OceanStor DeviceManager provides GUI configuration, alarms, performance monitoring, and log collection for a single array.

eSight provides unified management, topology, alarms, and performance reports across multiple Huawei storage devices.

SmartKit offers health checks, upgrade planning, configuration collection, and log gathering for OceanStor arrays.

Alarm severities are critical, major, minor, and warning; critical alarms indicate service-impacting faults that require immediate action.

Key performance counters include IOPS, bandwidth, latency, queue depth, cache hit ratio, and port utilization.

For a host-visible LUN issue, check physical link, switch zoning, LUN mapping, host multipath state, and operating system logs in that order.

Collect array logs before rebooting or replacing components; logs preserve the event sequence for root-cause analysis.

Configure NTP on arrays and switches so alarms and events from different devices have comparable timestamps.