Reply to post: been doing this 10 years already

been doing this 10 years already

My own story is about 10 years ago I knew very little about storage. When I looked at an array I saw it did RAID, had redundant controllers, had fibre channel connectivity, and that's about it. I didn't understand the differences much beyond that. My background before was mostly servers, and some networking. I had dabbled a bit(very little bit) at one company, mostly following directions from the formal storage admin (this was about 12 years ago). I saw them planning the data layouts in excel and visio at the time. I thought to myself "I don't want to do storage, pain in the ass".

Then I came across 3PAR and well I suppose the rest is history. I have learned a lot about storage in the past decade, and things run pretty well. Managed 3PAR systems across 4 different companies over the past 10 years, currently have 4 arrays at two data centers. I would never call myself a storage admin, though I do do storage admin related things I suppose (nobody else in the companies I have worked at did storage stuff). The thing I perhaps learned that is the most important lesson is that features or performance alone is only a small part of the equation when it comes to storage. I've certainly had issues here and there with 3PAR in my years using them and so am MUCH more conservative with storage management today than when I started. I have had multiple people at HP(and 3PAR before) tell me that they have never known someone who operates 3PAR arrays as well as I do. I may not of ever become a 3PAR person if it wasn't for NetApp refusing to lend a system to do an evaluation 10 years ago.

Storage still makes up a very small % of my time, networking generally even less(switches especially, hardly ever touch them, I am the primary SME for switching, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, storage, vmware, servers etc at my company ~$300M annual revenue). I realize I do a lot of different things, more than most people in my field(I've never met anyone else like me but I have not tried to either). So I am probably more of an edge case (or extreme edge case) rather than a run of the mill systems person.

(system admin/engineer/etc for roughly 20 years now)