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Section 1 - Customer needs analysis/Design
- Ask the appropriate questions to define CPU requirements (e.g., based on operating system, application licensing, and performance characteristics).
- Determine the questions needed to define the memory requirements (e.g., based on the need for fault-tolerance and the price/performance benefits of differing memory configurations).
- Determine the questions needed to define the storage requirements based on the anticipated workload (number and size of I/O/sec., percentage of sequential vs. random and percentage of reads/writes) and component interoperability.
- Determine the questions needed to define the network requirements for a system including fault-tolerance, throughput, latency and interoperability.
- Given a system configuration, select the appropriate questions needed to implement the system in the customer's environment (e.g., 220v power, cooling, and network ports including ports for RSA).
- Based on customer requirements, articulate the value and benefits of the solution enhancements including fault-tolerant hardware, clustering, backup and restore and disaster recovery.
- Given a set of customer requirements and a list of their priorities (performance, cost, availability, etc.), select the appropriate system, CPU and memory configuration.
- Given a set of customer requirements and a list of their priorities (performance, cost, availability, etc.), select the appropriate storage solution (i.e., SCSI, NAS, SAN).
- Evaluate cost benefit analyses of scale up vs. scale out solutions (i.e., VMware, Aurema, software consolidations, etc.).
Section 2 - Storage
- Describe the benefits of each storage subsystem (i.e., NAS, SAN, SCSI, iSCSI).
- Given a disk performance chart, identify bottlenecking issues in a disk subsystem.
- Given an identified bottleneck in a disk subsystem, resolve the issue.
- Determine appropriate RAID configurations for a given application requirement.
- Given a customer scenario and the proposed solution, validate the SAN configuration.
- Given customer application requirements, determine proper configuration of disk controller cache.
- Given customer backup requirements, articulate the factors that impact a backup and restore solution.
- Describe storage subsystems in a redundant path implementation.
Section 3 - System management
- Describe the benefits of IBM systems management tools and determine interoperability with other system management products and tools (e.g., RSA/RSAII, BC Management Modules, IBM Director, Remote Deployment Manager, Application Workload Manager, Remote Lights Out Operation (RILO), Inside Lights Out Operation (LILO), Insight Manager, HP TopTools, etc.).
- Identify system requirements for the different IBM Director components (e.g., CPU, memory, network, disk space, database, OS).
- Install and configure IBM Director components (e.g., IBM Director Agents, Server, Console, Database interaction and Upward Integration Modules).
- Set up IBM Director to monitor resource thresholds and process monitor thresholds.
- Given an alerting requirement, create an Event Action Plan to generate the appropriate alerts.
- Identify situations where components of the IBM Director are used (e.g., Capacity Manager, Cluster Manager, etc.).
- Describe the uses of Remote Deployment Manager and IBM Director (built-in Software Distribution task), and their methods of operation and their infrastructure requirements.
- Describe Application Workload Manager and hot it is used in a server consolidation plan.
- Install and configure RSA/RSAII adapters (e.g., Network Settings/Protocols, Security and Alerting Features).
Section 4 - Advanced system skills
- Differentiate between failover and teaming with network adapters.
- Define the interoperability between the IBM eServer brands.
- Given a customer scenario, determine the NOS requirements for the solution.
Section 5 - Performance tuning
- Determine when to use Expand On Demand processor upgrade techniques.
- Describe functions of the XceL4 Cache.
- Explain when to increase the number of CPUs, versus increasing CPU speed, versus increasing memory size.
- Identify when to use Xeon MP versus Xeon DP processors.
- Explain memory interleaving and when it is used.
- Explain the differences between memory fault tolerant technologies (e.g., Chipkill, Memory ProteXion, Memory Mirroring and Hot Spare Memory).
- Explain IBM's implementation of hot-swap memory and how it works.
- Describe the multi-path implementation of remote I/O (RXE-100).
- Describe I/O throughput considerations for PCI adapters including network adapters and DASD adapters (e.g., bus speed, bus width, adapter locations).
- Identify the considerations for applications based on their memory and/or disk access (sequential versus non-sequential) requirements.
Section 6 - Heterogeneous environments
- When installing a system in a third-party network, identify the tasks necessary for a supported solution (e.g., ServerProven, SAR, interoperability, etc.).
- When installing a system in third-party storage, identify the tasks necessary for a supported solution (e.g., ServerProven, SAR, interoperability, etc.).
- When installing IBM systems management with third-party servers, identify the tasks necessary for a supported solution (e.g., ServerProven, SAR, interoperability, etc.).
Section 7 - Customer management
- Select appropriate follow-up questions to identify additional customer needs (e.g., systems management, storage, etc.).
- Given a competitive customer environment, position the IBM technical advantages of a specific solution.
- Given a specific solution, identify the factors that will impact the customer's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
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