IT - Storage Area Networks (SAN) - Good career choice?

MrWenger1982

Hi,
I have the opportunity to become a SAN administrator in a large organisation. Do IT people here feel that this would be a good career move? Is SAN a technology which will have plenty of well paid job prospects in the future? I am 23 and just out of college and want to pick the right specialisation.

po0k

Don't specialise on a volatile area. It's definately something to learn about, but I don't think there'd be an abundance of jobs where it's your task.

MrPudding

SAN rocks. People will always need storage and SAN is where it is at. There isn't much happening in Dublin TBH but if you were willing to work in London you could make a killing once you have some experience. Check out www.jobserve.co.uk and do a search for storage.

I would recommend to try to get some enterprise backup experience, Netbackup or Networker for example, as well. Some basic Windows and Unix admin would also help. Do that for 2 years and you can pull in £400 a day in London.

MrP

damnyanks

400 a day in London isn't too much. SAN is great n all... but ultimitley is it what you want to spend your life doing? Team I work on manages SAN teams and other team's that would fall into that category for a business. Seem's like a very dull role, check if SAN si wokring, deploy SAN for new projects etc. etc.

As a step inot the industry its good... but wathc out for them ther pigeon holes

colincarnate

Storage is thee most boring thing you can do man.

You're 23 out of college - don't get all boring and then buy a sports car when you're 35 as a result of getting £400 squid a day!

I do tape backups etc as part of my job - and ho is it the worst

MrPudding

Guys, storage is not boring. Being a tape monkey is boring. Designing and implementing SANs is actually pretty cool. Designing, installing and tuning an enterprise backup solution is not boring. The reason being a tape monkey is boring is because someone spent a lot of time designing and setting up the enviroment. Admittedly the day to day admin can get boring especially when it is well setup but you have to do the boring stuff before you can get to the good stuff.

£400 a day is OK for someone with two years experience. Once you move into design and implementation you should easily be able to get 700ish, and I'm sorry but I think that is good money, actually I think 400 a day is pretty good. London is not that much more expensive (if at all) than Dublin and I think I could do quite well in Dublin on €600ish per day.

The other side of it is that storage is easy. Once you get your head around it, not too difficult, it is easy money.

OK, I case you haven't noticed I am one of those weird people that actually enjoys storage. Seriously, am I the only person that thinks libraries are cool? They have robots inside FFS.:D

OP, at the end of the day the more stuff you can do the better. Specialisation is good in the UK but may limit you options in a small market like Ireland. I would say you should give it a go and see if you like it. You might be one of the weird ones that actually likes it. If you do you can make good money once you get your experience up.

MrP

thewing

Big ****ing difference between being a tape monkey and SAN storage

We have 3 SAN's in our place and there's a lot of cool architecture stuff with real time site-to-site replications etc.being a tape monkey and a SAN admin are very different things.

srdb20

Wondering lads how does one get in to SAN (designing and implementing etc...)???

MrPudding

srdb20 wrote:

Wondering lads how does one get in to SAN (designing and implementing etc...)???

I suppose the first step is to get a job somewhere that uses them. That would be most large companies these days. Once you are there try to get to play with it as much as possible. EMC & Dell run courses for their customers using their SANS, try to get yourself on one of those. They are not cheap so you will want the company to pay for it. After that it si all about the experience.

Most guys I know that would be into design and implementation would have cut there teeth either administering it or supporting it.

I got into it through supporting enterprise backup software for Dell customers Enterprise backups and SAN go hand in hand.

Well said thewing, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of disks but the technology involved in making it all work is state of the art and actually quite interesting.

You simply cannot call planning a SAN install, setting the thing up, possibly in different sites and maybe in different countries and having the whole thing work.

MrP

srdb20

Cheers lads ill look into it.......

Ponster

MrPudding wrote:

£400 a day is OK for someone with two years experience. Once you move into design and implementation you should easily be able to get 700ish...

[Hijack]

£400 a day? And that's only 'OK' ? For a 23-year old ?
That's about €3000 a week !

Is it just me that's surprised at that?

[/Hijack]

IronMan

I work in a storage team for a large semi-state. Its not a boring role by any means. Being a tape monkey can be boring, if that is all you are doing, setting up backup policies and sending the tapes offsite. But designing and implementing SAN envionments, working with remote replication, stretched clusters, fibre switches, enterprise storage arrays, Virtual tape libraries, WORM devices etc is really quite interesting. It can be complex and you need a methodical nature, but thats the name of the game with most IT roles.


There isn't actually much demand for pure Storage Admins in Ireland, unless you want to be doing backups all the time, but the demand in London, America etc is strong, with upto £550 per day for contracting rates being quoted.
Dell have a enterprise storage support team, and sell re-badged Brocade and EMC kit, and are looking for suitably qualified people. EMC in Cork, are also hiring afaik, probably telephone work at first, but having dealt with EMC support, it does seem like they are getting good training, as most of 1st level support are quite knowledgable.

Having done programming and testing for a year, before moving into this area, I certainly know which is the more interesting, allows better interaction with other team, opportunities to progress etc. No regrets at all!

MrWenger1982

Just reading replies now. My current job is actually specialising in NetBackup but it is more day to day maintainance than design. I have the choice between specialising in either SAN or NetBackup Design and I am leaning towards SAN. Either way, we are going to use DISK to DISK backups soon so NetBackup will have SAN exposure. Thanks for all those who replied

MrPudding

Ponster wrote:

[Hijack]

£400 a day? And that's only 'OK' ? For a 23-year old ?
That's about €3000 a week !

Is it just me that's surprised at that?

[/Hijack]

My thoughts exactly. I think 400 per day is pretty good. I am not the one who said it wasn't.

MrWenger1982 wrote:

Just reading replies now. My current job is actually specialising in NetBackup but it is more day to day maintainance than design. I have the choice between specialising in either SAN or NetBackup Design and I am leaning towards SAN. Either way, we are going to use DISK to DISK backups soon so NetBackup will have SAN exposure. Thanks for all those who replied

Where are you working. Netbackup would be my main thing but the work seems to be fairly scarce in Ireland. I am looking at contracts inthe UK to keep it going. I am fairly lucky in that in addition I have reasonable EMC skills as well as to being able to pass myself in Compaq & HP MSA/MA & EVA SANs. Oh, I I know a bit of CommVault as well.

MrP

DublinWriter

damnyanks wrote:

400 a day in London isn't too much.

Not if you're a coke-dealer. What technically-orientated contract area in IT is paying more than that right now? (apart from Oracle Financials).

IT has always had particular 'fads' which create bubbles in demand in certain areas that seem to burst, or at least normalise back to regular salary....ERP, CRM, Tuxedo, Java, SAP, Siebel....

SAN would be a pretty good thing to stay with if you intend to continue working in a hardware based context for the next five years and would be a good area if you want to get experience of enterprise level network/server management.

However, just be sure what you're getting into. IT loves to reinvent the same old crap under snazzy new marketing-generated buzzwords. Just make sure your company doesn't think that SAN is looking after the tape backups in the basement!