NCIE-SAN Certification Preparation (NS0-520): Part 2 - Study Tips

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Continuing from: NCIE-SAN Certification Preparation (NS0-520): Part 1 - Practice Tests and Answers

The NS0-520 official page here - Certified Implementation Engineer—SAN Specialist | NetApp - does have a section "View Exam Topics" (with the heading "Take Your Exam"). This is not fantastically useful though, as there are no links to references. Great we're told the exam topics, but would be nice to know where to go to read more.

The answer will of course be NetApp Documentation, NetApp TRs (Technical Reports), NetApp Official Blogs etcetera, but where!? Endless reading of documentation isn't the most enjoyable thing to do, nor is it a particularly good use of time (lets face it, when you want to know something you look it up because it is at your finger tips via simple Google searches, you simply don't need to know everything.)

The main structure of the exam haven't changed much in 10 years. If you remember that all the technology is over 10 years out of date and missing stuff like NVMe, then Vidad Cosonok's 2012 NSO-502 Study Notes give an idea of what you need to know -

NetApp NS0-502 Study Notes Part 1/4

- but again, no useful links to references, so here we go trying to find useful and relevant reading!

Useful Reading:

NetApp TRs (with last updated date at time of writing - January 2023):

NetApp Documentation:

Definitely you want to review these:

* For instance, this tells me that in ONTAP 9.8:
  • For all the non-EOA AFF systems - A250, A400A, A700, A800, C190 - Max Nodes per Cluster for SAN = 12
  • For all the non-EOA ASA systems - A250, A400A, A700, A800 - Max Nodes per Cluster for SAN = 2
**NetApp OneCollect Tool is now NetApp Inventory Collect Tool

Useful Viewing:

Don't forget to check out NetApp TV: https://www.netapp.tv/

And titles such as:

  • NetApp ONTAP NVMe/TCP Optimizes and Democratizes Your SAN [BRK-1179-2]



Other Notes:

Overview: NVMe-oF vs FC Concepts:
 
   FCP | NVMe-oF
-------+--------
   LUN | Namespace
  WWPN | NQN
Igroup | Subsystem
  ALUA | ANA
 
NQN = NVMe Qualified Name
ANA = Asymmetric Namespace Access

From TR4080:

ONTAP 9.5 New Features include:
The principal enhancements added to ONTAP block protocols with ONTAP 9.5 include:
  • NetApp SnapMirror Synchronous (SM-S)
  • Asymmetric Namespace Access (ANA) support added to the NVMe/FC target stack
  • SUSE 15 and  RHEL 7.6 added to the NVMe/FC IMT (SUSE 15 with ANA support)
ONTAP 9.7 New Features include:
Included:
  • ONTAP 9.7 SAN introduced All SAN Array (ASA)
  • Increase the maximum number of volumes per node from 1000 to 2500

What is the All SAN Array (ASA)?
ASA is a SAN-only HA pair that is symmetric active/active. This means that the ASA advertises and users paths through both controllers to any underlying LUN. The effect of this architectural change is to guarantee that hosts will always have an active path to any LUN hosted on either controller in the HA pair. This is important because it makes otherwise disruptive planned or unplanned failovers and givebacks virtually instantaneous. This brings frame array functionality to a modern modular array architecture without compromises such as requiring one of the two nodes being stranded in a standby node.

ONTAP 9.8 New Features include:
ONTAP 9.8 removed the requirement that NVMe/FC be segregated from other block and file protocols in its own SVM (NVMe-oF protocol coexistence.)

Note: I believe NS0-520 only goes up to ONTAP 9.8. I might be wrong so I could stop here with the New Feature highlights. But it's still worth checking them out in the TR.

ONTAP 9.9.1 New Features include:
  • A non-destructive AFF to ASA in-place conversion.
  • ASA maximum cluster size grows from a single HA pair to 12 nodes.

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