I had been considering taking the ‘Architecting Multi-Site HP Storage Solutions – HP0-J67’ for quite some time after reviewing the exam objectives.
I had cut my teeth on P2000 MSA’s and StoreVirtuals and had spent quite a bit of ‘one to one’ time with StoreServ’s recently, so thought I was in a good position to tackle the exam.
Bart Heungens (HP Certified Instructor) over at bitcon.be had written a blog post entitled ‘Are you ready for being a Master ASE Storage Solution Architect?‘ which had the download link for the resource library for the exam. This was my go to study material to prepare for Architecting Multi-Site HP Storage Solutions HP–J67.
My initial thoughts when I flicked over the resource library was yikes! How much information was their to digest, I was never going to be able to do that in a timely manner. The good news was that I had previously read most of the P2000, StoreVirtual and 3PAR whitepapers when creating designs and installing the products.
So I decided to skim read the P2000, StoreVitual and 3PAR whitepapers, noting down information that I had forgotten or thought or could be relevant. This was fairly difficult as newer versions of LeftHand OS and Inform OS are not covered, so I spent sometime going over their release notes and essentially forgetting that information for the exam. In total I must have spent four hours brushing up on the P2000, StoreVirtual and 3PAR.
I felt pretty comfortable with the HP StoreEasy range, as I use these for products for most of the Veeam Backup & Replication designs I propose.
The main area which my knowledge lacked was the HP StoreOnce, literally I have never read up on them, used them or tried to position one with a customer. So I knew this was my ‘achilles heel’. But I wanted to be sensible as I knew that I wouldn’t be positioning them with customers so any information I learned for the exam, would be leaving my brain shortly after exiting the exam centre!
I took a pragmatic approach to this looking at items that I felt could appear in an exam (if you are an experienced exam veteran you know what I mean by this) items such as block size, StoreOnce deduplication sources and size limits on the models. I spent around 6 hours on this reading the various whitepapers.
In total I spent around 10 hours preparing for the exam, not what I would recommend, but I was aiming for minimally qualified candidate! Designing storage solutions is part of my job (not all of it), so I was happy with my approach for this exam.
A new PearsonVue testing centre had recently become available in Milton Keynes, which had car parking (paid) which was a plus. The exam centre was bright, clean and the receptionist was welcoming.
Not sure why I wasn’t nervous before stepping into the exam centre, I guess this had something to do with the amount of preparation I had done. I think that if I had invested more time, then I would have been concerned about the outcome.
The exam consisted of 60 questions which had to be completed in two hours. Usual exam format was used with multiple choice and drag and drop questions. I thought the questions where a fair reflection of the blueprint.
I finished in an hour and clicked the ‘end exam’ button, and I was pleased to see you have passed the ‘Architecting Multi-Site HP Storage Solutions – HP0-J67’ with a score of 62%.
The pass mark was 58%, so I left the exam centre with a smile on my face thinking ‘I have done the optimal amount of studying’ and am the definition on the ‘minimally qualified candidate’.
One of my goals for 2015 was to achieve the HP Master ASE accreditation, I’m pleased to say that gaining the HP0-J67 has enabled me to do this.
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