I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)

I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.

AMA.

7 points

What kind of upcoming tech do you see coming out in the next little while that could make a big difference in your field?

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2 points

The migration to cloud is a big deal. Learning about cloud storage is straightforward, but there’s a huge number of new services offerings that don’t nearly fit into the way the existing tech was built 25+ years ago. I’m “scaroused” at the idea of having to learn how all this works.

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2 points

My organization is moving a bunch of on prem stuff to the cloud over the next few years and its been interesting to see how things are changing, Azure has a TON of features but is overwhelming when I look at my deployment now and where I want to get to in the future. But I will get there, one piece at a time.

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2 points

Yeah, given that the software I specialize in is proprietary and built on a very limited number of supported configs (OS / DB / Storage Management) it’s unlikely to be affected by so many cloud changes, but I can see how it might enable a HUGE number of competitors to build something similar just by clicking together cloud services like a box of lego blocks.

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6 points

Can you get in touch with me? I work in archives, in IT, and have a nasty situation I’m looking for advice on from someone with experience in exactly this. Can we dm? Not sure how that works here.

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3 points

Sadly, no… My niche is so very, very small that it’s unlikely I can help your specific situation. It’s also a self-preservation thing – giving professional advice for free without contracts in place is a liability issue.

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1 point

Those two reasons pretty much cancel each other out, but alright.

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1 point
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1 point

Awesome, I appreciate the offer!

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6 points

How did you end up in that niche? Was it a conscious decision or was it something that was thrust on you?

Follow-up question: Did you take any courses for the archiving portion of your job, or is it entirely self-taught? Any certifications or additional (formal) training?

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4 points

Heh. I told my boss to fuck off after I got back from a vacation and she yelled at me because the people who were supposed to do my work couldn’t do it – because it was too technical.

I went back to my cube, cleared out my desk, and waited for security to escort me out. Three days later, my boss came to my cube and said “Go to the 11th floor and ask for Dave.” then they walked away. I was sure it was an exit interview with HR. I put my box on my desk and went downstairs where… I got a job interview in the IT department, managing their new archive.

As part of the transfer to IT, I got a week’s training in the USA, and several boxes of software manuals. Dave (my new IT mentor) said he wanted me to read all of them. He’d stop by, ask me which manual I’d read most recently, flip through it, read something, and say “Tell me about… X Y Z”, and I’d have to barf out what I’d learned about storage management or database indexes, or server OS commands or functions.

After that, everything was self-taught. I ended up buying some old decommissioned server hardware from a friend that worked at the manufacturer, borrowing the install CDs from work, and building my own server to repeatedly fuck up / learn on.

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3 points

Wait, you packed up and then waited for three days?

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4 points

Well, I wasn’t going to quit… I wanted to get a severance payment. :)

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2 points

Wow, what a story. The reason I asked is because I am (hopefully) coming from the other side: librarianship, trying to get into records management and archives and eventually into digital archives.

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5 points

What was the biggest change over your 40 years of experience?

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3 points

The insane storage capacities. The first archive I was responsible for had a total of 75GB of data. When I raised the alert that we didn’t have an offsite backup, the enterprise backup team said, “Are you insane? You want us to back up 75 gigabytes EVERY WEEK?”

I have 128GB MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail… In my office I have over 250TB of storage, and I’m just some nerd. I routinely move hundreds of terabytes between systems for migrations.

Also… abstraction.

Many of the servers I connect to are VMs on servers using storage in SAN fabric using virtual IPs. Troubleshooting performance problems is difficult because nothing is strictly physical anymore. Another VM on a different physical server might be soaking up all the I/O bandwidth on SAN hardware I can’t even see from my server. Even tape libraries can be entirely virtual, backed with cheap SATA disks, and a massive physical tape library in another datacentre that serves multiple sites. This “bends my noodle” more than I’d like to admit.

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6 points

I’m another old tech, starting in 1981 on a TI99/4a.

What’s your ring tone? Mine is a 56k modem.

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2 points

One of the default ringtones that came with my phone. Sorry, it’s just a phone to me. :D

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