This week’s podcast was recorded a few months ago, so apologies for the sound quality.  The team discuss the role of the storage administrator and whether we will see the eventual demise of storage admins or simply a transition to another role.  The conversation tracks the responsibilities of storage administrators over the last 30 years, from the era of the mainframe to today’s software-defined offerings. Early on, Martin invents a new word (abomnerbation)!  The discussions finally agree that the age of the LUN monkey is over.

Elapsed Time: 00:26:57

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:00 – Storage on the mainframe – including punched cards, 300GB under management.

* 00:03:00 – Storage Admin in the 1990s – VSS and ESS

* 00:04:00 – Centralised storage (EMC) introduced to fix the mess of Windows

* 00:04:33 – StorageTek Iceberg, or RAMAC Virtual Array

* 00:05:20 – EMC horror stories, Gavin – spill the beans!

* 00:07:00 – Storage was very “hands on” – Bus & Tag!

* 00:08:30 – 2000’s introduced the move towards simplicity and awful SRM products

* 00:10:00 – Bring on the APIs!

* 00:12:00 – Reliability – one of today’s big improvements

* 00:13:00 – How reliable were those old mainframe disks?

* 00:14:00 – Who made things easier – XIV and 3PAR.

* 00:15:30 – Storage is now highly automated for performance.

* 00:16:30 – Hardware costs have declined, why pay for an expensive human resource?

* 00:17:30 – Using policy to determine how storage should be managed

* 00:19:00 – The storage role is changing to architectural and design – with less understanding?

* 00:22:00 – Who will do low level support in the future, the vendor?

* 00:24:00 – Start to understand the value of the data you are managing.

* 00:26:00 – The LUN Monkey is dead!!

* 00:26:08 – Wrap Up

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