Bsit Gen300 Final
Getting From Here to There: The Career Value of a College Education
GEN/300
My present career is in Information Technology for a regional company. I work as a Senior Network Analyst in the Information Services Department, and provide support for all devices on the computer network. I work on a team of seven members with responsibility for over 400 file servers, 40 routers, and 120 switches at more than 60 locations. Our company runs a mixture of network operating systems including Netware 6, Windows 2000 server, AIX, and various flavors of Linux.
I provide second level support for file servers, network operating system, user administration, data backup, clustering, directory services, file permissions, and virtual tape libraries. I determine hardware standards, negotiate support contracts, and renew maintenance agreements for our network equipment. I wear many hats in the company, and it certainly keeps things very interesting and fast paced.
My primary job is to provide support for our company's storage area network (SAN). The SAN infrastructure includes fibre channel switches and adapters, disk subsystems, storage appliances, and management devices. The SAN provides external storage to our corporate file servers. It is also used to maintain a mirror of critical data to a disaster recovery site. According to Webopedia, "data mirroring is the act of copying data from one location to a storage device in real time." (Anonymous, n.d.). ]
A director appliance is a high-powered file server that controls the disk resources connected to the SAN. The director runs the Linux operating system with a proprietary application to manage the disk subsystem. Clients must be defined through the director's administration interface in order to gain access to disk resources on the SAN.
Data mirroring is also accomplished by using a director appliance. According to Kai Lamb (2004), upon initial creation of a mirror:
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