Technical Interview Round for Storage & SAN Support engineer

I had to wait for nearly 40 minutes for the secound round of Technical interview. Read previous post (below post) Wipro Storage Interview to know what they asked in HR round.

There were very few guys in storage/SAN who came for this interview though it was a widely publicised walkin. There were more than 60 guys each for Software Testing, Java Development, Dotnet programming , Oracle ,Networking etc but for Storage hardly 5 guys came for the interview. This boosted my confidence - I was already imagining that I will definitely be given offer letter. Read the full posts to get all the details of this experience.

Second round was taken by two guys one seemed like a lead & another an engineer with little experience. Lead asked most of the questions & the new engineer asked twisted questions out of my own answers - it was more of a verification of my confidence in the subject.

Questions asked in that technical round of interview were like:
1. What kind of Storage Solutions have you worked on ?
2. Describe customer scenarios which you worked in & what problem did I resolve with my Storage knowledge ?
3. What Storage subsystems I have working experience on ?
4. Which vendor equipments I've used ?
5. How did you configure a SAN box from scratch ?
6. How do I plan , provision & manage Lun creation for different teams withing an organization ?
7. What are the difficulties I've faced in optimally utilizing the Storage infrastructure ?
8. What troubleshooting I've done & what are the steps I've followed ?
9. How different is it to manage a FC SAN & an iSCSI SAN ?
10.Mentioned some of the major company Storage products mention their specifications , limitations & performance comparisons ?
11. How will I manage if I have to work with Vmware Virtualization in my infrastructure do I have any exposure with ESX Server Administration or with Virtual Infrastructure management ?
12. What are the High Availability (HA) & Disaster Recovery Solutions (DR) I've implemented & how did I work out all the initial planning,designing,implementation & maintenance?
13. What is Zoning ? Mention types of Zoning & What Zoning options are available in which company products ?
14. What is Storage Virtualization & Storage Consolidation ?
15. Explain RAID5,RAID50,RAID10,RAID6,RAID3 which one is prefered & when ?

More details about how the interview went on will be posted in next 30 minutes keep reading .

Dont forget to see job openings for Storage in EMC2,HP,Wipro & many major companies in Storage Jobs Blog

For People who are interested to learn manual application Testing find real company Testing Interview Questions by clicking Testing Materials Website

How will be a Company's Network Infrastructure

Continuing the trend of images find below some more real Company implementations of Storage,Network & Systems.

Two OBF servers sit on top of an SGI Altix

Digi Console Servers for remote configuration


Sunfire V20Z - AMD Opteron Based Servers from Sunmicrosystems

The servers site in a private 6ft x 8ft colocation cage. The datacenter itslf belongs to bostondatacenters.com -- an excellent facility

These 2 servers belong to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, they host projects and sites such as bioperl.org, biojava,org, biodas.org, biomoby.org, biopython.org, bioruby.org, EMBOSS FTP

Rackable storage server (18x 250Gb SATA drives!) on top of an engineering prototype Intel system


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Storage Consolidation Explained with Example Images

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Email ur friends about this blog & CC me roger.smithson@gmail.com I Will send u Link to a Storage or Tech Job Video with lots of Real Industry Exposure for every friend you email - I want to spread the word & help more people thru this blog - U will also get many more Surprise Gifts to Boost your Career & Salary.


Storage Consolidation:Storage consolidation, also called storage convergence is a method of centralizing data storage among multiple servers. The objective is to facilitate data backup and archiving for all subscribers in an enterprise, while minimizing the time required to access and store data. Other desirable features include simplification of the storage infrastructure, centralized and efficient management, optimized resource utilization, and low operating cost.
Consolidated Storage Scenarios

There are a number of ways in which Storage technologies can help your organization consolidate storage, and help you to save time and money.
•NAS Gateway to a SAN: Consolidating File and Block Storage. For large organizations that have a SAN, curtailing the proliferation of NAS devices for file storage can be accomplished by deploying a NAS gateway (head) to the SAN. NAS gateways connect to the IP network and communicate with storage arrays on the SAN through switching technology. NAS gateways do not have on board storage; rather they access storage on the SAN, translating file data from the server into blocks for storage (and the reverse, when the data is requested by the server) as necessary. Deployment of a NAS gateway can help administrators to centralize block and file storage, while at the same time lowering equipment acquisition costs and preserving the value of NAS storage investments.

•Consolidated Backup Infrastructure. Consolidating storage onto a network provides administrators the opportunity to consolidate both backup hardware and software, helping organizations realize considerable cost savings.

On the hardware end, a SAN can support a single automated tape library with multiple tape drives, eliminating the need for backup equipment on each server, and centralizing media administration processes. Because the backup process has been moved off the servers and off the LAN, backups no longer impact work schedules or bandwidth.
By using Windows the Volume Shadow Copy Service, snapshot technologies can be integrated with the backup process, helping to ensure high fidelity backups and significantly reduce the backup window. Backups are stored centrally on the SAN; if a server goes down a second server can access the shadow copy and make it available for use. Not only does this simplify backup management, but it also speeds time to restore dramatically.

•Consolidate SAN Islands. Although SANs can scale to large sizes, it is more common for organizations to deploy multiple SANs, dedicating each SAN to a specific mission-critical database application, or each SAN serving a separate department or remote site location. Without interconnection, each of these SANs must be protected and managed independently, increasing cost and complexity. Islands of Fibre Channel SAN can be connected by extending the Fibre Channel infrastructure between them; however across long distances, this is an expensive proposition. (This is not a problem for iSCSI SANs, because no special equipment is required.) A less expensive solution is to use the existing LAN to extend a connection between distant SANs and an iSCSI bridge to translate between iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols.

For full details on how to do this using the Microsoft iSCSI software, see the section "iSCSI Bridge to a Fibre Channel SAN" in the white paper Deploying iSCSI SANs with the Microsoft iSCSI Architecture.

•Low Cost Consolidation of Wintel Servers to Centralized Storage. The centralized storage benefits—localized rather than distributed backups, reduced administration and simplified management—of a Fibre Channel SAN can be inexpensively extended to legacy servers. Rather than installing costly Fibre Channel HBAs to connect to the SAN, the standard IP networking equipment (onboard network interface cards) and the Microsoft iSCSI initiator coupled with an iSCSI gateway facilitates connection to the SAN.

•Blade Servers. In deployments that require hundreds or thousands of servers, managing individual servers is an administrative nightmare—server hardware acquisition and maintenance costs are high, and software update distribution is its own full time job. Blade (thin) servers are designed to share hardware resources among servers in a rack; the thinnest blade servers are diskless servers which access consolidated storage resources from the storage network.


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