Developing the Next Generation of Storage Admins - Intro

Hitachi Device Manager (HDvM), the foundation of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite (HSCS)

Like many aspects of enterprise level computer operations, administration and management of SAN-attached storage is a slow-moving concept. Our colleagues in the data center like that, since they're responsible for valuable corporate data, often the kind that simply is not allowed to fail at any level. As a result of this need to protect data and maintain Business Continuity, a lot of these enterprise-level professionals are older and more experienced. This makes replacing them problematic. As the hair on the guys in the enterprise data center continues to thin and just gets greyer, it's time to pause and consider from where the next generation of admins will come.

We joke about it all the time in storage classes. I'm 51 years old, and there have been weeks where I'm the youngest guy in the room. Even when there's a young whippersnapper of 40, the discussion during breaks and at lunch usually revolves around kids in college, daughters getting married, and other subjects a recent college graduate usually doesn't pause to consider. This should be a concern for corporate management, because Business Continuity includes human factors as well as data replication. It's one thing to have a solid replication operation of 50+TB running; it's another to have the personnel on staff to maintain that replication plan and expand it as data grows.

The grey-hair jokes in class are only one part of the inspiration for this series of blog articles. Last week, I taught a "combo class" of TSI1360 and TSI0945 (Hitachi Device Manager and Hitachi Tuning Manager) in Stockholm. Whenever we get to discussions of customizing reports using Tuning Manager's "Performance Reporter," invariably the reaction from experienced storage admins is that they just don't have the time to develop such things. Here in the US, we usually teach Tuning Manager as a 5-day, two-class combo, TSI0945 (GUI) and TSI1848 (CLI). The XML reporting capabilities of the product are awesome, and I always think, this would be perfect stuff for an intern to do. But even a Computer Science major with a solid structured programming background needs to understand the fundamentals of the storage in the data center.

And we're back to just how those CSCI, Computer Engineering, ex-military, and tech-school folks are going to learn what we do.

Next time, we'll start the series in depth, discussing promoting from within.