200 interview questions on SCSI FC RAID SAN Solaris SAN Design

Hi Aron

Thanks for your interest & faith in me. I thank you for placing the order on the blog for 200 interview questions at $24.

What you paid was for 200 Interview questions only. But still i want to appreciate your payment & hence you will find answers also for almost 200 interview questions on storage essential topics attached in this email . Anyone who can put time & dedication to read through all these documents can win any Storage job .There are more than 100 people as proof for this who got job offers who used these materials as their core preparation reference guides. so I request you to make the best use of these resources .

These questions were collected from the real interviews attended in almost all major storage companies.

Please DO NOT forward these materials to any body. It usually happens you will forward to your close friend & he will forward to his close friends & thus it reaches more than 1000 people .It happens like some one copies it on his website or blog so every one can have it. I am requesting you NOT to forward this to anyone.I want people to appreciate the effort gone into preparation of these materials. People many times do not value/appreciate what they get for free so if someone is really dedicated they will read through all the articles on this blog & can get the infromation . On the other hand if someone is not having time to read through and want to pay & get all interview questions with answers they can email roger.smithson@gmail.com so that they support this blog to grow. I hope you understand my request.

Please email your feedback & suggestions .Let me know what you feel about this package.

As a thank you from my side find some quick reference guides,advanced SAN Design guide from a major storage company attached & some more detailed guides on the topics I've covered in interview questions.

U also get a bonus HR interview questions answers pdf as well as a SAN Student guide FREE

Find these 19 documents attached in the email I am sending you.


Keep emailing me your progress & I'm sure you can prepare fast for your interviews with these reference materials on storage.

Best Regards
Roger

Storage jobs blog Interview Questions has more than 150 blog posts[Blog articles]

I am very happy to share that this blog has grown with more than 150 articles(blog posts).

Click on "Blog Archive" at the bottom right hand corner below "Friendfinder" image. You can click through the year,dates & the article titles to read all important articles.

It is really a nice milestone for me as an author of this blog to complete. I love to share stories that too stories which can inspire others. So let me share a little story (history) about this blog.(You will not find any personal info about me though- I am sorry but I like to remain at the background & let this blog do its work better).

This blog was started in 2006 August 25th with the intention of helping people get better career guidance in Information Technology. If you are a new visitor to this blog & if you are not sure what Storage or SAN is all about then we are talking about Computer Data Storage & How real big enterprises manage or store data .

There was & There will always be a huge need for Storage professionals.

Even today when I talk to many Storage company teams they are expressing that there is a huge number of job openings for storage professionals. But, But the main thing is there are not many good candidates & even worse, there is no proper stream to guide/train/motivate people to explore career options in storage.

So I thought let me start this small blog where I can post few tips & share some stories to help people get some guidance in this highly lucrative Storage technology.

I have recieved more than 1000 emails till today (my email id is roger.smithson@gmail.com ) & there are atleast 20 emails on an average everyday. I try to reply to every email but sometimes i do miss.

This blog has given me a lot of satisfaction as it has helped more than 100 people get job in just last 6 months. These are the people who replied back saying this blog helped. There are also innumerable blog readers who benefited from the blog but forgot to email me :)

Anyway more than emails I am interested in how well this blog can help someone like YOU, who had taken out time to visit & read through the articles. I really appreciate your visit to this blog & would love to see an email from you with a feedback.I will try to improve the content & quality of this blog. I understand the ads have been a bit of annoyance but due to some reasons I request you to consider it as a small servicefee for the amount of things this blog is offering for FREE.

If you just spare 10 minutes to browse though the previous posts apart from posts on this page you will find real people sharing their story of how they got their Career in Storage or related technologies like Backup,Network Management,System administration etc. So please take time & bookmark this blog .Visit regularly to read all the latest updates.

I've made up a resolution to update this blog daily & if possible every 4 hours once. You will find many interesting things soon apart from Interview Questions & Tutorials. Also you will get a FREE Storage Student Guide if you email roger.smithson@gmail.com

Keep reading this blog & forward the weblink http://storage-jobs.blogspot.com to all your friends or loved ones whom you think can benefit from this.

Thanks for your support

Senior Positions in Storage industries in INDIA

Almost all Storage companies are struggling to hire for Senior positions.Companies like

EMC2/Vmware
Netapp
Brocade
Cisco
Qlogic
Emulex
Adaptec
LSI Logic
Dell
HP
IBM
Sun Microsystems/Storagetek
Microsoft
Seagate
Lefthand Networks
Computer Associates (CA)
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
Fujitsu
Symantec/Veritas
Inmage

All above companies are on a heavy hiring so many recruiters are emailing me for the resumes/CV of people who are interested.

So anyone who has more than 3-4 years experience (and above) please forward your resumes/CV to roger.smithson@gmail.com and let me know your interests.

Interesting SAN Setup of one of the blog reader -

Hi Roger,

I sent an email to u last week for SAN Guide and still waiting for your erply
Regards
Gerry
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Hi Gerry,
Sorry for delayed reply but some how i missed forwarding you the Storage tutorial guide. Please find it attached in this email along with some more additional student reference materials. Now what will u share from ur side :)
People always take help/resources but never do anything in return.

I appreciate if you differ & do contribute any original articles from ur experience for the blogs. I send more useful reference materials to people who contribute original articles to this blog written from their work/tech experience.

Rgds
Roger
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Hi. Roger,

How r u doing ? I guess fine. I got ur all three Emails. I am very Grateful to u for sending me such a brilliant material about SAN etc.
I Apologize, if you are hurt from my last Email, I am extremely sorry for that.
And i respect ur thought that, People always take help but never do anything in return. But I am not like that, i will definetly contribute some original articles.
As far as my job profile is concerned, I am a Storage Professional,working in an MNC. I am in this position from last 4years.

Regards
Gerry
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Gerry,
im not hurt u were right in ur email - i missed so its my fault im sorry for that

anyway ur reply was really nice & I am happy to have come across a person like you.
how long u've been reading the blog & did it help in anyway
What is your present job role & tasks you are responsible for

plz do write in detail about yourself & ur work challenges & what sort of storage products/vendors u r working with.

Rgds
Roger
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About my SAN Setup
Currently i am working on SAN Technology.My SAN setup contains

a) 2 IBM Servers ( eSeries & xSeries) having Operating Systems as RHEL5, SLES,Solaris 10.2 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers


b) 5 Sunblade 2000 sparc Servers (HP xw 4300 Model) Having Operating system Solaris 9 & Solaris 10.

Sunblade 2000 & Ultra 10.

c) 3 Avocent Console Machines used for monitoring the Servers setup.



d) Storage from Sun Storagetek and EMC2, one is Fibre Channel Storage & another is iSCSI.
RAID Level implemented is RAID-5
No. of Hard Disks in Fibre Storage is 15 each of 200 GB
No. of Hard Disks in iSCSI is 12each of 300 GB


e) 2 Storage Tek Tape Library 1 is Base and the other is expansion (SL500 Model) which contains total 56 slots for Digital Tapes Drives. (40 DLT Used & 16 SDLT used in the slots).

f) SUN ACSLS (Automatic Cartridge system Library Software) Machine (SUN BLADE 2000 Model) It is used to control the Robotic Arm inside the Tape Library.

Below is image of StorageTek Automated Cartridge System (ACS), with robot arms manipulating up to 6,000 tape cartridges


g) 4 Network Switches
1 Brocade Silkworm : 2gbps
1 Qlogic SANbox : 4gbps
2 Intel Gigabit ethernet switch

This is all about the SAN setup on which i am working. My job profile is to maintain the whole Setup like
a) Plan for the setup from the scratch
b) Design & get approvals for the design of the whole infrastructure
c) Procure & Deploy the Servers,Network,Storage,Racks etc
d) Configure & install the whole system
a) To train engineers to monitor the network,storage & servers
b) To maintain the servers,storage & networks.

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1 minute reading links

How to Get job in Storage technology

Storage job openings in EMC2,Netapp,HP,Sun Microsystems

Vmware Interview Questions Storage

Veritas Interview Questions

Software Testing Tutorial

Email conversation with one of the Blog reader who is interested in learning more Storage but passionate to work as a programmer

Hi Roger,

Thanks a ton for writing a blog on Storage career opportunities and thanks for sending those Storage tutorial pdf materials.
Though i am working for a storage company for about an year,i am still perplexed with
storage complexities,market requirement, storage technologies
(DAS,NAS,SAN,SCSI,iSCSI to name a few), and i was unsure of my career roadmap as well,but after finding so many kool stuff on your blog,i'm excited with joy and aspiration.

~Aron
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Hi Aron

thanks for your email nice to know your feedback .
So do write more about ur tech experience & how is your work on storage.
what are the challenges& responsibilities you handle.

Rgds
Roger
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Hi Roger,

I'm working as a Quality Assurance-engineer( Some call the same designation as Product Verification Engineer or Product Testing Enginner) and my task involves certifying Backup & Volume Manager(which is basically an management interface which ultimately talks to SAS Storage devices & iSCSI drivers)and file system features, using already developed testsuites & testscripts.
(which mean not much is there for me to develop,beside fixing testsetup related bugs)
,beside this i do a little bit of troubleshooting and automation using perl,shell scripts.
Due to lack of bandwidth here (in my organisation) and company policies,i am not able
to sharpen my skills in systems programming and kernel level programming(which is my passion),i'm looking for opportunities where my primary work is doing what i love most(programming).hence i'm looking for such opportunities in storage domain.

Impatiently waiting to hear from you,
~Aron
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Hi Aron

I am sorry for delayed reply. I'd have loved to reply earlier but due to some hectic schedule I got a chance to do that only now. So i understand your mind to some extent. May be few lines from my thoughts may be of some help to You

Since you are saying you are much interested in programming you can gain more expertise in that by participating in some open source storage projects : where u get lot of freedom but the only problem is no pay :)

So if you are aiming for getting into a job where they pay well & allow you to code then I would say gain more in depth knowledge on as much storage fundamentals as u can - this way you can clear lots of Bigger storage company interviews which pay well & they definitely need someone to come for programming role for their storage business solutions.

So improve your programming skills as well as gain very good grip on major storage concepts like Fibre Channel,SAN,iSCSI,FS Switches,Storage arrays etc & then I can send you some documents to help you get going on these.

write to me what is your expected pay package if u wanna change & whats the present pay.I will see if there are any chances for something to be done to help you.

I do not want to promise much but if you work hard & constantly email me your progress I can definitely guide you to some extent - But ultimately I like to see long emails detailing what you are studying & how you are learning things & gaining more expertise :

I may publish some of our conversation on the blog (Removing all personal details & other confidential details) so I want people who share lot of tech stuff from their side & I will help them as much as I can

Rgds
Roger

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Hi Roger,

Thanks a lot for sharing words of wisdom with me.
Those pdfs are really kool, thanks again.

I work on SGI ,Solaris ,Linux platform and work closely with Volume managers.
Recently i got some Vmware virtualization exposure and these days i'm trying to explore more about it.
Thank god we have vmtn.com ,which is an awesome site with zillions of information on vmware virtualization
and beyond. I've learned a lot from forums at this site.This is a must visit site and i must say that if anyone is serious to learn Vmware ESX Server or Virtual Centre and art of troubleshooting then join forums here.

Also whenever i get time, i practice programing.
I'm almost done with "Advanced programming in UNIX" by Richard Stevans,which
gave me good insight of UNIX APIs.
Beside this i'm reading some books on OS and Linux kernel,which are:
a) "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
b) "Linux Kernel Development" by Robert Love.
c) "Linux Device Drivers" -3rd Edition

Roger, Thanks for taking out your precious time and writing to me.I'll certainly keep you updated with my latest learnings and experience in storage domain.

Regards
Aron