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

I got job in IBM reading this blog everyday & studying all the materials :Blog Reader Sean Joy

My name is ShiV.(Blog Reader) I got job in one of the biggest company IBM though I came from Mechanical Engineering background. and I am proud to say that i am a regular reader of this blog and it is the first time i am sharing my struggles and experience for a job and in the end getting a job in the biggest IT company. I got a dream job in IBM because of my hardwork & with the help of reading this Storage blog regularly.

I passed out from college in 2001 in Mechanical engineering. but always wanted to build my career in IT field.i was looking for a suitable opportunity to start off as i had done courses like C,C++,java. but at that time job market was in slump and my career was going nowhere inspite of great percentage and strong analytical and aptitude skills.I then started working as a tech support and got frustrated with that job as i did not want a call centre job.i was studying side by side for some software companies interviews .

I hardly used to get time for sleep as I had to work night shift of tech support & also used to come back & make time to read other materials. I started looking for a course which can give me an edge above others.luckily i found out a course comprising of TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) AIX basics, Windows 2003 Server and Networking and being the first Storage batch i did not have much guidance as its a brand new field so I started learning on my own .I used to regularly come to this Storage jobs blog and seek guidance and knowledge.I read all the articles on this blog which are now more than 150 . I read many pdf's regarding SAN, TSM concepts,configuration, implementation,problem determination guides etc.and also other websites like Virtualization blog , Testing Blog,Datawarehousing Tutorials so I can know maximum about Storage & related technologies . I also concentrated more on command line as my opinion is its easy to lean GUI but if you want to be clear about the basics then use command line.then i sat for IBM interview.

In the Storage Interview the interviewers asked all the basic stuff about storage like :
reclaimation,
collocation,
policy management,
scheduling,
SAN,NAS ,DAS
etc

it was a 3 round interview extremely tough consisting of all the knowledge we had gathered

Ist round was written 100 marks consisting of all knowledge of AIX and storage.Storage part included all basic and advanced concepts of
LUN masking,
zoning,
RAID,
fibre channel classes of services,
FC topologies,
scsi,iscsi etc.(this blog really helped me because all above topics are covered on this blog )

2nd round was the best..they installed Tivoli Storage Manager(TSM) server and client on a m/c and gave us real time scenarios and we had to show them how to troubleshoot on command line some eg . of scenarios :
Issues with database ,
recovery log getting full ,
low scratch tapes no.
disk storage pool full what will happen to client sessions
schedules failed
etc

3rd round was seminar..topic from SNIA website we have to choose.(.I chose Storage Consolidation and Virtualization -when where how and why) i must say one of the videos i found on this blog really did help me it was a guy explaining about the same..

after all this they selected only 6 people and i got through and now joined IBM as TSM system admin .It is a dream come true for me it was a long journey from being a night shift guy handling Tech support to a IT Professional working in a prestigious company like IBM on a normal shift :) in Hyderabad.

My first role will be i think Storage Management,Disaster Recovery administration but i want to gradually learn as much as possible like SAN or Virtualization

hope this experince helps those who are struggling remember one thing :IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING. thanks roger for this wonderful blog

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

A Storage Interview Experience from one of the blog reader

Wipro Storage Interview Experience interview attended on 15 August 2007.

Job : Storage & SAN Support Engineer

Number of Rounds :

Initial screening was done through a HR round where there were usual things like :
1. Tell me about your self
2. Tell me about your previous experience
3. How were the team structure or company hierarchy in previous companies
4. What are the tasks & responsibilities you handled in present/previous job
5. Why are you leaving that job
6. Why This company & How can you say that you will stick in this job for a long time
7. What do you look for in your new job
8. What are your strengths & how they helped in your job
9. What are your weaknesses & how are you working to overcome them
10.Why should we hire you?
11.What are your salary expectations ? What is your present CTC & expected CTC ? Notice period & any issue in relocating ?

Next Rounds will details with questions will be posted in the next blog post within next 30 minutes.

If you want to see many job openings in Storage & System administration find them in Storage Jobs Blog

Check out Software Testing Jobs Blog for lots more Testing Interview Questions