I haven’t been to many IT related conferences. I was fortunate enough to go to a LOPSA run event, the Professional IT Community Conference(PICC). It was a conference for sysadmins, run by sysadmins. Most of the other conferences I have been to have been run by vendors and most of the content was marketing based. I felt like the PICC had a lot of good, non vendor specific and design based content which was applicable to many sysadmins, regardless of their “business”.
My main interest was taking the training courses on storage. I think, after hearing other people talking, that my environment is probably smaller than the majority of the other environments that people were representing. Since I work for a K-12 school district, our storage infrastructure historically has not been planned. Need storage? Buy a server. Essentially, mostly all of our storage has been direct attached. Within the past few years, we have deployed a couple of basic Dell servers running iSCSI target services to be used as shared storage for our Novell Cluster.
We have had initial internal discussions about moving forward with a planned storage system. The two sessions on storage virtualization that I attended taught me one thing over everything else, storage virtualization is just a continued abstraction of storage. There are nitty-gritty details about how and where that abstraction occurs that I won’t get into, but regardless of the size and use of modern storage virtualization, it needs to be planned out properly. It’s not as easy as taking three drives and creating a RAID5 array.
Sometimes you get tunnel vision at your job where you can unknowingly insulate yourself from fresh ideas. A conference such as the PICC is a great opportunity to talk to other people in the sysadmin community that can open your eyes to fresh ideas that you would have never thought of.
Ian Carder
http://www.arsedout.net/idogg/