Whenever there’s a technology change, there’s a human impact. When you plan to bring a new technology into your data center, you need to consider how it will affect the operations team that monitors and manages that technology.
That’s even truer for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) than for other technology. It’s well recognized that the integration of compute and storage into a single component in HCI means the typical data center silos will change. Operations teams and especially storage administrators will be concerned about what this means for their jobs.
Some Storage Administrator Tasks Will No Longer Be Needed
HCI means that many of the tasks storage admins typically focus on won’t be important any more.
Because the storage and server resources are managed together, the tasks of creating disk groups and managing RAID are no longer complex and critical operations. The ease of expanding HCI through adding commodity nodes to the cluster means that capacity planning is no longer as challenging. Built-in backup integration means that data protection tasks are far easier. The management software provided by the HCI vendor means that storage-specific knowledge isn’t needed to complete most necessary tasks.
Storage Administrator Knowledge of the Data Becomes More Valuable
There are two possible approaches to finding a role for your storage administrators once you’ve adopted hyperconverged infrastructure. The first is to train your storage admins in the skills needed to manage the HCI. Rather than focusing solely on storage management, they can become part of your team focused on infrastructure management.
The second approach takes advantage of the valuable skills and knowledge your storage team has that no one else does. Unlike the rest of your operations team, the storage team has intimate knowledge of the data used in your business.
As companies go through a digital transformation, the business becomes both more directed by and more dependent on the data it collects. With their knowledge of both data and applications, storage admins can use their skills to make sure data is stored and accessed most efficiently to help applications support business goals; this is crucial in the new hybrid cloud world where data needs to be transparently shared by internal and external platforms.
Storage admins can also apply their knowledge to making sure the compliance needs of the data are satisfied and implement automation to ensure policies are applied across all datastores. Even more valuable, they can help identify how data can be repurposed to support new business objectives.
How have you prepared your IT organization for the changes that come with hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud? dcVAST can help you design, implement, and manage hyperconverged infrastructure using technology like Nutanix and NetApp. We can set up systems and turn them over to your teams to support or offer full managed services to ensure smooth running systems. Contact us to talk about the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure and how to transition your technical infrastructure and your technology team.