IICTI Certified Storage Administrator

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate block, file and object storage protocol internals, sAN fabric design, zoning and multipathing, rAID, erasure coding and distributed storage resilience and storage performance engineering and capacity analytics, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Storage Administrator.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in it operations roles.

1. 01Block, file and object storage protocol internals12% of the exam

   • Evaluate storage protocols and access methods against workload, latency and consistency requirements.
   • Scope: FC and FC-NVMe, iSCSI, NVMe-oF over TCP and RoCEv2, NFSv4.1/pNFS, SMB 3.x multichannel and continuous availability, S3 API semantics and consistency models.
2. 02SAN fabric design, zoning and multipathing9% of the exam

   • Design and troubleshoot resilient SAN fabrics and host multipathing for mission-critical workloads.
   • Scope: Core-edge and spine-leaf fabrics, single-initiator and peer zoning, NPIV, ALUA, DM-Multipath and MPIO policies, buffer-to-buffer credits and slow-drain device detection.
3. 03RAID, erasure coding and distributed storage resilience8% of the exam

   • Evaluate data protection schemes and failure domains to meet durability and rebuild-risk targets.
   • Scope: RAID level trade-offs, rebuild time and URE risk modelling, declustered RAID, Reed-Solomon and LRC erasure coding, Ceph CRUSH maps and failure domain design.
4. 04Storage performance engineering and capacity analytics12% of the exam

   • Diagnose storage performance bottlenecks and forecast capacity using quantitative analysis.
   • Scope: IOPS, throughput and latency modelling, Little's law and queue depth, fio benchmarking, iostat and esxtop analysis, caching tiers, QoS policies and capacity forecasting.
5. 05Data reduction, thin provisioning and intelligent tiering7% of the exam

   • Evaluate efficiency technologies and design policies that lower cost without compromising performance or availability.
   • Scope: Inline and post-process deduplication and compression, validating data reduction ratios, thin provisioning overcommit risk, auto-tiering, QLC flash characteristics and lifecycle policies.
6. 06Replication, metro clustering and disaster recovery architecture10% of the exam

   • Architect storage replication and DR solutions that meet defined RPO/RTO with verified recoverability.
   • Scope: Synchronous and asynchronous replication, metro and stretched clusters, consistency groups, snapshots, RPO/RTO design, ISO 22301 alignment and DR test programmes.
7. 07Cyber-resilient backup and ransomware recovery14% of the exam

   • Design backup and recovery architectures that guarantee clean, timely restoration after destructive cyber events.
   • Scope: 3-2-1-1-0 strategy, immutable and WORM storage (S3 Object Lock), air-gapped vaults, isolated clean-room recovery, backup anomaly detection, and platforms such as Veeam, Commvault and Rubrik.
8. 08Software-defined, hyperconverged and Kubernetes persistent storage5% of the exam

   • Architect software-defined and container-native storage that delivers predictable performance and data protection.
   • Scope: Ceph and Rook, VMware vSAN, Nutanix, Kubernetes CSI drivers, StorageClasses, volume snapshots, StatefulSet data patterns and Portworx.
9. 09Cloud and hybrid storage services and data mobility6% of the exam

   • Design hybrid storage and data mobility strategies optimised for cost, performance and governance.
   • Scope: AWS EBS, EFS, FSx and S3 storage classes, Azure Blob, Files and NetApp Files, storage gateways, cloud tiering, egress cost modelling and large-scale data migration tooling.
10. 10Storage security, encryption, key management and sanitisation12% of the exam

    • Evaluate and implement storage security controls that protect data across its full lifecycle.
    • Scope: Self-encrypting drives, KMIP and external key managers, in-flight encryption, RBAC and multi-tenant isolation, audit logging, NIST SP 800-88 and IEEE 2883 media sanitisation.
11. 11Storage automation, operations leadership and lifecycle governance5% of the exam

    • Lead storage operations through automation, governance and lifecycle planning at enterprise scale.
    • Scope: REST API, Ansible and Terraform automation, monitoring and AIOps, firmware and lifecycle management, ITIL 4 change enablement, SNIA standards and technology refresh planning.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner