Tech Careers: How To Pick IT

When choosing a high-tech career that involves the administration of data center hardware, IT administrators have traditionally fallen into three camps:

1. Server Administrators: these administrators focus on the installation of operating systems, the setting up of user accounts, the administration of applications and/or hypervisors, and the connectivity to both network and storage resources.
2. Network Administrators: these administrators focus on the connectivity of the network switch, the zoning, and the security/firewall maintenance.
3. Storage Administrators: these administrators focus on the provisioning of storage capacity, the allocation to servers (through a network switch), and other tasks such as disaster recovery or storage array backup.

Traditionally, most IT operations would require coordination between two or three people. Job seekers wishing to land an IT job might ask: which type of administrator represents the best choice for me?

The answer can be found in an interesting blog post from IT Management 2.0. Given the growing complexities associated with explosive data growth and multi-step IT operations, automation across all hardware in the data center is the sweet spot for an aspiring IT administrator:

“Unified platforms (those that combine network, storage and compute elements) represent another opportunity for doing things differently.”

More and more data center purchase decisions are considering integrated server, network, and storage packages. These unified platforms advertise one administration console that provides a single portal for automating common activities across multiple hardware domains. This level of automation has a lot of appeal, and becoming familiar with automated IT toolsets is a solid career move.

Where to start? Find an all-in-one IT organization such as Acadia, and take a look at their job offerings.

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Intrapreneur