Monthly Archives: September 2012

Time For A Change

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After 7 and a half years, and what I consider a good career, it is time for a change. Two weeks from today will be last day at Truven Health Analytics. It’s been a good career as far as I am concerned and I have come a long way from where I started, however, all good things must come to an end.

It all started in February of 2005, with a bang I might add, when I started working for Thomson Medstat as a Computer Operator on the midnight shift. After about a year and a half I relocated to Eagan MN to help rebuild the company infrastructure and move our data center from Ann Arbor to Eagan. I went out on September 16, 2006 and was only supposed to be out there for about 3 months, but that turned into almost 9 months. I made the long drive home on April 10, 2007 and during that entire 12 hour trip I was driving home to no job, as I had just relocated the data center I once worked at to Eagan! However after being home for only a few hours that day I received a phone call and got some good news, and that is when I stepped away from Computer Operations and started down the road to being a Systems Manager.

In the beginning my focus was strictly on TSM administration but sometime in 2008 I started working with NetApp filers and my career as a Storage Engineer came along with it. However in typical corporate form I wouldn’t get any training for my new position until almost a year later, and an additional two years before I got certified. The past year and a half have been spent trying to hone my skills on the NetApp’s along with trying to learn how to provision SAN disk on both EMC and HDS hardware with both Brocade and Cisco fabric switches. Admittedly I am stronger on the EMC hardware (specifically the Symmetrix line) than I am on the HDS hardware, but I think that is because I have had a lot more secondhand exposure to those. Sometime in there I got raised to a Sr. Storage Engineer as well and ran point on a number of different projects including upgrading ONTap versions, performing filer head swaps, and even upgrading the TSM systems, hardware and implementing encryption.

Yet after all this it has come time to say goodbye. I have been given the opportunity to join a new company out in Southfield, Secure-24. Secure-24 is a hosting provider for other companies, supplying everything from SAP and Oracle hosting to total IT outsourcing. As for me, I’ll be joining their backup team and focusing on NetWorker with a little bit of Avamar thrown in. Though in all honesty I am hoping to quickly transition over to their storage team as I think that is really the direction I want my career to follow.

While I was not actively looking for a new job (a recruiter for the company actually contacted me via LinkedIn) too many stars aligned and showed me that it was a good time to make a change. For instance Truven is currently gearing up for a data center migration now that the company has parted ways with Thomson Reuters and become its own stand alone company. Which I guess makes the fact that I am going to work for a data center provider a little ironic. However, I also feel that I have hit a professional growth wall here. While it is true that I am still learning much of the SAN side of the house, that learning is slow at best due to the siloed nature of such a small team (there are a total of 3 engineers, 1 contractor in India, and our manager). Those coupled along with a few personal reasons have made this opportunity to hard to pass up.

So it is with both great sadness and great nervousness and expectation that I have put in my two week notice of resignation with the only company I have known in my professional career.

Tailgate Time

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Today was the annual EMC Customer appreciation tailgate and U of M football game. Today they were playing Air Force. While the party and game were enjoyable, for me I think the best parts were right before the game began.  During the singing of the national anthem Air Force released a trained Bald Eagle which circled down through the stadium and landed on its trainers arm down on the field. If that weren’t awesome enough, just as the anthem finished a B-52 Stealth Bomber did a flyover! The whole thing was pretty awe inspiring!

A Son is Born

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Congratulations to my brother Chris and his wife Tracey on the birth of their son (the first boy in the family to carry on the name), Julian Grey! Born at 1:29pm and measuring 21 inches and weighing 7 pounds 15 ounces. Mother and baby are doing fine.

Julian Grey

First Day of Second Grade

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It’s hard to believe, but today was Kylie’s first day of second grade! I wasn’t able to get the time off from work to be able to see her off for her first day, but Mommy was able too and she told me all about how sad it was. Well, the event itself wasn’t sad, seeing Kylie go off to another first day of school is actually very exciting and gratifying as a parent, the sad part is watching your child grow up and seeing them need you a little less each day. Let me explain with some back story… Last night Kylie and Mommy were talking about how this morning was going to go when they got to school and how Kylie wanted Mommy to walk up to her new classroom with her to make sure she found it ok.  This year Kylie has a new classroom on the second floor of the building, in Mrs. Prince’s class, and she wanted Mommy to help make sure that she found the classroom alright. So this was the plan and Mommy was happy to help her, until they got to school that is, and Kylie changed her mind. When they got there Kylie found a couple of her friends from last year that also have the same teacher as her and so she decided that Mommy didn’t need to help because she and her friends would be fine. This sudden change in plans forced Mommy to realize that Kylie is indeed a year older and growing up, which made her a little sad. Kylie on the other hand had a great first day and is very excited about seeing all of her friends again, having a new teacher with a room on the second floor, and all the new things she is going to learn this year!