Enter the Storage Administrator

Greg (shoe) Schuweiler

The tasks of a systems administrator's job are changing. In small and large environments, systems administrators used to spend their days (and nights) managing any number of servers with locally attached disks with an occasional timeout for a game of X-Pilot, Doom, etc. We tuned the servers, managed the disks and the data, and backed up the data to locally attached tape drives.

The failure of a disk usually meant an outage while the failed disk was replaced, formatted, file systems built, and the data was restored from tape. The outage was a fact of life that both the users and administrators accepted. These were not always the good old days. I do not miss trying to justify to management a 540-MB hard drive that cost $3500. I do miss running scripts via cron that automatically sent an email stating the top five disk hogs to everyone with an account on the system and letting peer pressure do the rest. Alas, one must be a gentler systems administrator nowadays. Sigh.

Now I have a filing cabinet drawer full of 4.5-GB, 9-GB, 18-GB, and some 36-GB SCSI drives that are perfectly serviceable but too small to be used in production. I just cannot bear to part with them. We now purchase wads of storage that are racked into datacenters in 0.5 and 1-TB clumps (a techie term) or disk arrays that are monolithic blobs (another techie term) that snap together like Lego building blocks and add storage by the tens of terabytes.

Our businesses' quest for acquiring data makes a salmon's run upstream to its spawning place look like a Sunday stroll around a pond.