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Home » #40 – Garbage Collection: Death of the Storage Admin

#40 – Garbage Collection: Death of the Storage Admin

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This week’s podcast was recorded a few months ago, so apologies for the sound quality.  The team discuss the role of the storage administrator and whether we will see the eventual demise of storage admins or simply a transition to another role.  The conversation tracks the responsibilities of storage administrators over the last 30 years, from the era of the mainframe to today’s software-defined offerings. Early on, Martin invents a new word (abomnerbation)!  The discussions finally agree that the age of the LUN monkey is over.

Elapsed Time: 00:26:57

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Intro
  • 00:01:00 – Storage on the mainframe – including punched cards, 300GB under management.
  • 00:03:00 – Storage Admin in the 1990s – VSS and ESS
  • 00:04:00 – Centralised storage (EMC) introduced to fix the mess of Windows
  • 00:04:33 – StorageTek Iceberg, or RAMAC Virtual Array
  • 00:05:20 – EMC horror stories, Gavin – spill the beans!
  • 00:07:00 – Storage was very “hands on” – Bus & Tag!
  • 00:08:30 – 2000’s introduced the move towards simplicity and awful SRM products
  • 00:10:00 – Bring on the APIs!
  • 00:12:00 – Reliability – one of today’s big improvements
  • 00:13:00 – How reliable were those old mainframe disks?
  • 00:14:00 – Who made things easier – XIV and 3PAR.
  • 00:15:30 – Storage is now highly automated for performance.
  • 00:16:30 – Hardware costs have declined, why pay for an expensive human resource?
  • 00:17:30 – Using policy to determine how storage should be managed
  • 00:19:00 – The storage role is changing to architectural and design – with less understanding?
  • 00:22:00 – Who will do low level support in the future, the vendor?
  • 00:24:00 – Start to understand the value of the data you are managing.
  • 00:26:00 – The LUN Monkey is dead!!
  • 00:26:08 – Wrap Up

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Comments

  1. Tim Wessels says

    So, how about a transcript if the audio quality is poor? It would not take 26 minutes to read the transcript. If the sound quality is poor then what is the point of trying to listen to it?

    • Chris M Evans says

      Tim, we’ve had a few issues with software for recording. We’re not always in the same place. We’re always looking for ways to improve the quality. For transcription, I agree, we’re looking at it to find somebody who understands the technical aspects, otherwise we’d have to redo anything we have done.

      • Tim Wessels says

        Chris, yes having transcriptions of the podcasts would be useful. I watch/listen to Steve Gibson’s weekly Security Now podcast on my Roku. He mentions that he works with someone who has been doing his transcriptions for years which he posts on his website. Steve is very precise and deeply technical during his podcast so whoever he is using would be a good person to contact.

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