I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
What was the biggest change over your 40 years of experience?
The insane storage capacities. The first archive I was responsible for had a total of 75GB of data. When I raised the alert that we didn’t have an offsite backup, the enterprise backup team said, “Are you insane? You want us to back up 75 gigabytes EVERY WEEK?”
I have 128GB MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail… In my office I have over 250TB of storage, and I’m just some nerd. I routinely move hundreds of terabytes between systems for migrations.
Also… abstraction.
Many of the servers I connect to are VMs on servers using storage in SAN fabric using virtual IPs. Troubleshooting performance problems is difficult because nothing is strictly physical anymore. Another VM on a different physical server might be soaking up all the I/O bandwidth on SAN hardware I can’t even see from my server. Even tape libraries can be entirely virtual, backed with cheap SATA disks, and a massive physical tape library in another datacentre that serves multiple sites. This “bends my noodle” more than I’d like to admit.