I got job in IBM reading this blog everyday & studying all the materials :Blog Reader Sean Joy

My name is ShiV.(Blog Reader) I got job in one of the biggest company IBM though I came from Mechanical Engineering background. and I am proud to say that i am a regular reader of this blog and it is the first time i am sharing my struggles and experience for a job and in the end getting a job in the biggest IT company. I got a dream job in IBM because of my hardwork & with the help of reading this Storage blog regularly.

I passed out from college in 2001 in Mechanical engineering. but always wanted to build my career in IT field.i was looking for a suitable opportunity to start off as i had done courses like C,C++,java. but at that time job market was in slump and my career was going nowhere inspite of great percentage and strong analytical and aptitude skills.I then started working as a tech support and got frustrated with that job as i did not want a call centre job.i was studying side by side for some software companies interviews .

I hardly used to get time for sleep as I had to work night shift of tech support & also used to come back & make time to read other materials. I started looking for a course which can give me an edge above others.luckily i found out a course comprising of TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) AIX basics, Windows 2003 Server and Networking and being the first Storage batch i did not have much guidance as its a brand new field so I started learning on my own .I used to regularly come to this Storage jobs blog and seek guidance and knowledge.I read all the articles on this blog which are now more than 150 . I read many pdf's regarding SAN, TSM concepts,configuration, implementation,problem determination guides etc.and also other websites like Virtualization blog , Testing Blog,Datawarehousing Tutorials so I can know maximum about Storage & related technologies . I also concentrated more on command line as my opinion is its easy to lean GUI but if you want to be clear about the basics then use command line.then i sat for IBM interview.

In the Storage Interview the interviewers asked all the basic stuff about storage like :
reclaimation,
collocation,
policy management,
scheduling,
SAN,NAS ,DAS
etc

it was a 3 round interview extremely tough consisting of all the knowledge we had gathered

Ist round was written 100 marks consisting of all knowledge of AIX and storage.Storage part included all basic and advanced concepts of
LUN masking,
zoning,
RAID,
fibre channel classes of services,
FC topologies,
scsi,iscsi etc.(this blog really helped me because all above topics are covered on this blog )

2nd round was the best..they installed Tivoli Storage Manager(TSM) server and client on a m/c and gave us real time scenarios and we had to show them how to troubleshoot on command line some eg . of scenarios :
Issues with database ,
recovery log getting full ,
low scratch tapes no.
disk storage pool full what will happen to client sessions
schedules failed
etc

3rd round was seminar..topic from SNIA website we have to choose.(.I chose Storage Consolidation and Virtualization -when where how and why) i must say one of the videos i found on this blog really did help me it was a guy explaining about the same..

after all this they selected only 6 people and i got through and now joined IBM as TSM system admin .It is a dream come true for me it was a long journey from being a night shift guy handling Tech support to a IT Professional working in a prestigious company like IBM on a normal shift :) in Hyderabad.

My first role will be i think Storage Management,Disaster Recovery administration but i want to gradually learn as much as possible like SAN or Virtualization

hope this experince helps those who are struggling remember one thing :IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING. thanks roger for this wonderful blog