I'm about eight months into a Help Desk job for an almost 2000 internal users environment, about a 1/4 of which are remote. We have *many* applications and functions to support, and the infrastructure is tended to very carefully. All of IT is about 200 people, 22 of which are Help Desk, phone and deskside support.
I pestered my Team Leader to get me a tour of our datacenter, one floor below me. I'd been there once to fix someone's laptop, but it's a separate security area and one cannot just get off the elevator there and take a stroll. She set up a tour for me and three other newish people with the head of the Windows server people. He's a big linebacker-looking guy who really knew his subject and took obvious interest in it. I learned that we have four stages of infrastructure preparedness: dev (in development), int (?), pre-prod (production ready, but let's be sure), and prod. We have 247 logical servers, a handful of which are "mainframe". Most of those 247 logical servers occupy their own physical server, though there is long term development (in the "Model Office") of a heavily virtualized server environment. The target is 3 to 4 servers running on every box, using Microsoft's Virtual Server. Our machines are mostly HP, though storage is done on Sun StorEdge or StorageTek. NAS is giving way to SAN, and we have a "VTL" box. Structural engineers make surveys once a month or so (this is the 12th floor in an identified flood basin). Air flow is voluminous in the server room, the Model Office uses inductive cooling. At one point our guide took an instrument off of a hook on the wall. It had a band saw shaped handle and two big black suction cups on it. He gracefully lobbed this thing to a point about three feet away from him. It landed on the floor with a plop and he leaned over and pulled on it, removing one of the square floor panels, revealing cabling. It was all very smooth, and I was highly impressed. This is the career path I want. The datacenter contains Telecom, Operations, Unix, and Intel. Telecom is phones and network jacks. Operations does administrative computery stuff like regular file transfers and backups and anything requiring little decision making and a lot of repeatibility. Unix is a small team of four or five guys who've all been with the company for many years. "Intel" is the name they give to the guys (and gals, actually) who maintain the various Windows-based servers. I guess they call it Intel because there's a one-to-one mapping between Intel based servers and Microsoft Windows, right? Intel has a slow but steady turnover rate, and it would be a more realistic career goal right now. If I could spend time in Intel and then jump to Unix when the chance arose, I might be happy. I hate dealing with Windows, but I like being a dwarf. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
