Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

Q. What is the most critical component in SAN? Each component has its own criticality with respect to business needs of a company. 1. Differentiate between DAS-NAS-SAN? 2. When NAS is a better option than DAS? 3. When SAN is a better option than NAS? 4. What are the advantages & disadvantages of each of these product types? DAS: Direct Attached Storage: Server (or host)is directly connected to storage. NAS: Network Attached Storage: NAS is essentially a file server which is connected to storage thru some network interface using widely supported IP protocols. NFS, CIFS are supported. SAN: Storage Area Networking: Storage networks that connect multiple hosts through a switched fabric such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI. SAN is configured with multiple switches and multiple servers Host Bus Adapters (HBA) to create a high-availability storage configuration and various RAID solutions are used to protect data at the disk level. Q. What is the need for separate network for storage why LAN cant be used? LAN hardware and operating systems are geared to user traffic, and LANs are tuned for a fast user response to messaging requests. With a SAN, the storage units can be secured separately from the servers and totally apart from the user network enhancing storage access in data blocks (bulk data transfers), advantageous for server less backups. Q. How many classes of service are available in Fibre Channel? 7 Classes of service Q. What are the main constrains of SCSI in storage networking? a) Deployment distance (max. of 25 mts) b) Number of devices that can be interconnected (16) Q. What is a Fabric? Interconnection of Fibre Channel Switches A typical Fibre Channel SAN is made up of a number of Fibre Channel switches (FC switches are network devices) which are connected together to form a fabric. A fabric is similar in concept to a segment in a local area network. Fibre Channel routing solution, and these bring substantial scalability benefits to the SAN architecture by allowing data to cross between different fabrics without merging them. Q. What is RAID?

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

A. 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.

Q. What are the advantages of RAID?

A. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Depending on how we configure the array, we can have the 1. data mirrored [RAID 1] (duplicate copies on separate drives) 2. striped [RAID 0] (interleaved across several drives), or 3. parity protected / Stripping with parity [RAID 5](extra data written to identify errors). These can be used in combination to deliver the balance of performance and reliability that the user requires. Q. Define RAID? Which one you feel is good choice? A. RAID (Redundant array of Independent Disks) is a technology to achieve redundancy with faster I/O. There are Many Levels of RAID to meet different needs of the customer which are: R0, R1, R3, R4, R5, R10, R6. Generally customer chooses R5 to achieve better redundancy and speed and it is cost effective. R0 Striped set without parity/[Non-Redundant Array]. Provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Any disk failure destroys the array, which becomes more likely with more disks in the array. A single disk failure destroys the entire array because when data is written to a RAID 0 drive, the data is broken into fragments. The number of fragments is dictated by the number of disks in the drive. The fragments are written to their respective disks simultaneously on the same sector. This allows smaller sections of the entire chunk of data to be read off the drive in parallel, giving this type of arrangement huge bandwidth. RAID 0 does not implement error checking so any error is unrecoverable. More disks in the array means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss R1 - Mirrored set without parity. Provides fault tolerance from disk errors and failure of all but one of the drives. Increased read performance occurs when using a multi-threaded operating system that supports split seeks, very small performance reduction when writing. Array continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning. Using RAID 1 with a separate controller for each disk is sometimes called duplexing. R3 - Striped set with dedicated parity/Bit interleaved parity. This mechanism provides an improved performance and fault tolerance similar to RAID 5, but with a dedicated parity disk rather than rotated parity stripes. The single parity disk is a bottle-neck for writing since every write requires updating the parity data. One minor benefit is the dedicated parity disk allows the parity drive to fail and operation will continue without parity or performance penalty. R4 - Block level parity. Identical to RAID 3, but does block-level striping instead of byte-level striping. In this setup, files can be distributed between multiple disks. Each disk operates independently which allows I/O requests to be performed in parallel, though data transfer speeds can suffer due to the type of parity. The error detection is achieved through dedicated parity and is stored in a separate, single disk unit. R5 - Striped set with distributed parity. Distributed parity requires all drives but one to be present to operate; drive failure requires replacement, but the array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. Upon drive failure, any subsequent

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. The array will have data loss in the event of a second drive failure and is vulnerable until the data that was on the failed drive is rebuilt onto a replacement drive. R6 - Striped set with dual distributed Parity. Provides fault tolerance from two drive failures; array continues to operate with up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical, especially for high availability systems. This becomes increasingly important because large-capacity drives lengthen the time needed to recover from the failure of a single drive. Single parity RAID levels are vulnerable to data loss until the failed drive is rebuilt: the larger the drive, the longer the rebuild will take. Dual parity gives time to rebuild the array without the data being at risk if one drive, but no more, fails before the rebuild is complete. 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. Q. What is the difference between RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0?

A. RAID 0+1 (Mirrored Stripped)

In this RAID level all the data is saved on stripped volumes which are in turn mirrored, so any disk failure saves the data loss but it makes whole stripe unavailable. The key difference from RAID 1+0 is that RAID 0+1 creates a second striped set to mirror a primary striped set. The array continues to operate with one or more drives failed in the same mirror set, but if drives fail on both sides of the mirror the data on the RAID system is lost. In this RAID level if one disk is failed full mirror is marked as inactive and data is saved only one stripped volume. RAID 1+0 (Stripped Mirrored) In this RAID level all the data is saved on mirrored volumes which are in turn stripped, so any disk failure saves data loss. The key difference from RAID 0+1 is that RAID 1+0 creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. In a failed disk situation RAID 1+0 performs better because all the remaining disks continue to be used. The array can sustain multiple drive losses so long as no mirror loses both its drives. This RAID level is most preferred for high performance and high data protection because rebuilding of RAID 1+0 is less time consuming in comparison to RAID 0+1.

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

Q. Differentiate RAID & JBOD? A. RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Fault-tolerant grouping of disks that server sees as a single disk volume Combination of parity-checking, mirroring, striping Self-contained, manageable unit of storage JBOD: Just a Bunch of Disks Drives independently attached to the I/O channel Scalable, but requires server to manage multiple volumes Do not provide protection in case of drive failure Q. What are the types of disk array used in SAN? a) JBOD b) RAID JBOD: Just Bunch of Disks is Storage Box,it consists of Enclosure where set of harddrives are hosted in many combinations such SCSI drives,SAS ,FC,SATA. RAID: (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) Technology that groups several physical drives in a computer into an array that you can define as one or more logical drive to achieve redundancy with fasterI/O. Q. What is Array? A. Array is a group of Independent physical disks to configure any Volumes or RAID volumes. Q. What is the purpose of disk array / What is disk array? A1. Probability of unavailability of data stored on the disk array due to single point failure is totally eliminated. A2. 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. Q. How many minimum drives are required to create R5 (RAID 5)? A. You need to have at least 3 disk drives to create R5. Q. Can you name some of the states of RAID array? A. There are states of RAID arrays that represent the status of the RAID arrays which are given below: a. Online. b. Degraded. c. Rebuilding. d. Failed.

Q. Can we assign a hot spare to R0 (RAID 0) array?

A. No, since R0 is not redundant array, failure of any disks results in failure of the entire array so we cannot rebuild the hot spare for the R0 array. Q. What is zoning? A. Fabric management service that can be used to create logical subsets of devices within a SAN. This enables portioning of resources for management and access control purpose. Q. What are the two major classification of zoning? A. Two types of zoning are: a) Software Zoning.

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

b) Hardware Zoning. Q. What are different levels of zoning?

A.
a) Port Level zoning. b) WWN Level zoning. c) Device Level zoning. d) Protocol Level zoning. e) LUN Level zoning. Q. What is virtualization? A. 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. Q. What is storage virtualization? A. Storage virtualization is amalgamation of multiple n/w storage devices into single storage unit. Q. What is LUN Masking? A. A method used to create an exclusive storage area and access control. And this can be achieved by storage device control program. Q. What are two types of recording techniques on the tapes? a) Linear Recording b) Helical Scan Recording. Q. Name few types of Tape storage? a) Digital Linear Tape b) Advanced Intelligent Tape c) Linear Tape Open Q. What is snapshot? A. A snapshot of data object contains an image of data at a particular point of time. Q. What is stripe-unit-size? A. 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. Q. What is hot-swapping? A. Devices are allowed to be removed and inserted into a system without turning off the system. Q. What is Hot-Sparing? A. A spare device is available to be inserted into the subsystem operation without having to remove and replace a device. Q. What is HSM? A. Hierarchical Storage Management - An application that attempts to match the priority of data with the cost of storage. Q. What are different types of backup system? A. a) Offline. b) Online. c) Near Line.

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

Q. 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). Q. What is the different between mirroring, Routing and multipathing? A. Redundancy Functions Relationships Role Mirroring Generates 2 ios 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. Q. What are the different types of clusters? A. a) High availability clusters. b) High Performance Clusters. c) Load Balancing Clusters. Q. What is Multipath I/O? A. Fault tolerant technique where, 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. Q. What is Jitter? A. 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. Q. What is BER/Bit error rate? A. 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. Q. What is bypass circuitry? A. A circuit that automatically removes the storage device from the data path (FC device out of FC AL loop) when signaling is lost (this signal is called port by-pass signal). Q. What is connection allegiance? A. 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 any additional overhead of monitoring multiple connections and to see whether a particular request is completed. Q. How is the capacity of the HDD calculated? A. Number of Heads X Number of Cylinders X Sectors per track X Sector Size. Q. What is bad block reallocation? A. 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

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan

Storage Area Network Job Interview Questions

performed after the HDD is attached to the system). Q. Can you describe at-least 3 troubleshooting scenarios which you have come across in detail? A. SCENARIO 1: How do you find/debug when there is error while working SCSI devices? In our daily SAN troubleshooting there are many management and configuration tools we use them to see when there is a failure with target device or initiator device. Some time it is even hard to troubleshoot some of the things such as media errors in the drives, or some of the drives taking long time to spin-up. In such cases these utilities will not come to help. To debug this kind of information most of the controller will be implemented with 3-pin serial debug port. With serial port debug connector cable you can collect the debug information with hyper terminal software.
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SCENARIO 2: I am having an issue with a controller its taking lot of time to boot and detect all the drives connected how can I solve this.? There are many possibilities that might cause this problem. One of the reason might be you are using bad drives that cannot be repaired. In those cases you replace the disks with working ones. Another reason might be slots you connected your controller to a slot which might not be supported. Try to connect with other types of slots. One more probable reason is if you have flashed the firmware for different OEMs on the same hardware. To get rid of this the flash utilities will be having option to erase all the previous and EEPROM and boot block entry option. Use that option to rectify the problem. SCENARIO 3: I am using tape drive series 700X, even the vendor information on the Tape drive says 700X, but the POST information while booting the server is showing as 500X what could be the problem? First you should make sure your hardware is of which series, you can find out this in the product website. Generally you can see this because in most of the testing companies they use same hardware to test different series of same hardware type. What they do is they flash the different series firmware. You can always flash back to exact hardware type.

Date: 26/Nov/2012

MD Ali Asharaf Khan