Adding a new user to Hitachi Device Manager, the core of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite
There are two approaches to adding staff to an enterprise storage team: Recruit seasoned pros from the outside or develop talent from other IT departments inside the company. Each approach has its pros and cons, but promoting from within will almost always cost less up-front.
When we teaching computer-related training classes, the introductory module that kicks off the class invariably includes an "introduction" section, where you go around the class and have students introduce themselves. In the storage-related classes, the career path of the students is often quite the same--guys and gals moving over to storage from mainframe and open systems administration teams. After all, it's usually the existing system admins who identify the need to expand the storage capabilities of the enterprise, so they're the ones who follow through with the plan. As those "first-generation" admins retire or move on, they need to be replaced with someone at the same level.
The problem with promoting from within is the costs associated with the learning curve of making a system administrator into a storage admin can be steep. When a company makes a decision to purchase SAN-attached storage, most vendors sweeten the deal with a certain amount of training classes worked into the sale. (In the HDS world, that means a "Hi-card" or three included.) Those get used up fast when training up first-gen admins, leaving little from the initial investment for on-going development of staff. The first-gen admins are often up to their eyeballs in "real" work, and have no time to train/mentor newbies. The ambitious storage admin knows this mentoring is important, however, lest they never advance further in the organization than where they are now.
There are a number of pitfalls involved with trying to teach what you do to someone else. In many data centers, the candidate for this sort of mentoring works for a different team, and recruiting them for your team may be regarded as "poaching," opening up a can of office politics that can get ugly.
What the first-gen admin needs are tools to facilitate mentoring. In the HDS environment, there's a great way to "subversively" involved admins from other teams in storage activities--give them access to the products in the Hitachi Storage Command Suite.
WHAT??? I can almost see the heads shaking from here. No way I'm letting some Windows guy near my USPVs. Well, yes, I agree with that sentiment, to an extent. The HSCS offers a compromise, namely the "view only" account. Set up system admins with accounts for Device Manager and Tuning Manager so they can look into the relationship between their servers and the storage. In the Foundations classes, I usually refer to this level of access as a "pointy-haired manager" account, look but not touch. In the case of the managers, a lot of them don't even look into the systems, but an admin might put the access to good use.
Now, how to avoid the accusations of "poaching?" If your team has HDvM's host agents installed, the program is pulling in some great data from the servers. Even if you're not trying to subversively recruit, giving the "other guys" a view into your systems and how you view their equipment is invaluable. As the sysadmins work more with HDvM, it may even be possible to turn over responsibilities for certain replication pair operations and Hitachi Provisioning Manager operations to them.
Think about it for a moment. If you're using Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP), provisioning storage to production servers involves creating virtual DP-Vols. The storage team can plan out which DP-pool will be used for a server/cluster, and leave the rest to the sysadmins if they're trained.
Blurring the lines, breaking down the walls, and improving inter-departmental relationships is always helpful. It's even better if it leads to developing talent you can later pull into your storage administration team.
