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
