Quote:
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Originally Posted by Steve Martin in The Jerk
The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need. My name in print. That really makes somebody. Things are going to start happening to me now!
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Actually, I did get a promotion -- it has been a long time coming...
For the past 11.5 years, my title has been "Operations Support Analyst." (Started with MBUSA in October, 1998). On day one, I was a mainframe storage and disaster recovery guy - total disk capacity was ~5TB. First DR test was a month after I arrived - and I pulled it off!
Over the years, I have taken on more and more responsibility - back around 2002, the concept of a SAN (Storage Area Network) arrived at our doorstep at work. Since it was 'storage' and there was no one else that 'did storage,' I was slated to manage the SAN - it was quite simple -- about 20TB in an IBM ESS2105 attached to a couple of simple Brocade switches with about 10 Open systems servers (AIX and Wintel) attached to the SAN fabrics.
For about the first 5 years, I had a coworker who basically helped me manage the mainframe part of the of the storage landscape (mostly tape and some disk), while I did both mainframe and the expanding open systems storage.
So from about 2005 on, I was on my own, after my co-worker was let go. I managed to keep my head above the water, managing both mainframe and Open systems SAN storage. By then, I estimate we were up to about 50TB and 80-100 open systems servers as part of the SAN fabric, with 4 McData enterprise class directors (ED6064's) in the SAN fabrics.
Fast forward to 2007, and a significant event occurred in my company -- we 'demerged' from Chrysler!! This was great for the company -- and meant a significant growth in the datacenter -- when we merged with Chrysler in 1998, Chrysler took over all the financial (SAP) systems for Daimler-Chrysler. Well, you can imagine that when we demerged, it was paramount that we take back our financial systems. In three months we converted a set of conference rooms into a full-blown datacenter, our SAN environment grew to 100TB overnight, and our SAN fabric expanded greatly (~50 new servers, 2 new ED6140 direcotrs...etc, an IBM DS8300, and IBM's SVC - SAN Volume controller) to accomodate the extra load. And still, I was the sole "Operations Support Analyst" managing all the SAN and mainframe storage in our shop!
In 2009, another big event occurred -- our Montvale campus was deemed to be the "NAFTA Regional Datacenter" with plans of moving all IT processing in the NAFTA region into our datacenters. We built a second datacenter down the road and setup an "Active-Active" environment. So that meant I built out a SAN infrastructure to accomdate the requirements. This included 4 new Brocade DCX directors, SAN routing, a second DS8300 and SVC...etc.
"Build it and they will come." And they did come -- currently we are managing applications on our datacenter from Oregon (Dailmer Trucks - Freightliner), Michican (Daimler Financial), and even Germany. We are growing 200TB of storage on the floor, with well over 200 servers attached, including many VMWARE servers with hundreds of virtual servers, as well as AIX VIO servers. Mainframe has grown to about 10TB as well. And we have a growing NAS (NetApp) environment that I will be working on more and more, once I have a chance to get some skills transfer from the guy managing that stuff. (CIFS, NFS, Waffle -- fun stuff!)
As all this was evolving, I was getting more and more involved with the designing and planning aspect of SAN storage. I was interfacing more with various vendors, and even project leads from around the world to make sure our infrastructure would mee their requirements. All the while, still doing the technical 'stuff' like allocating LUNs and setting up zoning within the SAN. I've been a busy guy for quite some time...
Back in November of 2009, I started the process of revamping my job description, title, and band level. Reworked the wording, spent many hours with my supervisor to get everything right. His manager was on board as well. And then the waiting game began. Long story short, it took from February until yesterday to get this promotion through -- going up the ranks within the IT department, and then on to HR.
So, as of today, I am officially the
"Senior SAN / Storage Architect" for my company. (Personally, I thought "Zoltan, the Sultan of Storage" would have been a more snazzy title...) Pretty much the same (growing) responsibility I had before, but with the new job description, I moved up a band level, and they did give me a small raise. I am at a crossroads now -- caught between doing the technical work for storage management, and planning and managing the SAN infrastructure. They won't hire another body yet to to the technical 'stuff' due to the job freeze in my company - but in a way, that is good since I still need to get my hands dirty with the technical nitty-gritty stuff. (I'll be pulling fiber cables in the datacenter tomorrow, just after I setup a PO in our SAP systems -- take about diverse roles!)
So like Steve Martin to elegantly stated it,
"My name in print. That really makes somebody. Things are going to start happening to me now!
Just had to share this -- sorry for the long post!
-Z-man.