NAS/SAN - Bulding a foundation of understanding

Stuppored

I know there's already threads about noobie's wanting to learn about NAS/SAN... I just wanted to start my own.

Currently reading through:

Storage Networks Explained 2nd Edition

I'll follow that up with:

Information Storage and Management

After that, are there any certifications and of you would recommend I get? I'm really not sure what I'm trying to get out of this besides more understanding and perhaps a job change. (here's my thread about what's currently on my plate: http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/71462-full-time-employee-wanting-step-up-game-bit.html)

I have applied in the past for a NAS/SAN type position without any prior theory or handson and I did not get the job. It looks like a pretty in depth topic and in my books would be very technical as well as specialized - so hands down, it interests me.

Can you name a few of the major types of corporations that utilize NAS/SANs that have full time technicians?

Everyone

The smallest organization I've worked at that had a full time Storage position was a Hospital with about 3000 employees. You might find that type of position in organizations that fall in the 1000-2000 user range too, but any smaller than that, and it is less and less likely. Anything 3000+ is more and more likely. Although the amount of storage they use probably impacts this much more than the number of users they have.

If you're talking major corporations (i.e. Fortune 500), you'd probably be hard pressed to find one that DOESN'T have at least 1 full time Storage position, in fact, lots of them are likely to have entire teams dedicated to it.

The major global Fortune 500 I work for has a team of 6 or so (not sure how many, I think they are understaffed right now too IIRC) dedicated just to Storage.

The easiest way to learn both NAS and SAN at home, is to mess around with something like FreeNAS. I've written about this quite a bit on my blog. You can setup a Virtual SAN and learn iSCSI pretty well with it.

That being said, most major corporations aren't going to hire someone to work on their SAN with just home lab experience. Also Fiber SAN experience is a little harder, too cost prohibitive to learn at home, and a lot of places still use it as they heavily invested in Fiber years ago. So to start down the path of specializing in Storage, you're going to have to find something smaller that just happens to include Storage responsabilities.

cyberguypr

I agree with Everyone's comments. Bigger companies will most likely have several engineers dedicated to storage in all its forms. From what I've seen mid sized companies roll the storage admin role into the sys, windows or network engineer. Lately I've been seeing a lot of storage paired with VMware positions. Storage is like many other higher level IT roles, it is very difficult to just jump into it. Your best approach would definitely be leveraging a role that has some exposure to SAN/NAS even if it is minor.

blargoe

cyberguypr wrote: »

From what I've seen mid sized companies roll the storage admin role into the sys, windows or network engineer. Lately I've been seeing a lot of storage paired with VMware positions. Storage is like many other higher level IT roles, it is very difficult to just jump into it. Your best approach would definitely be leveraging a role that has some exposure to SAN/NAS even if it is minor.

This is my current situation, and how I was introduced to SAN.

DirtySouth

It definitely has more to do with the amount of data the company has rather than the number of employees. If you can have a good knowledge of data center networking, enterprise storage and virtualization, that's what I like to call the trifecta. The three go hand in hand.

QHalo

We have less than 1000 people total and I do all of what DirtySouth mentioned. From Nexus to UCS to NetApp/Equallogic to VMware.