#162 - The Evolving Role of Storage Administration

The role of the storage administrator has changed over the years and is in many ways influenced by the three “V”s typically used to describe AI. Admins have to deal with increased data Volumes, with the Velocity of delivering resources and with a wide Variety of application profiles. This week, Chris talks to Clay Ryder (Senior Director of Enterprise Marketing) and Frank Shepherd (Principal Systems Engineer) from Tintri to gain their insights on how technology and process is changing storage administration to meet the Three Vs challenge.

Exponential data growth has always been an issue in IT. As the cost of storage drops, the volume of data increases, making the work of the storage admin further disconnected from hardware management. Server virtualisation abstracted much of the provision work of storage administration but hasn’t changed fundamentals like workload placement.

Going forward, we need to see technology taking control of the more mundane and repetitive tasks of managing storage infrastructure. AIOps is building that process into storage platforms. At that point, the admin becomes the strategist and architect of business requirements.

You can learn more about Tintri and the VMStore platform at https://tintri.com/. Follow Tintri blogs at https://tintri.com/blog/.

Elapsed Time: 00:43:16

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:01:00 – Tintri is now part of DDN
00:01:55 – What is the history of storage administration?
00:04:55 – Virtualisation didn’t change the construct of a disk
00:05:40 – Applications & hardware used to be tightly coupled
00:07:20 – Admins used to spend lots of time managing hardware
00:09:00 – Storage is a performance arms race
00:10:50 – Exponential growth doesn’t mean exponential numbers of staff
00:13:00 – AIOps will be essential – augmentation like car navigation systems
00:18:50 – Storage needs to self-adapt to remove administrator intervention
00:19:30 – Storage needs to adapt to application & business specific needs
00:22:00 – Virtualisation still depends on underlying storage hardware characteristics
00:27:30 – (Storage) infrastructure is still needed across the industry
00:29:30 – We need good analytics from storage platforms
00:33:50 – Some tasks may be dispersed to non-storage skilled teams
00:35:20 – What will the future storage administrator skill set look like?
00:36:20 – The Human aspect moves towards supporting the needs of the business
00:38:30 – Metcalfe’s Law predicts exponential increase in complexity
00:42:00 – Wrap Up

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