Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

IBM Exam 000-074 is part of IBM’s Certified Systems Expert certification program. As with the similar HP0-055, the focus was a bit different than your usual Microsoft exams.

When first looking at the specs for this exams, i found the required passing score to be very low: 59%. HP’s exam had a passing score of 71%. As such, i expected a very difficult the exam, but that wasn’t the case.

This exam focused on three points:

• Normal, hardware neutral Windows/Networking Knowledge
• IBM Director Knowledge
• IBM System x hardware knowledge (especially of bigger products like the System x3850)

I’ve passed this exam with an okay score, but was guessing at almost all the IBM Director and the System x hardware knowledge. The problem here is that neither IBM Director nor 4 socket machines are being used in the small businesses i work for. The fact that i still passed shows that good guessing can give you lots of points, because the answers are sometimes rather obvious.

There was also a good deal of normal Windows Knowledge required, and several very very basic Networking questions, which could probably be answered by your average gamer kid. If you already hold an MCSE/MCSA on Windows Server 2003, you might be able to pass this exam without having touched an IBM server before.

Even though this may sound bad, i though the exam in it’s whole made a lot of sense. Most questions where detailed, and the answers where short an concise. Again, for several questions you had to know what the limitiations of a given IBM hardware platforms are. I still don’t really like this, because i don’t deal with every piece of System x hardware IBM has to offer (even though i’d like to know, that’s currently not the case).

As expected, there were many performance tuning questions which were usually answerable with general IT knowledge. You’ll just need to know which system performance values indicate what kind of performance bottleneck.