Mirror Slap

Storage Engineer, Storage Consultant, Storage Architect

then mix in netapp, pure , dell emc, ecs, storage grid, cleversafe, etc.

I’m referring to BIG storage, private clouds, data lakes, etc. For example, my primary customer, In three years we’ve grown the object storage footprint by 100 petabytes. The rest of the global footprint across 110 sites is another 95PB. Commodity services do not scale, and global data transmission is typically custom tailored to the user requirements. Thinks like a 1st pass at the edge in 15 remote test sites, each crunching 100TB of raw data down to 10TB for transmission back to core, and that process happens on a clock. Other binary distribution uses cases, transmitting 50GB jobs from other continents back to core for analysis. It’s all still custom. Then there’s all the API back end work, to build out all the customer accessible storage APIs, numerous challenges there.

Everything in IT infrastructure is done “as code” now. If you know how to code, but want to do something with real hardware and solve real problems, I’d go that route. To be more specific, IT Storage has a massive shortage of people, and it is weirdly neglected as a target career by younger folks.

I know how to code in python, powershell, C, REST APIs, etc., but I cannot stand just sitting and coding for any length of time. HOWEVER I do like writing snippets of code to solve problem and automate infrastructure. Look a NetApp certifications, Pure Storage, or one of the other leading vendors. If you’re already familiar with S3 protocol / Object Storage, look at those options. I had a position open that paid $120-140k starting salary that we had open for 9 months last year until it was cancelled. We interviewed a mountain of people, we just couldn’t find a solid candidate, and the bar was pretty low. Storage is also becoming a more and more critical part of security, as protecting intellectual property stored on storage is critical for practically every major company.

The Linux Kernel and operating system in general. It is simultaneously my favorite and I hate that it killed my prior favorite, the SGI Irix operating system. I was there at the beginning, from kernel 1.1 through today. I remember telling regional directors at silicon graphics that Linux was the future and them disparaging that opinion.