350-601 Storage Network Practice Question
An organization has four Cisco MDS 9700 directors connected in a full-mesh topology. They use VSANs to separate production, backup, and management traffic. The backup VSAN is experiencing high latency and occasional timeouts. The engineer runs the 'show fcspf routes' command and notices that the path from the backup host to the backup target has an uneven hop count across different paths. The links are all 16 Gbps. The engineer also notes that the backup target is connected to a different director than the backup host. Which action is most likely to improve performance?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Decrease the FSPF cost on the direct links
Decreasing the FSPF cost on the direct links encourages traffic to take shorter paths, reducing hop count and latency. Increasing cost would push traffic away, making it worse. IVR is for inter-VSAN routing, not intra-VSAN. Load balancing via PortChannels increases bandwidth but does not directly reduce latency from long paths.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure IVR to route backup traffic over a dedicated path
Why it's wrong here
IVR is for routing between VSANs, not within the same VSAN.
- ✓
Decrease the FSPF cost on the direct links
Why this is correct
Lowering cost makes the direct path more preferred, reducing hop count and latency.
- ✗
Increase the FSPF cost on the direct links
Why it's wrong here
Increasing cost would make the direct path less preferred, increasing hop count.
- ✗
Implement load balancing using multiple PortChannels
Why it's wrong here
PortChannels increase throughput but do not reduce the number of hops.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 350-601 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Cisco certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 350-601 exam.