On Sat, March 17, 2007 8:25 am, Todd Walton wrote: > 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 >
Your interest (people like to call it passion nowadays) comes through in your description. My personal experience is that doing what interests you is much more gratifying than chasing a buck (unless money is what interests you ... not necessarily a bad thing). So I'd say you're on the right track. Best of luck. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
