SAN admin anyone ?

I spoke to my old friend, a few days ago. He wants to come to Bangalore and get into the storage industry and become a SAN admin.

It gets real funny when people say that , what exactly do they mean by that , I wonder ?
Its like saying I want to get into the "computer" industry !
Just goes to show that little knowledge can be worse than complete ignorance.

I asked him, what does he want to learn about storage ?
No surprises here , he mentioned he wants to learn about Clariion .
Damn, I have heard this about a zillion times. I always get that stupid answer.
Clariion is one of the low-end arrays made by EMC , it doesn't even have an active-active storage processors !
I wonder why nobody talks about symmetrix or Hitachi HDS etc.

But in any case , a SAN admin job doesn't just involve managing arrays. In fact , that would be the least of his
concerns , most of these boxes have "made for dummies" type GUIs.
I advised learning more about switches and storage technologies in general and then moving onto specialized topics , like individual arrays and associated technologies.
That does not mean that you ignore arrays altogether , but you can take up arrays later.
The major part of the work is the fibre-switching , patch work , zoning and most importantly, implementation.
It becomes less of a "button-pushing" and more of a planning affair.


My friend also mentioned that he is trying to learn Unix , which he believes will be an advantage in the storage industry.
I seriously don't get this , WTF has Unix got to do with the storage industry ??
There is negligible host based configuration involved these days, nobody does any kind of LUN masking from the host side.

I offered my opinion , which is most likely going to be ignored . For one person offering the right bit of advice , there will be ten other fools trying to convince in the other direction.