Backup SAN, NAS, ISCSI Interview

1) What is the difference b/w SAN and NAS?

The basic difference between SAN and NAS , SAN is Fabric based and NAS is Ethernet based.
SAN - Storage Area Network
NAS - Network attached Storage
2) What is a typical storage area network consists of - if we consider it for implementation in a
small business setup?
If we consider any small business following are essentials components of SAN
 Fabric Switch
 FC Controllers
 JBOD's
3) Can you briefly explain each of these Storage area components?
 Fabric Switch: It's a device which interconnects multiple network devices .There are
switches starting from 16 port to 32 ports which connect 16 or 32 machine nodes etc.
Vendors who manufacture these kinds of switches are Brocade, McData.
 FC Controllers: These are Data transfer medias they will sit on PCI slots of Server,u can
configure Arrays and volumes on it.
 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.
4) Define RAID? Which one you feel is good choice?
RAID (Redundant array of Independent Disks) is a technology to achive redundancy with
faster I/O.There are Many Levels of RAID to meet different needs of the customer which are :
R0,R1,R5,R10,R5.
Generally customers choose R5 to achive better redundancy and speed and it is cost effective.
5) How is a SAN managed?
There are many management softwares used for managing SAN's to name a few
 Santricity
 IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.
 CA Unicenter.
 Veritas Volumemanger.
6) Which one is the Default ID for SCSI HBA ?
Generally the default ID for SCSI HBA is 7.
SCSI- Small Computer System Interface
HBA - Host Bus Adaptor
7) How do you install device drivers for the HBA first time during OS installation?
In some scenarios you are supposed to install Operating System on the drives connected thru
SCSI HBA or SCSI RAID Controllers, but most of the OS'es will not be updated with drivers for
those controllers, that time you need to supply drivers externally, if you are installing
windows ,you need to press F6 during the installation of OS and provide the driver disk or CD
which came along with HBA.
If you are installing linux you need to type "linux dd" for installing any driver.
8) What is Array?
Array is a group of Independent physical disks to configure any Volumes or RAID volumes.
9) Can u describe atleast 3 troubleshooting scenarios which you have come across in detail?

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 trouble shoot some of the things such as media errors in the
drives, or some of the drives taking long time to spinnup.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.

10) 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 OEM’s 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.
11) 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.
12) Which are the SAN topologies?
SAN can be connected in 3 types which are mentioned below:
 Point to Point topology
 FC Arbitrated Loop (FC :Fibre Channel )
 Switched Fabric
13) Which are the 4 types of SAN architecture types
 Core-edge
 Full-Mesh
 Partial-Mesh
 Cascade
14) Which command is used in linux to know the driver version of any hardware device?
dmesg
15) How many minimum drives are required to create R5 ( RAID 5) ?
You need to have at least 3 disk drives to create R5.
16) Can you name some of the states of RAID array?
There are states of RAID arrays that represent the status of the RAID arrays which are given
below
  Online
 Degraded
 Rebuilding
 Failed
17) Name the features of SCSI-3 standard?
QAS: Quick arbitration and selection
Domain Validation
CRC: Cyclic redundancy check
18) Can we assign a hot spare to R0 (RAID 0) array?
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.
19) Can you name some of the available tape media types?
There are many types of tape media available to back up the data some of them are
 DLT: Digital linear tape - technology for tape backup/archive of networks and servers;
DLT technology addresses midrange to high-end tape backup requirements.
 LTO: Linear tape open; a new standard tape format developed by HP, IBM, and
Seagate.
 AIT: Advanced intelligent tape; a helical scan technology developed by Sony for tape
backup/archive of networks and servers, specifically addressing midrange to high-end
backup requirements.
20) What is HA?
HA High Availability is a technology to achive failover with very less latency. It’s a practical
requirement of data centers these days when customers expect the servers to be running 24
hours on all 7 days around the whole 365 days a year - usually referred as 24x7x365. So to
achieve this a redundant infrastructure is created to make sure if one database server or if one
app server fails there is a replica Database or Appserver ready to takeover the operations. End
customer never experiences any outage when there is a HA network infrastructure.
21) What is virtualization?
Virtualization is logical representation of physical devices. It is the technique of managing and
presenting storage devices and resources functionally, regardless of their physical layout or
location. Virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices
into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console. Storage
virtualization is commonly used in a storage area network (SAN). The management of storage
devices can be tedious and time-consuming. Storage virtualization helps the storage
administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily, and in less
time, by disguising the actual complexity of the SAN.

Sysadmin interview questions

1) What is an incremental backup?

2) What steps are required to perform a bare-metal recovery?
3) Name key files or directories on a UNIX system that should always be backed up.
4) Name key files or directories on a Windows system that should always be backed up.
5) What is RAID 0?
6) What is RAID 0+1? Why is it better than 0?
7) What is RAID-5?
8) Why would you NOT want to encapsulate a root directory with Veritas?
 9) What is concatenation?
10) What is striping?
11) What is a spindle?

1) What is a level 0 backup?

Level 0 backup is normal or full backup. A normal backup disregards the archive bit in all files
and backs up all files and folders selected, regardless of when they were modified. A normal
backup is the most complete type of backup, and the only type of backup that can be used to
back up the registry and other critical system files. A normal backup takes the longest amount
of time to back up and recover. A normal backup clears the archive bit on all files after backing
up.

Q2. An incremental backup is the quickest method for performing backups of data. An incremental
backup only backs up files that have been created or modified (their archive bit is set to 1) since the
last normal or incremental backup. An incremental backup also clears the archive bit (sets the archive
bit back to 0) of all files that it backs up.

Q3. reinstall the os.

start -> run -> type “ntbackup” -> ok -> next -> select restore -> next -> select backup files -> next ->
finish

vamsi

Posted 9/16/2005 at 2:46 am | Permalink

11Q What is striping?

A technique for spreading data over multiple disk drives. Disk striping can speed up operations that
retrieve data from disk storage. The computer system breaks a body of data into units and spreads
these units across the available disks. Systems that implement disk striping generally allow the user to
select the data unit size or stripe width.

Disk striping is available in two types. Single user striping uses relatively large data units, and improves
performance on a single-user workstation by allowing parallel transfers from different disks. Multi-user
striping uses smaller data units and improves performance in a multi-user environment by allowing
simultaneous (or overlapping) read operations on multiple disk drives.
Vivek Kumar

Posted 11/26/2005 at 2:35 am | Permalink

Question 6: RAID’s are of 2 types H/W and S/W RAID.

RAID 0 is bascially a type of S/W RAID that ships with Windows Server..

It is a highly perfomance striped volume without parity..

The data is distributed into different parts and the placed over different volumes and hence improving
the responce time.. you can use this with disks Betw. 2 to 32. you can not mirror a striped volume
rather u can make fault toulerent by backing it up..

Patsy Farkas

Posted 12/23/2005 at 12:21 pm | Permalink

Please send me the answers for

Name key files or directories on a UNIX system that should always be backed up.

Name key files or directories on a Windows system that should always be backed up.

What is RAID 0?

What is RAID 0+1? Why is it better than 0?

What is RAID-5?

Why would you NOT want to encapsulate a root directory with Veritas?

What is concatenation?

What is striping?
What is a spindle?

ksahu

Posted 12/26/2005 at 2:19 am | Permalink

What is RAID 0?

What is RAID 0+1? Why is it better than 0?

What is RAID-5?

swapnatummala

Posted 1/5/2006 at 5:20 am | Permalink

ple send me the answers for these questions:

What is RAID 0?

What is RAID 0+1? Why is it better than 0?

What is RAID-5?

Why would you NOT want to encapsulate a root directory with Veritas?

What is concatenation?

What is striping?

What is a spindle?

#5.RAID-REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INDEPENDENT DISKS.

RAID 0-EACH FILE HAS A BACKUP.

Q4: /etc, /boot, /home

Q5: “%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings”

Number 10 answer is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenation

Ashish

Posted 4/26/2006 at 11:24 am | Permalink

Q6: Level 0 — Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks
of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not
deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

Raja

Posted 6/16/2006 at 7:42 am | Permalink

raid 0: its a striping process that means datas dividing

raid 1: its a mirroring process so that raid 1 s better than raid 0

raid5:this s also striping and parity process

in this raid 5 used 4 partations.4 th one s spare

in case 2 nd paratation s failed spare (i mean 4 th ) s activate to 2 nd partation

RAID 0:

Striping. Data is spread across multiple disks. No redundancy.

RAID 1:

Mirrioring. Data written to a mirror is duplicated to a second disk or volume.

RAID 0+1:
Striping + Mirroring: Data is striped across 2 or more disks, then duplicated to identical disk setups.
This provides speed, as well as redundancy.

RAID 1+0:

Mirroring + Striping: _MIRRORS_ are striped across multiple disks. Faster than 0+1, but not as
redundant.

RAID 5:

RAID with parity. Data is striped across multiple disks. A disk or disks in a RAID-5 set is reserved for
parity information. This way data can be reconstructed using the pairity information.

Why would you NOT want to do root-disk encapsulation with Veritas?

This is not nessacarily the case anymore with versions of VxFS greater than 4.5. root disk encapsulation
requires kernel-level drivers in most cases. Because of this, encapsulating the root partition can make
it unreadable in a bare-metal recovery situation.

What is Concatination?

Concatination is a process whereby multple disk drives are combined into a larger volume. e.g. 2
drives, 1 30 GB drive, and a 10 GB drive are combined to present a 40GB drive to the OS.

What is Striping?

Striping is a process whereby data is split across multiple disks. This is typically done with identical
drives. Data being written is split into small blocks (8-32K typically) and written across as many drives
that are in the striped volume. The block-size is typically called an ‘interlace’ or ‘interleave’ factor.
This makes writing and reading data much faster than writing to a single disk.

What is a spindle?

Spindles are the center-points of disk drives.. the rotating shaft. The reason this question could be
relevant is that when discussing RAID, it’s not uncommon to hear terms like “Spliting data across as
many spindles as possible to achieve performance”… i think this term has started to fall out of use
however.

Jeff

Posted 10/12/2006 at 12:59 pm | Permalink

# What is a level 0 backup?

Level 0 backups are also known as “full” backups. ALL data on a system is copied.

# What is an incremental backup?

An Incremental backup is copying data that has only changed since the last FULL backup.

# What steps are required to perform a bare-metal recovery?

Most bare-metal recovery solutions require that a minimal OS be installed back onto the system. There
is software out there that can assist with this. However it’s usually easier to just boot a box from a CD
or network server, install a base OS, and recover from the last known good backup.

# Name key files or directories on a UNIX system that should always be backed up.

SOLARIS systems:

/etc - System configuration information.

/var/adm - additional log directory for Solaris.

/var/log - preserve log data for forensics if needed.

LINUX Systems:

/etc - system configuration information.

/boot - Linux kernel information

/var/log - Log data for forensics if needed.

# Name key files or directories on a Windows system that should always be backed up
c:\ :)

Perry Bryant

Posted 10/18/2006 at 11:36 am | Permalink

1. What is a level 0 backup? Level 0 backup is normal or full backup. A normal backup disregards the
archive bit in all files and backs up all files and folders selected, regardless of when they were
modified. A normal backup is the most complete type of backup, and the only type of backup that can
be used to back up the registry and other critical system files. A normal backup takes the longest
amount of time to back up and recover. A normal backup clears the archive bit on all files after
backing up.

2. What is an incremental backup? An incremental backup is the quickest method for performing
backups of data. An incremental backup only backs up files that have been created or modified (their
archive bit is set to 1) since the last normal or incremental backup. An incremental backup also clears
the archive bit (sets the archive bit back to 0) of all files that it backs up.

3. What steps are required to perform a bare-metal recovery? Reinstall the OS.

start -> run -> type “ntbackup” -> ok -> next -> select restore -> next -> select backup
files -> next -> finish

4. Name key files or directories on a UNIX system that should always be backed up.

5. Name key files or directories on a Windows system that should always be backed up.

6. What is RAID 0? Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out
blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does
not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
7.What is RAID 0+1? Why is it better than 0?

· RAID 0: Striping. Data is spread across multiple disks. No redundancy.

· RAID 1: Mirroring. Data written to a mirror is duplicated to a second disk or volume.

· RAID 0+1: Striping + Mirroring: Data is striped across 2 or more disks, and then duplicated to
identical disk setups. This provides speed, as well as redundancy.

· RAID 1+0: Mirroring + Striping: _MIRRORS_ are striped across multiple disks. Faster than 0+1, but
not as redundant.

· RAID 5: RAID with parity. Data is striped across multiple disks. A disk or disks in a RAID-5 set is
reserved for parity information. This way data can be reconstructed using the parity information.

8. Why would you NOT want to encapsulate a root directory with Veritas? Encapsulating the root
partition can make it unreadable in a bare-metal recovery situation.

9. What is concatenation? Concatenation is the operation of joining two character strings end to end.

10. What is striping? A technique for spreading data over multiple disk drives. Disk striping can speed
up operations that retrieve data from disk storage. The computer system breaks a body of data into
units and spreads these units across the available disks. Systems that implement disk striping generally
allow the user to select the data unit size or stripe width. Disk striping is available in two types. Single
user striping uses relatively large data units, and improves performance on a single-user workstation by
allowing parallel transfers from different disks. Multi-user striping uses smaller data units and improves
performance in a multi-user environment by allowing simultaneous (or overlapping) read operations on
multiple disk drives.

11. What is a spindle? Spindles are the center-points of disk drives.. the rotating shaft. The reason this
question could be relevant is that when discussing RAID, it’s not uncommon to hear terms like
“Splitting data across as many spindles as possible to achieve performance”

12. What is RAID? REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INDEPENDENT DISKS.

RAID 0-EACH FILE HAS A BACKUP.

Basha

Posted 12/23/2006 at 8:45 am | Permalink

I can put 30 HDD in a Dell server(configuration of Raid 5)in between two HDD was get problem. on that
time wat we have to do??

I have out 2 New HDD ….

If I put 2 new HDD wat about the Configuration of Raid 5??or we have configure RAID 5..

How??

Kilgore Trout

Posted 1/26/2007 at 10:03 am | Permalink

Why would you NOT want to do root-disk encapsulation with Veritas?

Because it loses the slice information.

sankaranarayanan

Posted 2/1/2007 at 8:42 am | Permalink

Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 5

Raid 0 is with out Fault tolerance.nothing will be retrived.

Raid 1…Disk mirroring is the basic function occurs.

1) It creats exact copy of one physical harddisk to another.

2 It uses one controller

3 If one drive fails system will boot with other drive.

4 slow performance.

5 Increased cost every mirror must be seperate physical device thus you must purchase twice the
storage capacity.

6 no protection from controller failure.: if controller failure , the mirrored drives as just inaccesible.

Raid 5: Disk stripping with parity.

It is completely Software based and higly secured technology.

1 Raid 5 is in-expensive, but very convinient.

2 The parity information is stored distributed in different disk .

3 If one of the disk fails , it is hot swappable.

4 Parity information is stored in other Harddisk is automatically updated to failed one.

5 If more than one disk fails, it should be restored from backup.

Regards,

sankarnarayanan.G

Chuck

Posted 1/18/2008 at 10:22 am | Permalink

Note: Raid 1 does not imply a single controller. Raid 1 means that each block is replicated to one or
more secondary disks. It has nothing to do with the number of controllers and/or paths to each
disk/lun.
Note: Raid 5 does not imply something is hot swapable, that is hardware dependent. Raid 5 merely
implies that parity information is written across all disks allowing it to sustain a single disk failure
because the data on the failed disk can be reconstructed using the parity information located on the
other disks. A Raid 5 set with a failed disk is classified as “degraded”. Note that some raid 5
configurations allow for more than 1 disk failure.

Chuck

Posted 1/18/2008 at 10:25 am | Permalink

Regarding level 0 backups and incremental backups.

I keep seeing people refer to the “archive bit” in files… On Unix, with Netbackup specifically, the
archive bit means absolutely nothing. An incremental backup will pick up all files _modified_ since the
last backup - be it incremental or full. Hence it is using the mtime of the file. If you were to “touch
/etc/passwd” this file would now be included in the next incremental backup.