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Question

Senior CommVault Admin - Recruiting, Knowledge, Skills & Mentoring help

  • 14 September 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 92 views
TrevorPersson
Rank
Badge +1

Hi everyone, my team has 6 full-time data protection specialists that administer our large CommVault (CV) environment (plus 12 storage admins - PowerMax, PowerStore, Unity, NetApp, etc.). I’m looking for a full-time senior to join the team but it’s hard to find people who have senior experience. Our team switched over from Networker, NetBackup and others to CV about 3+ yrs ago. We’ve done all the CV education training, but it’s really not enough. I’m curious if anyone has recommendations for increasing our team’s knowledge and skills. I’m referring mainly to standard backup & recovery, IntelliSnap, database agents, etc.

FYI - we backup Windows (2016+), HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, AIX, Linux, etc., Oracle, SQL, Iris, & other databases and no cloud to speak of. We run about 570k jobs a month with 99.83% success, on 4300 VMs & 500 servers in CV using all disk-based backup targets. We have 35PB of storage we manage, of which a portion of that is protected with CV. 

Your insights are appreciated around recruiting and mentoring & skills development.

– we’re based in Alberta, Canada. The team members work remote, but only from within Alberta. 

 

2 replies

YYZ
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge +12

Trevor

It would be easy to ‘dive in’ with thoughts and suggestions; but the first question that comes to mind is:

  1. What are the Top3 / Top 5 challenges you’re having
    1. Reading between the lines its possible it’s “6 staff who have some interest at a general operations level’, but no one to take a Technical Leadership role?

Thats a guess; but over to you and from there I can share what it took to ‘transition’ from a Legato User, to not only being ‘interested’ in CommVault, but becoming deeply passionate for what it can do for our envrionment.

TrevorPersson
Rank
Badge +1

Thanks YYZ. 

  1. Switching over from other technologies takes time and a “reset” in what your used to doing.  CV does things differently, so day to day activities or management of the environment varies on the team.  So, yes, in part that is evident by not having a solid technical leadership role to build a standard operating practice then managing everyone to that SOP.  We had three islands before (CV, NBU, NW divided up by data center location and client base), now it’s one team. We kept the same assignments, but each person doesn’t manage the CV environment the same.  I falsely believed that it would be easy to “convert” people over to CV with the CV training courses.
  2. We’ve also shifted from dump-n-sweep style backups in the past, driven by our clients and application vendors, to a more mature agent-based backup. Now that we’re on one platform it was thought that it would be easier to make this needed transition, as it would be less impact on database and o/s & compute teams (again one platform to learn). So, we’ve had to learn deeper skills around features offered for databases, VMware, and advanced storage features like IntelliSnap. This puts a resource constraint on the team, it’s taken 2+years to really make this shift.
  3. We’re moving away from DataDomain to Unity (disk-based targets) backend and CV doesn’t have great tools to manage “libraries”, it appears very manual and labor intense. 
  4. We’ve had various technical issues that require deep skills and only one person that’s deep enough to work on them.  That bogs the team down and has risks of burnout.


 

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