Trading time for Knowledge

[natrian_maxwell]

Hello,

I am a recent NCDA certified engineer, however, the Storage arena is very competitive. I am trying to find a place that will allow a person to volunteer time for the opportunity to learn more about storage.

Has anyone heard of a place I can work for free? I am currently employed as an Operations Engineer, but do to the internal policies, I am unable to be on campus over 40 hours a week without indicating it on my timecard.

I am basically looking to give 6 hours a week to assist a storage admin do all of the work they hate doing, but will teach me more about storage.

Please let me know if anyone would like to take me up on this opportunity.

Thanks!

[ekashpureff]

Natrian -

A few questions, and suggestions:

Are you looking for experience you can put on your resume, or experience to hone your skills with Data ONTAP ?

For honing your skills with Data ONTAP I would suggest you install a set of four simulators - An active-active pair for primary storage, and another set for secondary storage. Spend some time setting up all the applications you can to implement these as storage for other applications - NetApp applications (SnapDrive, Ops Mgr, System Mgr, OSSV) as well as any other apps you can get your hands on - Oracle, VMware, MSSQL.

Also, study, study, study. You passed your NCDA, but keep reading. Go through Data ONTAP release notes, as well as all the guides. As you read, do test implementations. Browse and read through all of the TRs at www.netapp.com/us/library.

For resume working experience you may want to contact very large charity organizations. I had a student in one of my NetApp classes a few months ago who did volunteer time as an admin for the Red Cross.

Hope this has been helpful for you.

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff