The provided exhibit displays the output of the showport -s command, which summarizes the port status for all controller nodes in an HPE Alletra 6000 system. The output shows entries for four nodes (Node 0, 1, 2, and 3). While Nodes 0 and 1 have active and ready ports, all entries for Nodes 2 and 3 are ---, indicating these controller nodes are missing, offline, or have failed.

If the system is a 4-node model (e.g., Alletra 6030, 6050, 6070, or 6090), the absence of an entire node pair means it is operating in a severely degraded state. This condition halves the available processing power, cache, and I/O port resources, which would directly and significantly reduce the overall performance of the array.

A. The exhibit does not show "active (0) paths". It shows ports with an active link state. A high number of active paths is beneficial for performance.

B. A greater number of active paths provides increased bandwidth and redundancy for host connectivity, which typically improves performance and availability, rather than reducing it.

1. HPE Alletra 6000 Architecture Technical White Paper (Document ID: a00113380enw, April 2021).

Page 7, "Controller node high availability": This section explains the behavior of 4-node systems during failures. It states, "In a 4-node configuration... If an entire node pair fails, the system will continue to run on the remaining node pair, but in a degraded state." This directly supports the conclusion that a missing controller pair reduces performance.

2. HPE 3PAR OS Command Line Interface Reference (for HPE 3PAR OS 3.3.1, which shares its command-line heritage with Alletra 6000).

showport command description: The documentation for this command confirms that it displays the status of all ports on all nodes. The use of dashes (---) in the output table indicates that the corresponding component (in this case, the controller nodes and their ports) is not present or has failed.