Path to learn more about storage?

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SRussell

Active Member
Oct 7, 2019
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I am diving headfirst into storage and I realize I lack a significant amount of basic knowledge. It took me a couple of hours to feel 100% confident about setting up a storage head unit and connecting a JBOD using SAS. Even with the time I put in there was one component I could not find and @T_Minus had to break it down for me.

Would you recommend reading through the Storage+ certification to gain a better understanding? If not that road what resources would you recommend to help me ask smarter questions?
 
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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I'm not sure how I could answer your post... Do you have specific goals/requirements?
Otherwise I think "learning by doing" is the best approach to learn about IT (and storage) :D
Would you recommend reading through the Storage+ certification to gain a better understanding?
What's the storage+ certification? Do you have a link?
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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I think "learning by doing" is the best approach to learn about IT (and storage) :D
I'd be inclined to agree - actually sitting down and doing it not only forces you to concentrate but also gives you real-life experience of common pitfalls associated with it*. If you have a few spare bits of hardware lying around, building yourself a FeeeNAS box or other DIY SAN/NAS and presenting it to other boxes will teach you a world of info, and if you're just doing it as a learning tool you can do it very cheaply as there's no need to care about upgradeability, resiliency, etc.

Come up with a mini-project you can try to build to teach yourself the basics - man moons ago I built a NAS machine (first pre-ZFS FreeNAS, then debian) and then turned it in to an iSCSI SAN; shared out the storage over NFS/iSCSI to some spare desktops to make a makeshift VMware learning cluster. More advanced stuff than that you're generally in to the realms of vendors-specific storage solutions but once you've twigged the underlying fundamentals it's a lot easier to grasp the details layered on top.

* I'm a "kinaesthetic learning" sort of person myself and my brain doesn't engage as well as it should unless I'm actually doing the work. Your brain may be wired differently and you learn by watching someone else do it, but I don't rate that approach personally.
 
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SRussell

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Oct 7, 2019
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@i386 @Rand__ @EffrafaxOfWug Thanks for the advice.

Storage+ is now abandoned; I am not sure what year the material was last updated. I looked into the SNIA Certified Storage Professional but the texts they link to have 1 star or no reviews: Study Materials | SNIA. All the books from SNIA Recommended Reading are from 2001-2004 except for one Cisco book from 2014: Recommended Reading | SNIA.

I have ordered a SuperMicro SC 216 and SM 846. I am still waiting for all of my equipment to arrive and was hoping to find a structured learning program that would give me a deeper insight into enterprise storage. I am currently reading, setting up ZFS, blow it away, and rebuild a different config to learn more.

My end goal is to move out of doing SMB software support. I do not have a dedicated path. Right now I am bouncing around Windows learning about AD. Picking up Red Hat specific Linux to improve my command line foo, shell scripting, and regex. I plan to spend the most time becoming as familiar with VMware as I can. I am starting to read about vSAN and that branched into a storage rabbit hole.
 

acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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Get a PC with 6-8 HDDs in it
Install linux
Use mdadm to build various raid0, 1, 5, 10 configurations
Share each of those configs out over NFS/SMB to another host
Benchmark each configuration and understand the results
Pull a drive and rebuild the array, play with hot-spares
Benchmark and understand the results while the array is rebuilding
Format the array over and lay an LVM configuration down on top of it
Practice adding/resizing LVM volumes and the file systems inside of them.
Make some volumes on the array and share them out over iscsi and mount them on a remote host
Add a filesystem on top of the iscsi LUN and benchmark it

etc...
 
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gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Get a PC with 6-8 HDDs in it
Install linux
Use mdadm to build various raid0, 1, 5, 10 configurations
Share each of those configs out over NFS/SMB to another host
Benchmark each configuration and understand the results
Pull a drive and rebuild the array, play with hot-spares
Benchmark and understand the results while the array is rebuilding
Format the array over and lay an LVM configuration down on top of it
Practice adding/resizing LVM volumes and the file systems inside of them.
Make some volumes on the array and share them out over iscsi and mount them on a remote host
Add a filesystem on top of the iscsi LUN and benchmark it

etc...
(Just a reminder, it is always possible to do above using a VM and virtual drives even if one only has limited physical disks, just the performance will be pretty crap...)
 
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