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SAN Admin/Engineer

kharken

Any of you guys working as SAN Admin/Engineer? What usually are the responsibilities of a SAN engineer? Trying to pursue a career in IT but I do not want to be another 'network engineer' 'cause so many people are trying to be one. I don't want to add myself into the pool of network engineers.

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Comments

TechGuy215

To be a SAN Admin only would be really limiting your options on the job market. Also, notice that SAN contains the word "Network" in it...:) It would probably make more sense to get your foot in the door and get some actual networking experience under your belt, before pursuing such a speciliazed role. Again, this is just my opinion.

It is also pertinent to mention that some network engineers are expected to manage the SAN. I do routing/switching/server administration and still manage our SAN.

clouder

Depends. Some shops have admins only maintain the SAN, others have either those same admins design/implement upgrades or new solutions. You need to know a bit of networking, and it helps to have a strong understanding of virtualization. The team I work on does everything from patching ESXi hosts to upgrading the switches on our fabric, to presenting storage to VMs. There's a lot of different stuff to do.

it_consultant

Almost zero (I can't think of any) SAN engineers start as SAN engineers unless you are working for IBM or HP where they grab a bunch of people up and train them. One of the reasons why SAN engineers are so well paid is because they generally have a lot of years in the industry. Our SAN engineer monitors the hardware, space allocation; performance stuff like queue depth and pathing optimization.

pram

IMO SAN Engineer typically implies someone who designs/maintains a Fibre Channel storage network. That's why you only see senior experienced people in the field because it's a lot of expensive, proprietary, obscure equipment like Brocade fibre switches and the like. It's kind of a hybrid role between a system admin and a network engineer. A SAN Engineer would be expected to understand (in depth) both the fabric networking technology and the storage equipment, be it a NetApp NAS running SnapVault or a giant tape carousel or whatever.

I think with the advent of FCoE and 10GbE you're going to see a convergence of regular Networking and SAN skills. Brocade and Cisco are producing FCoE fabric switches.

Anyway it's not really an entry level position.

kharken

I guess getting my foot in the door of IT being a network engineer is really inevitable. I do understand that it's the foundation of advanced things like SAN, security, and the like.

*Out of topic*
What job is responsible for data service providers? (i.e. DSL/ fiber connections) Is it the telecom engineer? The job network engineer is really broad that I really don't know what one specializes in. I'd like to work on data services.

onesaint

From my experience, the network folks (usually) end up having a great understanding of SAN fabric, but minimal experience with storage management. That usually falls to a Sys Ad who also knows networking and moves into a role managing medium scale storage (maybe mixed with VMs), then to managing more large scale storage.

it_consultant

pram wrote: »

IMO SAN Engineer typically implies someone who designs/maintains a Fibre Channel storage network. That's why you only see senior experienced people in the field because it's a lot of expensive, proprietary, obscure equipment like Brocade fibre switches and the like. It's kind of a hybrid role between a system admin and a network engineer. A SAN Engineer would be expected to understand (in depth) both the fabric networking technology and the storage equipment, be it a NetApp NAS running SnapVault or a giant tape carousel or whatever.

I think with the advent of FCoE and 10GbE you're going to see a convergence of regular Networking and SAN skills. Brocade and Cisco are producing FCoE fabric switches.

Anyway it's not really an entry level position.

Not only is it a lot of expensive and proprietary equipment, they also operate in a zero loss environment which is a higher standard than regular networking. Something like an STP convergence in the FC world would be a terminating offense. In fact, I get bewildered looks when I explain to storage engineers that our theory of redundancy in routing (think VRRP) might drop a packet or two. That is totally unacceptable in storage which is why lossless ethernet and multi-pathed iSCSI are such popular topics. One dropped packet in storage can ruin a database. I have seen it happen.