A guest post by Fabiana and Sam who spent the week at Backup Technology’s head office on work experience.
Our work experience placement started with Fabiana and I (Sam) being welcomed into the very friendly and relaxed atmosphere that forms the heart of Backup Technology. The head office of Backup Technology has three departments; Sales, Disaster Recovery (DR) and Technical.
Over the course of our work experience, we had a chance to work with all three departments. We started working with DR. DR forms the second product that Backup Technology offer, letting companies have copies of their servers hosted by Backup Technology in a virtual environment, which can then be connected to their own network in the event of server failure. We helped the DR team over the whole of Monday and Tuesday morning to set up several VMs, using VMware. We then installed the correct OS on the VMs that we had created using CloneZilla. The third task we helped with was to produce some of the paperwork which Backup Technology use to know about the companies servers, and therefore make sure that their client knows exactly what they are getting with the service provided.
Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon were spent with the Technical team, helping to set up 2 new servers. The servers required the pre-installed virtual drives removing, and 2 new ones then adding. We then had to install Linux on one and Windows Server 2008 R2 WEB on the other. Once this was completed, we used SSH (Linux) and RDP (Windows) to connect to the servers remotely and set up the servers ready for use by a customer. After this, we had an introduction into MS SQL Server 2012, after which we started to learn the basics of SQL (neither of us had any experience of SQL beforehand), and this continued through to Thursday lunchtime.
Wednesday morning was spent with Sales, the part of Backup Technology that interacts directly and negotiates contracts with the customers. In Backup Technology, each customer is assigned to a member of the sales team, meaning that each customer is then dealt with in a personal manner. We learnt how Backup Technology have developed their own software, called Portal, which lets the sales team monitor the backups made from their customer’s system and how successful they are, meaning that any issues can be sorted quickly.
Overall, our week placement (this was written on the Thursday) at Backup Technology impressed us with the way that the company worked efficiently as a team, and how friendly they were towards their customers, being completely open with them all the time about any problems that may have arisen.
We both enjoyed the week massively, learning about the company and meeting all the friendly members that make up the Backup Technology team.
