How to prepare for interviews for Storage Openings

Previous 2 posts mentioned some storage job openings. You can click on EMC2,Dell,HP Openings ,Netapp Storage openings.
If you are worried about how to prepare for these interviews this blogpost is for you.
First Step Do Not apply for all openings when it does NOT match your profile. Making sure you apply for only those job openings which suit to your present profile or your interest is essential. This helps you to avoid the confusion & prepare with a focussed mind .Also this increases your chance of clearing all the rounds of interviews. Since interviewers are looking for persons who have the maximum points in their present profile matching the job requirement of the company.

So always make sure you get detailed Job description before you plan and schedule the interview. Once You have detailed JD(Job description) make sure you have atleast 1 to 2 weeks time to prepare for the interview. Interviewers always try to push you to take interviews very early. But if you request or sometimes even if you push then they will agree for a date of your convenince.

Once a date is fixed be serious & plan how you want to cover the major areas of your skillset. Example would be if you have mentioned below points as your skillsets
2 Years experience in Linux administration
Well versed in SDLC (Software Development Life CYcle)
Expertise in Release Engineering(RE) Process
Good experience in perl and shell scripting

Then you need to see what are your strong areas & which ones are weak areas. Start with Weak areas first & try to finish them early & with more stress.
Example if you feel SDLC,RE process are your strong areas & Linux administration,Perl/Shell scripting are areas you feel you need to improve on then you start with Weaker topics & strengthen yourself. Its always true that whenever u feel u r strong in any topic even if u prepare briefly on those topics you can still manage to do well in interviews. But if you are not at all confident about any topics then you will be shaky & will loose lots of good points/impressions when u are not able to answer or handle them in interview. So my suggestion is always strengthen your areas of weakness & make sure you are in a good enough defensive mode before you take the real interview.

It is always a good habit to go through several MOCK interview sessions or simulated interview sessions before you take the actual Real interview.This gives a clear picture & is a big winner for many of the people whom i have helped to win interviews. Believe it or not almost 60% to 80% of people have done very badly in their first & second mock interview session. Only those who were dedicated enought to prepare & take 3rd or 4th mock interview have done well in mock interviews as well as won their acutal company interviews 100%. These are the guys who came back with a big smile from their real company interview. Since they have fought the interview battle several times before hand .

instead of loosing your best chance by directly going for an interview its always safe & better to go through some simulated or mock interviews . This saves you from lots of frustations .

I will contiue writing about your interview preparations tips in my next post which I will for sure post by tomorrow. For those wise people who want to get personal guidance for their interview preparation I have a paid service where you pay me only $60 and I guide you for 15 days through emails & support materials for your job interview. Email roger.smithson@gmail.com with your interested job openings/job description & what are your expectations. I will do my best to support you but at the end of the day it is your dedication & sincerity in preparation that makes you win any job offer letter.

Inviting Storage company professionals to share their experiences

Any storage professional who can write about his experiences related to work or related to Storage profession can make $30 per article.I am willing to pay you $30 for a detailed article on
What sort of work do you do related to Storage
What is your Storage infrastructure like
What are the tasks & how are they accomplished
How can an enthusiast get into a similar company or Storage job
What are the skillset required by Job seekers to get into your Storage company

any thing more you want to share like your troubleshooting experiences, customer interactions, certification experience , interview experiences etc.Email roger.smithson@gmail.com your ORIGINAL articles.

If you can email me this & also permit me to publish on this blog - I will immediately send you $30 by paypal. I expect atleast 30+ lines of ORIGINAL article ( if anyone sends articles from web copy/pasted these will not be eligible)

The below company guys if they are willing to write I am willing to pay even $50 :)
EMC
Vmware
HP
Netapp
Sun Microsystems
IBM
Brocade

So this is the best way to make some fast money & also share your knowledge. Get started if you write to me more than 100 lines I will pay you $60 - the more quality & quantity you write you can earn more.

If you need any clarification email roger.smithson@gmail.com

Want to know more about Virtualization read the latest blog http://virtualizationjobs.blogspot.com

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Till now more than 200 Interview questions are posted on this blog & if you read all the articles there are also more than 15 Videos. Now You Can see more Videos related to Career/Job in Software,Technology and Storage - IF you write something suitable to post on this blog. Its a reward for sharing your knowledge with the community.EMAIL your article/writing/interview questions (ORIGINAL & NOT COPY PASTES FROM WEB ) to roger.smithson@gmail.com

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Interview questions on Veritas Volume Manager

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Veritas Volume Manager Overview


Some good questions on VERITAS Volume Manager. Before asking these questions make sure that candidate is familiar with LVM or VxVM and knows the benefits of these tools over traditional partitioning/file system.

1. Name the mandatory disk group in VxVM 3.5 ? How will configure VxVM in 3.5 ?
2. How will you create private and shared disk group using VxVM ?
3. Which are the different layouts for volumes in VxVM ?
4. What is the basic difference between private disk group and shared disk group ?
5. How will you add new disk to the existing disk group ?
6. How will grow/shrink the volume/file system ? What is the meaning of growby and growto options ? What is the meaning on shrinkto and shrinkby options ?
7. How will you setup and unsetup disks explicitly using VxVM ?
8. How will list the disks, which are in different disk groups ?
9. What is private region in VxVM ?
10. If, vxdisk list command gives you disks status as "error", what steps you will follow to make the respective disks online ?

These are some questions which I feel every storage professional should know. Please let me know if these are useful, answers will be posted in coming posts.

THANKS ASHISH FOR CONTRIBUTING ABOVE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ON VERITAS VOLUME MANAGER

Storage area networking Interview Questions

PREVIOUS POSTS CAN BE FOUND BY CLICKING THIS LINK
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Some more interview questions contributed by Jai
51) What is one of the constrains of using storage switch?
Latency

52) What is the difference between NAS and SAN?

NAS
Cables used in the n/w
n/w protocols (TCP/IP, IPx) and file sharing protocols (IFS & NFS)
Lower TCO
Support heterogeneous clients
Slow

SAN
High-speed connectivity such as FC
Do not use n/w protocols because data request are not made over LAN
Higher TCO
Requires special s/w to provide access to heterogeneous clients
Fast

53) What is Jitter?
Jitter refers to any deviation in timing that a bit stream suffers as it traverses the physical medium and the circuitry on-board the end devices. A certain amount of deviation from the original signaling will occur naturally as serial bit stream propagates over fibre-optic or copper cabling.

Mainly caused by electro magnetic interference

54) What is BER/Bit error rate?
Probability that a transmitted bit will be erroneously received is the measure of number of bits (erroneous) at the output of the receiver and dividing by the total number of bits in transmission.

55) What is WWPN?
WWPN is the 16bit character that is assigned to the port, SAN volume controller uses it to uniquely identify the fibre channel HBA that is installed in the host system.

56) What is connection allegiance?
Given multiple connections are established, individual command/response pair must flow over the same connection. This connection allegiance ensures that specific read or writes commands are fulfilled without the additional overhead of monitoring multiple connections and to see whether a particular request is completed.

57) What is burst Length?
The burst length is the number of bytes that the SCSI initiator sends to the SCSI target in the FCP_DATA sequence.

58) Explain different types of RAID?
RAID 0: data striping blocks are written sequentially, no redundancy, high performance than single disk access.

RAID 1: Mirroring, data blocks written to both disk at once, 100% redundancy, 100% additional capacity required. Read can be distributed across both the disks to increase performance.

RAID 3: Striping with byte parity, adds parity information to rebuild data in the event of disk failure, high transfer rate and availability with lower capacity required than RAID 1. Transactions performance low because all disks operate in lock step.

RAID 4: striping with block parity, independently accessible disks, data blocks written sequentially to each disk failure. Dedicated parity disk is write bottleneck and leads to poor performance.

RAID 5: Striping with rotational parity, parity blocks written per row and distributed across all disks, parity distribution eliminates single write bottleneck overhead for parity calculation on write supplemented with parallel microprocessors or caching.

59) What is NAS in detail ?
NAS or Network Attached Storage
“NAS is used to refer to storage elements that connect to a network and provide file
access services to computer systems. Abbreviated NAS. A NAS Storage Element consists of an interface or engine, which implements the file services, and one or more devices, on which data is stored.
NAS elements may be attached to any type of network. When attached to SANs, NAS elements may be considered to be members of the SAS (SAN Attached Storage) class of storage elements.

A class of systems that provide file services to host computers. A host system that uses network attached storage uses a file system device driver to access data using file access protocols such as NFS or CIFS. NAS systems interpret these commands and perform the internal file and device I/O operations necessary to execute them.”

Though the NAS does speed up bulk transfers, it does not offload the LAN like a SAN does. Most storage devices cannot just plug into gigabit Ethernet and be shared - this requires a specialized file server the variety of supported devices is more limited.NAS has various protocols established for such needed features as discovery, access control, and name services.

60)Briefly list the advantages of SAN ?
SANs fully exploit high-performance, highconnectivity network technologies
SANs expand easily to keep pace with fast growing storage needs
SANs allow any server to access any data
SANs help centralize management of storage resources
SANs reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)

READ BELOW POSTINGS FOR REMAINING 40+ INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ON STORAGE JOBS

More than 40 interview questions on storage,san,nas,FC:Thanks Jai for this contribution

I want to thank Jai one of our blog reader who has contributed more than 58 interview questions from his experience of attending real storage interviews.

In the last 2 posts we had more than 30 interview questions posted which can be accessed through the below links
interview questions Series 1
interview questions Series 2

Here you get 10 more interview questions for storage area networking
31) What are tow types of recording techniques on the tapes?
a) Linear Recording
b) Helical Scan Recording.

32) What is snap shot?
A snapshot of data object contains an image of data at a particular point of time.

33) What is HSM?
Hierarchical storage management, an application that attempts to match the priority of data with the cost of storage.

34) What is hot-swapping?
Devices are allowed to be removed and inserted into a system without turning off the system.

35) What is Hot-Sparing?
A spare device is available to be inserted into the subsystem operation without having to remove and replace a device.

36) What are different types of backup system?
a) Offline
b) Online
c) Near Line

37) What is the different between mirroring, Routing and multipathing?

Redundancy Functions Relationships Role
Mirroring Generates 2 i/os to 2 storage targets Creates 2 copies of data
Routing Determined by switches independent of SCSI Recreates n/w route after a failure
Multipathing Two initiator to one target Selects the LUN initiator pair to use

38) Name few types of Tape storage?
a) Digital Linear Tape
b) Advanced Intelligent Tape
c) Linear Tape Open

39) What is a sequence in FC?
Group of one or more frames that encompasses one or more “information units” of a upper layer protocol.

Example:
It requires
i) One sequence to transfer the command
ii) One or more sequence to transfer the data
iii) Once sequence to transfer the status.

40) What is Exchange in FC?
Exchange is to establish a relationship between 2 N_PORTs and then these two ports transfer data via one or more sequence within this relationship.
Example: Exchange exist to transfer the command, data and the status of one SCSI task

Networking (Storage) interview questions contributed by Jai(series 2)

Continuing the previous posting here some more interview questions contributed by our blog reader Jai.
More than 20 real storage job interview questions were posted in the previous post.

21) What is the purpose of disk array?
Probability of unavailability of data stored on the disk array due to single point failure is totally eliminated.

22) What is disk array?
Set of high performance storage disks that can store several terabytes of data. Single disk array can support multiple points of connection to the network.

23) What is virtualization?
A technique of hiding the physical characteristics of computer resources from the way in which other system application or end user interact with those resources. Aggregation, spanning or concatenation of the combined multiple resources into larger resource pools.

24) What is Multipath I/O?
Fault tolerant technique where by there is more than one physical path between the CPU in the computer systems and its main storage devices through the buses, controllers, switches and other bridge devices connecting them.

25) What is RAID?
Technology that groups several physical drives in a computer into an array that you can define as one or more logical drive. Each logical drive appears to the operating system as single drive. This grouping enhances the performance of the logical drive beyond the physical capability of the drives.

26) What is stripe-unit-size?
It is data distribution scheme that complement s the way operating system request data. Granularity at which data is stored on one drive of the array before subsequent data is stored on the next drive of the array. Stripe unit size should be close to the size of the system I/O request.

27) What is LUN Masking?
A method used to create an exclusive storage area and access control. And this can be achieved bye storage device control program.

28) What is the smallest unit of information transfer in FC?
Frame

29) How is the capacity of the HDD calculated?
Number of Heads X Number of Cylinders X Sectors per track X Sector Size

30) What is bad block reallocation?
A bad sector is remapped or reallocated to good spare block and this information is stored in the internal table on the hard disk drive. The bad blocks are identified during the media test of the HDD as well as during various types of read write operations performed during the I/O tests. Apart from the new generation of HDD comes with a technology called BGMS (background media scan) which continuously scans the HDD media for defects and maps them when the drive is idle (this is performed after the HDD is attached to the system).

Career in storage technology requires hardwork and dedication

If You are a Jobhunter & are planning to build your Career in Storage - know this first You Need to be dedicated , hard working and little guidance thats all it needs.

I have been recieving more than 30 emails everyday in respone to my blog & I am promptly replying each and every email - Because I want to HELP YOU GET A JOB. But just getting a Job is not the end of all miseries - believe me - Getting a Job is just 20% effort - Building Your Career & Growing in your Job is 80% effort. Jobseekers email me just asking for tutorials, materials, interview questions, quick help guide - I am happy to share them all but GUYS use them well - spend more than 4 to 6 hours a day with dedication learning these things, workingout on whatever little lab setup u can configure urself.

If you are really dedicated & willing to work hard - I can surely put time to help you to guide in you whatever time I can take.

Also DO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS BLOG by emailing roger.smithson@gmail.com any article, any interview experience, any troubleshooting or anything - WHICH is ORIGINAL & not copied from web. I want to help a COMMUNITY of Job seekers - Please help me to help them most.

Do care to give more than what u take from this blog because I highly appreciate your contribution & may send you more stuff to boost your Career.

Here is a Contest - You Can Win Loads of Interview Tips,Questions,Real interview experiences, Real Resumes of some of Known SAN professionals who have openly published their resume online & lots more - All u need to do is write & help people struggling out there to get some decent job.

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