“Are You Intelligent?” is a bit of an awkward question to ask a college student interviewing for a job.
“Are You Intelligent?” would be a valid question to ask a storage system.
“Are You Intelligent about Intelligent Storage Systems?” would be an excellent question to ask a college student looking for a job in the storage industry. If the answer is “Yes”, there is a natural follow-up:
Prove it.
If a student answered by talking about RAID algorithms, caching, and virtualization, I’d be impressed. But think about it: what courses in college discuss this topic?
Enter the EMC Academic Alliance. This curriculum, currently being used around the world, has a section dedicated to intelligent storage systems.
And having built several intelligent storage systems in my career, I was curious about what the curriculum would teach. So I spent some time reviewing this section.
Building On Foundations
As I mentioned in a previous post, each section of the EMC Academic Alliance curriculum builds on previous lessons. Knowledge of a typical data center infrastructure is a prerequisite to understanding the definition and positioning of an intelligent storage system. To review, the five pieces of a data center infrastructure are (1) applications, (2) database management systems, (3) servers and operating systems, (4) networks, and (5) storage media.
Those final three areas are critical to understanding intelligent storage systems. Let’s examine how the curriculum dives into these three areas.
Servers and Operating Systems
There’s a level of knowledge about servers that assumed in the storage industry. CPU, ALU, Registers, L1 Cache, busses, and I/O devices are all terms that are associated with servers. Learn these terms (EMC’s Curriculum steps through all of them). When it comes to a server connecting to storage, however, HBA is a good term to learn. HBA stands for Host Bus Adapter, and an HBA is a common way for data center servers to connect to fiber channel storage systems. Connect a cable from your HBA to the storage infrastructure. An HBA is an important physical aspect of the server.
Let’s not forget the software stack on the server. There’s a layer of software services that sit above an HBA. If you can come into an interview knowing about this stack of software it would be impressive. The stack looks something like this:
- Applications
- Operating System
- File Systems
- Volume Managers
- Multi-Pathing
- Device Drivers
Some layers are optional. The logical and physical aspects of a server should be taught and learned.
Networks
The connectivity of servers to storage can also be divided into logical and physical. On a physical level, students should know the definition and differences between ports, cables, switches, directors, and bridges.
On a logical level there are a variety of bus technologies and protocols to learn. Busses have serial, uni- or bi-directional, and parallel characteristics. There are system busses, local I/O busses, bus widths, and bus speeds. There’s PCI (peripheral component interconnect). There’s fiber channel and TCP/IP, and different protocols can flow over each. And finally there are several relevant protocols when communicating with disk drives. SCSI is a key protocol to learn. As a matter of fact, the difference between SCSI disk drives and IDE/ATA disk drives are an important topic covered in the curriculum.
Intelligent Storage Systems
I helped build an intelligent storage system called CLARiiON. When I look at the curriculum I see a pretty thorough coverage of items I’ve encountered along the way:
- Platters
- HDAs
- cylinders, tracks, and heads
- flying heights and landing zones
- rotational latencies and seek times
- MTBF
- RAID levels
- caching and cache persistence (e.g. vaulting)
- cache algorithms: LRU, MRU, read-ahead, pinned
Knowledge of acronyms is key in this industry!
I’ve been pleasantly surprised and happy with the depth of information convered in these modules. It’s exactly what a student needs to know. Wish I had this education when I was in school, it would have really helped me get off the ground running.
I’d be interested to hear feedback from students on whether or not they’ve had exposure to these areas in their curriculum.
Steve
P.S. Resources: Find a school that teaches you this kind of stuff. Or have your school official email EMC Education Services about the EMC Academic Alliance program.
