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

Solaris Interview Questions - Sun's OS is a favourite among Storage industry

Sun microsystem's Solaris Operating System has a large penetration in Storage industry so it becomes a necessity for Storage professionals to know Solaris. A good blog reader "Dushyant" (scorpio) : has shared very good interview questions which he has collected from his experience of attending interviews. Thanks Dushyant for sending these questions & sharing with this blog community - I appreciate your efforts. As a reward I will be sending Dushyant 4 PDF's of Solid Storage Fundamentals to help his Storage Learning.

I request all readers of this blog to share their IT or Storage related ORIGINAL articles & get more Free downloadable materials from me.

Solaris Interview Questions
1) What files control user administration?
A) /etc/passwd file: 7 Fields: loginid:x:userid:groupid:comment:homedir:shell
/etc/shadow: 9 Fields: loginid:password:lastchng:min:max:warn:inactive:expire
/etc/group : 4 Fields : groupname:password:groupid:username list)

2) What does the “pwconv” command do?
A) It updates the /etc/shadow file with information from /etc/passwd file.

3) Where are the failed login attemps to system logged?
A) /var/adm/loginlog (We need to create this file as it does not exist by default)

4) Which command shows the users currently logged in to system?
A) who ( It reads the information from /var/adm/utmpx file)

5) Which command will show detailed information about a user?
A) finger –m

6) Which command displays all login and logouts?
A) last (It reads the information from /var/adm/wtmpx file)

7) What is the “StickyBit” file permission?
A) Sticky Bit permission protects the file within a public writable directory.
File set with sticky bit will not allow any user to delete the file except the
Owner of file, owner of the group or the root user.

8) How is ACL (Access Control Lists) implemented?
A) 8.1) “getfacl”command : To display an ACL on file.
Syntax : getfacl

8.2) setfacl command : To set the ACL on file
Syntax : setfacl


8.3) setfacl –m command : To modify ACL entries
Syntax : setfacl –m

8.4) setfacl –s command : Remove old ACL entries and replace with new one.
Syntax : setfacl –s

8.5) setfacl –d command : Delete ACL entry
Syntax : setfacl –d

9) Imp “root(/)” subdirectories and their purpose :
9.1) / : Root of overall file system.
9.2) /bin : Symbolic link to /usr/bin. Stores standard system commands and binary files.
9.3) /dev : Primary location for “logical” device names
9.4) /devices : Primary location for “physical” device names
9.5) /etc : Contains host specific system admin config files
9.6) /export : Default directory for commonly shared filesystems.
9.7) /home : Default directory / mount point for user’s home directory
9.8) /kernel : Directory of platform independent loadable kernel file
9.9) /mnt : Temporary mount point for file systems
9.10) /opt : Default directory for add on packages
9.11) /sbin : Executables used in booting process and file recovery
9.12) /tmp : Temporary files
9.13) /usr : Mount point for /usr file system
9.14) /var : Directory for varying files, temporary logging or status files

10) What are the different disk slices?

Slice Name Function
0 / Root’s system files
1 swap Swap area
2 Entire Disk
5 /opt Optional Software
6 /usr System Exe’s
7 /export/home User’s file and directories

Dushyant has sent 41 interview questions in total which will be posted in next posts - updated in next 6 hours. This blog is updated twice a day & has lots of good articles in previous posts - So spend enough time to read thru & get a Career boost.

For people interested in Virtualisation jobshere is a great blog http://virtualizationjobs.blogspot.com

StorEdge Sun microsystems product series - good Storage product from Sun

Storage job opening interview pointers.
In any interview for a storage related opening you will surely be asked to name Storage product names which might have worked on or known about.So below are some of the good Storage products from Sun microsystems which you can learn more about.Next posts will have information about other Storage products from vendors like EMC,IBM etc

JBOD Storage Implementation


Sun StorEdge 6130 Array

aimed at business-critical applications, such as email, ERP and e-commerce providing advanced data protection, high availability and application oriented management.
* Maximum Tray Capacity: 73GB 10k rpm-FC drives 1022 GB per tray (3 RU), 73GB 15k rpm-FC drives 1022 GB per tray (3 RU), 146GB 10k rpm-FC drives 2044 GB per tray (3 RU), 400GB 7,200 rpm-SATA drives 5600 GB per tray (3 RU)
* System Capacity: Scales from 5 to 112 drives (365GB to 41.2TB)
* Support for high-performance FC and high-capacity SATA disk drives
* Modular design and "pay-as-you-grow" scalability

Sun StorEdge 9910 System

or the high-end data center, providing hardware and firmware redundancy, unique switched-fabric architecture, self-diagnosis, "call-home," and remote data replication.
* Over 3.5 TB raw capacity
* 48 drive capacity (up to 4 hot spares)
* SAN connectivity - handles up to 144 host connections (6:1 fan-out)
* 32 data paths provide 3.2 GB/sec bandwidth and extreme system resiliency
* RAID 5 or RAID 1+ gives customers a choice of HDD protection, resiliency, and performance

Sun StorEdge 3510 FC Array
This is an array system that uses a modular, 'building block' approach with high port counts.With a highly intuitive management interface, the StorEdge 3510 is easy to deploy, configure and then manage providing a host of enterprise class features such as dual hot-swap power and cooling, dynamic LUN expansion and hot-swap disk drives.
* Capacity : 146GB 10K rpm disk drives: 1.72 TB max storage capacity (raw, in single 2U array)
* 2Gb Fibre Channel architecture
* Up to 12 Fibre Channel ports in dual RAID controller configurations
* Support for up to 1024 logical unit numbers (LUNs) with hardware LUN masking

STORAGE TESTING TRAINING IN BANGALORE email jobsulike@gmail.com & read below posting for more information.

Storage companies products Videos & Tutorials

Dell Server Engineers give you a product brief


SATA Raid Controller & drive


You got to see inside a Hard disk when its spindle is running



SATA(Serial ATA) Hard Disk as an external drive

Storage area networking Sample Implementation Images

EMAIL roger.smithson@gmail.com FOR A FREE SAN STUDENT GUIDE PDF

There are more than 40 article or blog posts on this blog if u start reading all previous posts. But many visitors asked for some sample implementation images or any images to make the understanding of Storage & SAN easy. So some good Storage images are listed below.


Components:
The SAN components in the above image are listed below

- FC Storage Arrays (x2); each configured with
- 3U chassis with dual FC, hot-swap fans and power supplies
- 16 x 250GB SATA hot-swap drives

- FC Storage Array (x1)
- 3U chassis with dual FC, hot-swap fans and power supplies
- 16 x 500GB SATA II hot-swap drives

- SCSI Storage Arrays (x2); each configured with
- 2U chassis with dual Ultra160 SCSI, hot-swap fans, power supplies
- 12 x 72GB SCA SCSI hot-swap drives

- Tape Backup
- Sun StorEdge L25 Tape Library
- 2 x HP Ultrium-2 SCSI LTO2 drives
- 1 x Sun FC420 (ATTO FibreBridge) Internal SCSI<->FC Bridge

- SAN Fabric
- Q-Logic SanBox 5200 Fibre Channel Switch (x2); each configured with
- 16 2GB FC ports
- 4 10GB stacking ports
- 11 x Q-Logic QLA2340 64-bit HBAs

- SCSI to FC conversion
- ATTO FibrBridge 4500
- 3 x 1GB FC ports
- 4 x Ultra160 SCSI

This SAN is centrally managed also provisioned from the control server via java based SAN Manager and RAIDwatch software which comes bundled with the hardware.

Previous Posts on Storage Technology Jobs