Hello all,

 

I'm currently in a dead end IT job (datacenter related) and am looking into adjacent career paths to jump into.  Considering cloud stuff like AWS and Azure, but after working with and enjoying unraid for a while, I figured I'd ask here to see what careers could be similar to managing an unraid server.  I realize unraid itself is probably not used much professionally.

 

Thanks for any tips!

6 hours ago, acosmichippo said:

Hello all,

 

I'm currently in a dead end IT job (datacenter related) and am looking into adjacent career paths to jump into.  Considering cloud stuff like AWS and Azure, but after working with and enjoying unraid for a while, I figured I'd ask here to see what careers could be similar to managing an unraid server.  I realize unraid itself is probably not used much professionally.

 

Thanks for any tips!

Linux Systems Administration. Sysadmins spend a lot of time being intimately familiar with configuration files, packages and their dependencies and resolving conflicts between them. They would be expected to have some familiarity with programming languages (C/C++ generally) as well as being comfortable with a terminal and scripting languages. Modern sysadmins also work with automated deployment systems a lot, things like CHEF/Docker/Kubernetes are going to be premium skills to acquire. 

This is the field I would like to get into, but never feel confident enough with my skill level to dive right into.

There are storage administrator jobs. Years ago I was a Storage Sysadmin that managed PB's of storage on NetApp and various EMC related products (clariion, vmax, datadomain). I also worked with backups, and managed the Unix servers (fun /s). Since then I've moved to a Cloud Engineering focused role.

 

My path was Helpdesk -> SysAdmin -> Cloud Engineering

 

I will tell you that being a storage admin is a very specialized role and IMO it's slowly dying out. The only place you'll find that role is large companies that have on-prem (data center) metal. I decided to move more to the engineering side because I didn't think the storage admin path would play out well in 5-10 years time. From what I've seen of my former co-workers that were on the team, about half have moved on to large companies to manage storage, the others went to more cloud related jobs.

 

Most storage is so easily managed in the various cloud offering that there's almost no point in paying a person to solely manage it.

 

I'm more than happy to expand on anything if you'd like. You can DM me if you want more specific info. I don't like to be too specific on public forums.

 

Edited July 29, 20214 yr by CrashnBrn