BackupChain’s Internship Program

Welcome to BackupChain’s Internship Program!

This year we’ve got over 50 interns together. It’s going to be a fun and productive summer. Thank you for joining!

Interested in joining our internship program? Anyone can join; At the moment we have students joining our program with a computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, or information management background. Location: Baltimore, Maryland. You can join at any time. Please email: internship@backupchain.com

General

  • This is an unpaid internship and there will be no job offer at the end of it.
  • We believe in a self-directed learning environment that isn’t distorted by rewards and punishments. Hence, there is no supervision and there are no grades, no trophies, no carrots, no sticks, etc.
  • You need to sign and return the internship and non-disclosure agreement
  • We expect friendly and tight collaboration. Failure to collaborate with your team buddies will result in a warning, followed by dismissal.
  • Under no circumstances will we be competing against each other.
  • Unexcused absence or unannounced lack of documented progress for more than two weeks will be interpreted as “no longer interested” and dismissed
  • Stay focused and be loyal to your team. Once you are out you can’t come back in.
  • No prior experience is required. Do not give up when you get frustrated. It’s an absolutely normal feeling. Seek support from your team first. Use the internet for research. You will find a lot of educational materials on almost all subjects and tons of how-to videos on YouTube.
  • Plan to invest at least 10 hours a week to make this a fruitful learning experience
  • If you need assistance, contact me: internship@backupchain.com. Phone between 5pm and 9pm on workdays and during work hours if there is an emergency. Email is preferred as I might have to mass email the reply to others as well.

Process

  • You will be assigned to a team with approx. 10 buddies
  • You are responsible for the buddies on your team.
  • No one should be ‘stuck’ for too long without asking his/her buddies for help. Make sure everyone on your team is making progress
  • If the entire team is stuck shout for help. The point here is that you collaborate and learn together. Discover how things work on your own and as part of your team.  Discover how you benefit from your teammates’ perspectives and experience. Discover the value of assisting others.
  • You will set up a free blog on blogger.com or wordpress.com. The blog is your online work area and documents your progress and what you have learned.
  • On each post you will summarize at the top what is being done/learned, then you write about how you did/learned it, ideally with pictures/charts/etc, and then summarize what you learned while doing it.
  • Link to each other’s posts to include their exercises per topic

Ideal Work Tools

  • Laptop and/or PC
  • Spare PC that can be formatted
  • External hard drive, ideally 3.5” and 1TB+
  • Home network
  • USB stick with at least 5GB

Outcome

  • By the end of this internship you will have hands-on experience with:
    • Backup solutions
    • Server storage components
    • Virtualization platforms and virtual machines
    • Networking systems
    • Windows Server operating systems
    • Software testing
    • Quality assurance principles
  • You will have established online proof and documentation by maintaining your internship blog. Your potential future employers can check it out and see evidence of your skill level.

Storage Concepts

  • Files
  • Folders
  • Paths
  • File systems
    • Fragmentation
    • On disk storage
    • Limitations
  • Disks
  • Physical disks: IDE, SATA, SCSI, etc.
  • Virtual disks
  • Remote disks
  • Remote storage: Network paths and shares
  • iSCSI
  • File Access
  • Access Permissions
  • Latency

Virtual Machines / Virtualization

  • Platforms
    • Hyper-V
    • VMware
      • Player, Workstation
      • ESX, vSphere
    • VirtualBox
  • Virtual host vs. virtual machine (virtual server)
  • Uses: consolidation, testing, development, isolation, portability
  • Disadvantages
  • How to set up the environment
    • virtual network
    • virtual disk
    • storage
  • Creating virtual machines
  • Using virtual machines

Network concepts

  • Network shares
  • Impact of operating system and underlying file system
  • Accessing files/folders over network shares
  • Creating network shares and setting permissions

Software Testing Concepts

  • Documentation of procedure
    • Define input, output/outcome and environment
    • Define what’s relevant and what is assumed not to be relevant
    • Number of test combinations and how it is determined
  • Test phase
  • Documentation of results

 

Software and Backup Solution Concepts

  • Storage, archival, and retrieval of data
  • Files, folders, file systems, access permissions
  • Network access
  • Tasks
  • Schedulers
  • Versioning, retention, history
  • Logging
  • Error resolution
  • Compression
  • Deduplication
  • Image files
  • Container files
  • Disks, partitions, layouts
  • Database backup
  • Virtual machine backup
  • File server backup
  • Physical disk backup
  • Virtual disks
  • Conversion physical to virtual, virtual to virtual, virtual to physical disk
  • Verification
  • Speed throttling
  • Alerting and monitoring
  • Application consistency
  • Crash consistency

Milestones

Milestone #1 (Intro, Quality, Virtual Machines)
Software Quality & Testing Notes
Milestone #2 (Microsoft IIS)

Resources

List of Team Members

Please Join Our Forum

Join the Internship Forum

 

Final Session Photos

see photos