Working in a data centre

Rexxar

Rexxar

Rexxar

Associate
Joined
13 May 2010
Posts
1,631
So after spending years job hopping, i've decided to settle down on a career of sorts.

I'm looking at jobs in Data Centre's , this is an area that interests me and there's a large amount of jobs being advertised at the moment, particularly in Herts which is my doorstep.

Does anyone here work in one and can you give any pointers on where to start? I don't know if i should apply for roles with "the ambition to learn" and start off in a junior position, or whether i should look at qualifications first?

Any advise would be appreciated from those in the field.


Thanks
 
It entirely depends what you want to do in one. Do you want to be the guy who manages one, do you want to look after the cabling/aircon etc or do you want to be the techy who goes in to get his hands dirty?

I maintain the network for our data centres and I spend 90% of my time out of the DC. Anyone who does the admin work for them looks bored and always grumpy.
 
Sounds like you're more interested in the hands-on/labour type jobs - i.e. re-cabling, swapping out hardware, moving servers around etc. Any roles for engineers/development will more than likely spend most of their time in an office next to the data centre.

I couldn't think of anything worse than spending an entire day in our freezing cold, super loud data centre. The majority of work is done remotely, so i maybe access it once a month or so.
 
If you are wanting to spend time inside the DC, your either going to be there doing the physical stuff, racking, patching, auditing, basically a DC remote hands engineer, or if you are working for a hosting company, you could be on the network team, or you could be on the server team, in which case you will more likely be office based, and have the odd visit to the DCs when needed.

I used to work for a company who turned an ex ambulance centre in to a tier 3 data centre, although I was a network engineer, I was also a server/virtualisation and colo engineer at the same time, so would be a mixture of normal network deployments for customers and supporting, to racking servers, to patching and configuring networking, firewalls in the suites that surrounded me.

Place I am in now is office based, but we have 2 data centre point of presence in wales, and about 5 in the big London DC's, I only usually go the Welsh ones, as we have our own dedicated data centre team who do all the physical racking, patching etc.

Im only needed when I need to do specialist network stuff in the DC's

so depends what you want to do
 
Thanks,

The role i was looking at was a Support Engineer, which i imagined to be a lot of hands-on physical work. I'm getting sick of the commute where i work now as it's turning a 9hr day into a 13-14hr day , and i'd rather be closer to home, and actually working a 13hr day which is reflected in the wages vs travel!

Primary Duties:

* Racking & un-racking of computer hardware (Sun / HP / Dell).
* Configure remote iLO / RIB connections on HP / Dell hardware.
* Supervision of 3rd party vendors during core hours and On Call for break-fix installs and decommissions.
* Use network scanners and cables tester to diagnose infrastructure faults.
* Patching (copper and fibre).
* Respond to incidents and escalate problems to Infrastructure Support team.

Secondary Duties:
* System Monitoring (BMS / Email / HP SIM / Service Center / Dell OME).
* Carry out Tape Loading / unloading as directed by Backup support team. Ensure all tapes are handled carefully and stored securely.
* Manage hardware deliveries to site ensuring kit stored securely and relevant party informed of receipt.
* Stock Control of store room.
* Processing of Access Control Requests.
* Return faulty hardware to 3rd Party vendor support.
* Regular physical inspection of Data Hall.
Click to expand...
 
Is the quote the job description?

If not the phrase engineer doesn't mean what it once did. I am a systems engineer in network operations. What i really do is sit behind my desk in a basement for 12 hrs a day connecting to both physical and virtual servers across the UK and doing windows updates.
(ok so there is a bit mote to it but yeah)
 
Urbanfreestyle said:
Is the quote the job description?

If not the phrase engineer doesn't mean what it once did.
Click to expand...

For a long time it hasn't, the job description might as well say 'remote hands' but if you just want to work in a DC then it is an option.

P.s. "Supervision of 3rd party vendors" will be the most boring task ever. I hate spending any time at all in our DC, and aim to spend as little time as possible in there and having to spend any time essentially watching someone else work is to be avoided.
 
To be honest, the actual physical work in becoming very unskilled labour at this point, it's just a matter of being able to lift stuff and plug cables into the right places, you don't need much technical skill to do that and the pay reflects that fact.

Working for a company operating 40 datacenters globally, one of my big focuses for technology strategy was automating the datacenter so nobody there needed to do anything except plug the kit in. Between that and the onward march of of the cloud that's the future (and if you work for one of the big cloud providers, they're the kings of that kind of automation...).

The fact is even cheap people cost more than automation fairly quickly and automation is predictable, even good people make mistakes. The end result is an automated environment is more reliable and cheaper.

It's not a good long term bet in my view, learn the network stuff or learn the systems / operations / devops side and you'll have a career path but both will be sitting in an office not actually touching the hardware for the most part.
 
I don't want to say there will be no career progression starting out as a tech in a datacenter, but it's not much of a foot in the door to anything better. You're remote hands with someone else actually doing the troubleshooting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom