My first encouter with storage started in 1998, when i was hired for doing some periferal stuff, like refilling bulk-printers and doing the daily tape handling to our off-site recovery provider. Man i was impressed. We even had a floppy-disk copier, to make backups of the floppy’s that were provided for updates on the varies public client information systems. We managed to copy a stagering 30 floppies an hour.

On april 1st 2000, i was promoted to the storage team. I was immediately held responsible for the Windows NT server and Banyan Vines server backups using ABARS (Commvault) and ADSM 3.1. I guess this is were my Windows nightmare began.

After a year or so, we needed to move our ADSM diskpools from SSA to a more sophisticated storage device. Wow, an IBM Shark (F20). And it was supposed to be attached using fibre. Now it became really interesting and i managed to design, implement, and manage our Brocade Silkworm 2800 dual redundant switched fabric.
As with all other IT stuff, this SAN quickly grow, untill we decided to exchange the switches with directors.

Currently, we are in the process of selecting new disk subsytems to replace our Sharks (model 800) and DS4300 devices. As you will probably understand i can’t elaborate on this right now.

I think, the storage landscape is indeed the coolest environment to be working in. And i do have to say it is also one of the hardest places to be. The entire company’s information is dependent on your skills. Most of the non-storage IT colleagues over here are just figuring this out, and are now more willing to work with the storage people, instead of desperately trying to manage their “own” local storage cabinets.

I also consider myself lucky in the fact that my current employer (for over 8 years now) has enough IT for me to “play” around with. New stuff keeps coming on my plate on a monthly basis. I have the necessary hands-on equipement to keep myself busy.

Only a very tempting offer would make me consider a change of employment in the storage arena. No 10 horses would get me off my storage-chair for a couple of years.

I hear what your saying about storage still being a bit of a puzzle etc. I can remember a while ago, before I decided to specialise in storage, I was talking to an engineer who told me that storage was a real dark art and his company couldnt find people who could do it. At the time I remember thinking “hello that sounds like an opportunity”. From then on I decided to read everything I could find on storage (not much) and looked for opportunitites to get into it. Ever since then Ive loved it and am still working on the puzzle along with the rest of us.

What do I think is cool about storage? I think it’s all still one big puzzle that everyone is still trying to figure out. No one has all the answers and it’s super fun figuring out how to push an array to it’s boundaries and showing the vendors how you’ve done it. The look on their faces makes me smile every time I do it. “You can do that with this?” “Wow! We’ve never thought of that before.”

Another cool thing is talking to the smaller vendors about their wares and giving my opinion on where I think they should take their product. The storage industry, although old, is still very young in the sense that people are still trying to figure out the best way to do things. The bigger players would be better off if they listened to their users more often, but they don’t. I’ll save that rant for another post though.

The coolest thing that I have seen recently though is the way that the storage users are beginning to come out of their shells and sharing information with each other. Once that takes hold, then I think the users as a group can then dictate to the vendors what we want and how much we’re going to pay for it.

He was right. Since then, and learning about TimeFinder and SRDF, and more importantly some of the cool ways you can manipulate data with them, it’s all been one big voyage of discovery.

To put it mildly, I’m hooked.