Towards a successful Storage Career

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The demand for Storage professionals has been fueled by the fact that the digital information is being generated at a tremendous pace. And as IDC data predicts by 2012 there would be a demand for a million storage professionals worldwide. But at present there is a major dearth of available professionals specializing in Storage.

We talked to P. Sridhar Reddy, CMD, Ctrl S Data Centers Ltd. to find out more about the opportunities that lies ahead for Storage professionals, and also the kind of domains and job roles a storage professional can look out for. Ctrl S Data Centers is the pioneers in Tier IV data centers in India and this organization serves large multinational customers that use the Internet as the predominant delivery medium.

Here are some excerpts from the interview with Mr. P. Sridhar Reddy, CMD of Ctrl S Data Centers Ltd.

PCQ: What are the various job roles that a Storage professional has to perform in an organization? 

Sridhar Reddy: A storage professional needs to provide 2nd level Storage Management services and product support for various Storage product(EMC, IBM, TSM, Net App, Hitachi) which come under the verticals of NAS, SAN & DAS.  The most challenging role for storage professional is to get the right sizing done for the storage devices. This is done through a series of calculations by using RPM of the disk drives to arrive at IOPS (Input/output per second). Data being very critical for the survival of any organization, the storage professional must have robust backup plan which can be initiated in case of a disaster or disk crash. In addition to the above the following jobs will be performed by a storage professional on a regular basis.

•    Analyzing and resolving escalated problems.

•    Proficient with daily tasks which include lun mapping and masking, setting symmetrix port flags.

•    Ensure integrity of supported environment.

•    Actively and pre-emptively determine possible faults and causes by the execution of pre-determined health and operational checks.

•    Work with change and problem management tools

•    Hardware /software fault detection and vendor liaison

•    Investigate, identify and document proposals that will improve application recoverability.

•    Document and implement changes to technical standards as required.

PCQ: What is the likely career path for a Storage professional in an organization?

SR:  A Storage professional can start of as a Jr. Storage administrator and then move on to become a storage administrator followed by a storage manager or a storage architect. He can then possibly specialize to become a backup/recovery administrator or DR/BCP administrator, etc.

PCQ: For an individual, who wants to be a Storage expert, what skillsets are required and which certifications can help him enhance his career prospects? What advice do you give for such an individual who is foraying into this Storage domain?

SR: To manage the advanced storage devices one needs a very good understanding of the kinds of storage devices available today. Apart from the industry standard SNIA certification, it is recommended that individuals prioritize and obtain vendor-specific storage certifications that businesses can use right now. The top five storage certifications that IT managers want are:

•    Vendor-specific storage platform

•    Backup software

•    Volume management

•    SNIA certification

•    Storage networking

For professionals foraying into storage we would advice them to get a hands on experience on various high end storage devices coupled with certifications would make a them most sought after professionals by various MNC’s and large enterprises.

PCQ: SAN administration is one aspect related to Storage, similarly DR, archiving and journaling are also the storage needs of an enterprise. What all skill and experience does a professional need to gain to expertise in such areas.

SR: A storage professional must have the following skill set  and experience to gain expertise in various storage verticals

•    Managing storage growth based on the organizations requirements

•    Designing, deploying, managing—backup/recovery

•    Designing, deploying, managing—disaster recovery

•    Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions

•    Designing and deploying emerging storage technologies

•    Designing, deploying, and managing multi-site, multi-vendor environments

•    Shortage of skilled storage professionals

•    Managing data availability/data retention compliance

PCQ: How much in demand is the career as a Storage professional? What are the scopes for such professionals in Indian as well as overseas IT industry? At Ctrl S, how many Storage Professionals are employed? And how challenging the job can be for an Storage Expert?

SR: The increasing dependency of the businesses on digital information is leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are increasingly challenging to manage. This gives a very clear indication of a growing demand of well qualified storage professionals. With the storage industry growing at a healthy rate, the demand for certified data storage professionals is all set to increase manifold. At Ctrl S we have a team of 10 dedicated storage professionals specialized in different verticals like backup, operating system flavors, etc. Ctrl S customers include multi billion dollar companies hosting their mission critical data in our data center. Hence the job of our storage administrators becomes more challenging given the stringent SLA’s we provide to our customers.

PCQ: Storage is a wide domain, can you talk on some of the latest trends and technologies that are coming and shaping up the future of Storage arena? Which such domain a Storage professional should expertise to have a successful career as a specific Domain Specialist, for instance Backup Specialist or Archiving Expert etc.?

SR: Data storage is becoming more and more critical for today’s enterprises. The increasing trend in the data storage market can be attributed to the growth of globalization, e-commerce and user expectations of zero down time. With data centers using technologies for SAN, NAS, DAS and implementation of DR & BCP for customers, It is very difficult to differentiate the demand for specific for all the verticals under data storage, but seeing the current trend we foresee a huge demand for backup specialists.

PCQ: In a Data Center, what would be the job roles available for a Storage professional?

SR: At Ctrl S we have employed storage professionals with the following job roles. These job roles will be more or less similar across other data centers as well.

• Storage Manager–Manager of the formalized storage team or used interchangeably for Storage

Administrator

• Storage Administrator–Responsible for day-to-day administration, provisioning, configuration

management, monitoring, availability management, etc.

• Backup and Recovery Administrator–Responsible for day-to-day backup and recovery related

operations

• Storage Architect–Responsible for capacity planning, technology planning/design, and process

management

• Disaster Recovery Administrator or Business Continuity Administrator–Responsible for disaster

recovery, backup and recovery, planning, implementation, and management

PCQ: Finally, can you kindly put in your thoughts on what areas/ domains of Storage arena will be hot-spots where professionals will be high on demand and how the market demand for Storage professionals will be in coming years.

SR: Data centers are all set to shape the storage market. This can be attributed to the shift in computing and storage to data centers with technologies like cloud computing & Grid Computing. In future Storage subsystems, by default, are the most important segment as they provide the backbone infrastructure, storage capacity, reliability, availability, performance, and connectivity. The focus will also shift to storage virtualization which would not only give the end customer the option of scalability on demand but reduce reduce electrical power, cooling and floor space requirements while improving asset utilization, service delivery and ease of management for the provider. More and more companies would go for storage management tools which would significantly reduce the maintenance cost. Data protection technologies related to backup and recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity would take a front seat. We fore see a very good demand for storage professionals provided they have the right knowledge and industry or vendor specific certification backing their knowledge.