[irq]: techie interrupted

t-shaped data center professional

Think of “t-shaped” in terms of expertise.. depth in a single field, but conversant and intelligent about neighbors. For instance, imagine a network architect who’s intimately familiar with the interaction and interdepencies between core networks and on-server network components/stacks on one side and with NAS or SAN based storage systems on the other–someone who can talk to the complex infrastructure interactions that go into providing the services required by a particular application workload from a perspective that may be rooted in the network, but is nevertheless holistic.

I’m not a proponent of breaking down silos. You need serious and concentrated depth of expertise in the data center to squeeze every last bit of optimization out of every operatational field. But you also need t-shaped skills that reach up out of their silo’s depths into each others’ realms. Instead of breaking silos, make them permeable.

The t-shaped idea isn’t new. What’s new is the idea of cultivating a practice of them in the data center. That and the recognition of a need that’s being driven by technologies/requirements that cross silos: server virtualization, virtual machine mobility, workload mobility, data/storage network convergence (fcoe), interest in public/private/hybrid cloud models, complex systems orchestration/automation, etc.

I’ve been pushing this idea at work for the last couple of years, to mixed results. One success has been my team’s funding the writing and publishing of a sort of internal book [300pp worth] on this topic. It serves as [1] a guide for deep networking architects and engineers to “t-shape” themselves and [2] a bridge for other deep professionals to connect with networking. Folks are starting to get the point.

At a press event announcing the new UCS C-series rackmount servers today, Cisco also announced promotion of a “Unified Data Center Practice” bringing together data networking, storage networking, and server virtualization skills. There’ll be two new certs—Data Center Architect and Data Center Engineer–promoted to VARs and SIs. If anyone has the industry pull to create [or change] a global skills pool out of whole cloth, it’s Cisco.

Good work on their part. I was smiling and groaning all at once.