Working in a datacentremay not sound
like the most glamorous corner of IT, but for staff who like to
work in a close-knit team using the latest technologies and who can
handle occasional periods of high stress and out-of-hours working,
it is ideal. It is also a great place to develop specialist skills
while getting a grounding across the full spread of IT
operations.
Within the datacentre, staff are typically divided into two
broad types, says John Skelton, UK managed service director for
datacentre operator Colt. The implementation team will consist
of implementation managers who effectively act as project managers
for new customer requirements, supported by generalist engineers
who handle physical installs and cabling. The operational or
service assurance team will be responsible for configuring the
equipment and managing it once it has been installed, and will
consist of specialists of various levels of seniority in areas such
as server management, database management, storage and backup,
networking, and system monitoring, as well as helpdesk staff.
Alex Rabbetts, managing director of
Migration Solutions, which helps companies set up and staff
datacentres, says there are other staff in the datacentre who are
less obviously involved in IT work but still need IT knowledge,
such as storemen and power and cooling specialists. Storemen are
typically required to track and handle correctly high volumes of
very valuable equipment while, he points out, "much of the
infrastructure managed by facilities engineers - power, cooling,
fire detection and suppression, and security systems, for example -
is now managed using IT-based network management protocols."
Above these operational teams, says Ben Catchpole, a managing
consultant with recruiter Hudson, will be infrastructure architects
ensuring the datacentre is well designed and that all the
supporting services such as power and cooling are in place, and
project managers looking after major installations. At the top of
the tree is the datacentre manager who, Rabbetts says, needs a
broad understanding of everything in the datacentre from facilities
infrastructure, such as power and cooling to the servers, network
and operating systems and applications, as well as processes and
procedure. Alex Rea, a branch manager with
recruitment consultancy Computer People, says these roles
typically go to people who have experience in a datacentre or
perhaps in network operations for a large telco.
The work itself tends to be a mix of routine and reactive tasks.
"For implementation staff, most of the work is planned and you have
a reasonable amount of time to plan and deliver it," Skelton says.
On the operational side, he says "it is more reactive, but at Colt
we try to use proactive monitoring tools to allow us to plan for
tasks such as hard disk upgrades. We also try to automate processes
to take the strain of monitoring and other repetitive tasks."
However, datacentre work can be stressful. "You are typically
working in a high-availability environment where customer uptime is
critical and downtime means loss of revenue," says Riccardo
DegliEffeti, operations manager of TelecityGroup's Powergate
datacentre. In a hosted datacentre, service level agreements are
likely to involve some of that cost being passed from the customer
to the provider. DegliEffeti points out that the level of stress in
a particular datacentre will "very much depend on how well the site
is set up and how well it is maintained."
There are other differences between working in a corporate
datacentre, however large or small, and an outsourced datacentre.
"In a corporate datacentre, operators are much closer to the data,
are more passionate and take more responsibility, but processes and
procedures may not be so good and very often there will be one
person around whom the whole operation hangs because they know the
history, or they know how it all fits together. In an outsourced
environment, staff tend not to be close to the data, but their role
is all about service and the pressure is on maintaining maximum
uptime," Rabbetts says.
Working in a datacentre is also not quite like working in most
offices. "It is generally a very artificial environment: cooled,
heavily air-conditioned and artificially lit, and often out of town
in the middle of an industrial estate, and with few staff
facilities you might expect to find in a large organisation, such
as a canteen or gym. It is also a very security conscious
environment, so it may not be that easy to pop out for lunch," Rea
says.
Rabbetts says that, "datacentres, despite not being seen this
way by many organizations, are inherently dangerous places to work.
Equipment is heavy and often being lifted into high cabinets, while
datacentres use huge amounts of power and generally at least some
of this will be 3-phase. Plugging something into the wrong type of
power can have catastrophic effects for the equipment, the
datacentre as a whole and the operator."
People tend to get into datacentre work at a relatively junior
level. Skelton says he would hire staff without an IT background
for the most junior roles if they have "the gumption and the
ability to learn. One of the key things about datacentres is that
you have to have cross-functional working, so you need people who
are team players, rather than people with great technical expertise
but a tendency to create chinese walls between different
specialisms."
Another requirement, says Mike Bennett, head of technical
operators in Europe for
datacentre operator Savvis, is a high degree of comfort with
following procedures closely. "It is important to have proper
processes and routine in place so that you have good control over
the environment. You need people who understand that what they are
doing will direct affect customers' businesses," he says. At the
same time, Catchpole says, staff need to be flexible enough to deal
with crises and to not have a rigid nine-to-five mentality.
Although moving up in a corporate datacentre can be difficult
because there tends to be only a small number of staff in each
discipline, promotion prospects in outsourced datacentres can be
excellent. DegliEffetti's career is typical: he was hired as a
mid-level engineer by a TelecityGroup datacentre in Italy around
eight years ago. After being promoted at that datacentre, he moved
to an in-house role with Bloomberg in Italy managing server racks
housed in an external co-location datacentre, and then transferred
to a similar role in the UK. Finally, he moved back to
TelecityGroup around a year ago and is now manager of its newest
London datacentre.
The career path is slightly different in each role. Bennett says
that "staff on the support desk dealing with customer queries can
become more specialised in the systems they support and may
eventually move into specialist teams involved in fault resolution,
installation and provisioning." On the implementation side, says
Skelton, "junior engineers typically start out doing very reactive
tasks such as rebooting servers and work towards handling small
installations on their own before rising to implementation
manager." Operational staff, Catchpole says, will begin with
"feeding and watering of systems such as tape changes and batch
runs" before developing expertise in server, network and storage
management.
In more senior roles, Catchpole says, datacentres are looking
for staff with expertise in change management, project management
and
ITIL-based processes as well as technical skills. On the
technical side, datacentres want staff with certification in
supplier courses such as Sun and Cisco, and will often support
staff through the certification process, especially in service
providers whose customers expect staff to be fully up to date.
Despite the breadth and depth of skills required by the
datacentre, Rabbetts says salaries tend to be lower than equivalent
roles elsewhere. "They do not yet fully reflect the importance of
roles that are critical to the survival, let alone success, of many
organizations," he says. "Datacentre managers can typically expect
to earn £50-£70,000 a year in the south-east, which is low compared
to, for example, a unix admin who has just one skillset." He says
that in outsourced datacentres, which are run for profit, salaries
are typically 5% to 10% lower than in a corporate datacentre.
However, Rea suggests that with the present skills shortage,
datacentre pay is reaching comparable levels to similar roles in
other parts of the IT industry, and shift work allowances can add
considerably to basic pay. In more junior roles, Catchpole says
salaries start from around £20,000 a year, and Skelton sees
mid-level on-call or shift engineers earning £35,000 to £45,000 a
year.
Shift work is definitely the norm, with implementation engineers
often expected to work evening shifts because many planned changes
are scheduled when customer systems are less busy. On the
operational side, there is usually only one person in each
discipline on duty outside hours, with most staff working a normal
day shift but on call perhaps one week in five. "You will typically
get called out once or twice in the week you are on call," Skelton
says. Rabbets says that "in a well run datacentre, with good
processes and procedure, the impact of being on-call should be
minimal."
Even if salaries are lower, DegliEffeti says, they are offset by
other factors. "There are plenty of opportunities to develop
yourself in terms of technology and customer service," he says.
TelecityGroup is typical in providing "regular training in specific
technologies such as
Microsoft, Cisco and
cabling because we need our staff to keep up to date."
He says that because customers have varied needs, no two
customer environments are the same, which provides exposure to
broad range of system configurations. Bennett says that working in
a datacentre allows you "to make a career change without having to
go to a different company - as a company, we are happy to let
people move around because we benefit from retaining quality people
who have experience of other areas than their current specialism -
while the culture is friendly, open and honest."
As a result, Bennett says, staff turnover tends to be low.
However, if you do want to move on, ex-datacentre staff are highly
sought after. "You can get to a pretty senior level in a particular
technical discipline, while gaining a good grounding in other
specialisms because the different disciplines have to work closely
together. That means you could easily go to many other kinds of
companies," Skelton says.