With the evolution of workloads and the rapid growth of business, data center experts assume a variety of roles and master multiple skills, who have increasingly become a key element in IT equipment. The emergence of cloud computing may cast a shadow on the future of the data center, but the cloud is not a useless proposition.
Although this trend may cause some data centers to shrink in size, remained workloads within enterprises are often the most critical part of business operations.
At the same time, companies wish that fewer employees bring about higher work efficiency. So general IT professional staff tomorrow must get rid of traditional and isolated images and strive to become such experts that pick up a higher level of flexibility and interdisciplinary skills.
The role of data center experts
Technology development has exerted influence on IT division of labor, for there are cloud technology engineer and IT architect. But data center experts act as a backbone of daily operations among them and play core roles in IT organizations.
Monitoring: Data center experts implement, support, and use various monitoring and management tools on applications, resource pools, or physical devices; pay attention to important alerts; and respond to events that occur. They can use monitoring insight to recommend trend-based operational process improvements, such as allocating more storage to workloads near their current storage limits.
Integration: Data center experts should ensure that systems, services, and applications work together properly during deployment or integration. This requires an in-depth understanding of the system configuration in the data center and the interdependence between system and application components. Experts often install and maintain systems, perform wiring and deploy other infrastructure, and often recommend component-level improvements that can save costs and improve performance.
Troubleshooting: expert access logs and monitoring files in data center provide first-level and second-level support, root-cause analysis and other technologies for troubleshooting. They should ensure that IT department is ready to make response to downtime or other problems, and that unsolved issues must be followed up until they are totally fixed. Experts can recommend and implement proactive measures to mitigate or prevent recurring problems.
Collaboration: Data center experts work closely with users and IT colleagues, so clear written language and verbal communication are required. And they will often offer articles, guides and notes to them. The development of agile software paradigms (DevOps) also emphasizes a necessary of collaboration that builds operational support for continuous software development and release cycles.
Job requirements for data center experts
The educational level of data center experts depends on the organizations concerned. The size of the data center, the number of employees and other issues should be taken into consideration. In general, data center experts should, at least, have an associate degree in a technical discipline. Large companies prefer them to get a real bachelor’s degree.
Authoritative industry certifications such as “A+” and “Server+” of the Computing Technology Industry Association help potential candidates a lot. But these certifications are usually not included in job requirements, that is, vendor-centric certification (such as Cisco Certified Data Center Experts) does not matter in labor market. They are usually concentrated on specific platforms and may have limitations related to specific businesses.
Although data center experts do not need engineering-level management skills, they should have intermediate Windows and Linux knowledge and the ability to deploy, configure, optimize, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot these operating systems. Knowledge about virtualization tools such as Hyper-V in Windows or kernel-based Linux virtual machines is also helpful
Data center experts should also be proficient in various tools. Scripting tool like PowerShell 6.0 to them is only a preliminary level. They should show more skills about other platforms, such as asset management, help desk, application and system monitoring, facility management, and document generation tools.
Finally, a successful data center expert cannot ignore physical aspects of their work. As we know, timetables are usually fluctuating, which requires a regular work shift for data center experts to be accessible to emergency maintenance and operation calls. Meanwhile, related duties include a certain degree of manual labor like the movement, relocation, and repair of heavy equipment during installation.
Break out thinking shackle
In addition to roles and skills, one of the most important but most overlooked features of a data center expert is how to help IT department adapt to changing business needs. Simply adopting a common list of best practices, implementing a cookie-cutter architecture, or a fixed selection of vendor brands will not trigger any innovation. Data center experts who can put business needs to a higher level than that level of work safety, brand loyalty, and personal technology preferences will eventually succeed in the IT industry.
