At times people ask me what I do for a living. I generally give a bland answer that satisfies their immediate curiosity and do not elaborate unless the other person pursues further interest. Yeah...right. Like that's ever happened! "Computer guy" is what I say and 99.999% of the population is happy with that.
My current title has ranged anywhere from Midrange Storage Support to Midrange Storage Engineer, to Systems Engineer. For the past 15 years I have worked for a Fortune 50 company in some capacity relating to computer storage, meaning: disk, tape, backups, etc.
Lest your eyes glaze over, here is a 30,000 foot view of what I do now to earn money and pay the bills.
Your computer has a hard drive, right? It's likely anywhere from 40-250 gigabytes in size, depending upon your geekiness.
Imagine your computer on steroids. Suddenly, instead of a single hard disk, it now has 2,000 hard disks, each about 150 gigabytes in size. That's a lot of room for your music and pictures, right? Wow.
Now imagine that yours is not the only computer. Imagine there are hundreds of computers linked into YOUR computer accessing portions of your 2,000 hard drives.
That's what I do. I manage several large disk arrays comprising about 500 terabytes of data and close to 500 servers. These servers are connected to the disk array by a fiber optic cable. I manage the amount of disk each server can use and the backup of that data to computer tapes for offsite storage.
Wow....you never thought I did something SOOOO insanely boring, did you? What a geek.
3 comments:
Well, I'm impressed - we oversee 4+ people on our home computer and we're always having to fix it! You are a geek hero!
Hey, you 'splained it so I could almost understand it! (just when my eyes were about to glaze over...) and I'm totally amazed. Doesn't sound the least bit boring to me.
I look up to you Mr. Trained Computer Guy. I tell people I sit in front of a computer all day. Kinda like a computer guy, eh? ;)
I like geeky things, but I don't consider myself an all-out computer guy. Others think I am and ask me questions I just don't know. Maybe someday.
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