How do you become a storage engineer?

Question

IT education

Good afternoon. Tell me how they come to the profession of an engineer for storage systems (data storage networks)?
As far as I am, such specialists are not taught at universities.
Then is it a horizontal move in a career as a network engineer? Or certification from vendors? Or work in integrator companies?
Maybe there are other options? Or tell us your way to work with storage systems)

Answer 1

You can start with those technologies that you can build houses. Understanding how to build a raid from mdadm. LVM, ZFS.
How to break such a raid. How to fix.
Go to distributed storage - try to deal with DRBD. Collect, break, repair.
Learn how to build a block device multiple access file system - OCFS2. Break, repair, break again
Put CEPH, same thing.
Tune RGW, learn.
Understanding S3
So in a couple of years you will start to think something.

Answer 2

The best (and guaranteed) way to master storage technologies is to work with live hardware. Any manufacturer, it doesn’t matter, but best of all from the top five - they have full documentation for users of their equipment, as well as a bunch of free trainings and training materials. Including general technologies that are not specific to the manufacturer.
When hiring an engineer, I expect that he understands the physical principles of hard and solid state drives, their connection interfaces (starting with SCSI), network protocols, addressing and routing (in order to understand how FC, iSCSI and CIFS / NFS work. Plus - understanding of object storage and distributed infrastructures, as well as the skills to administer systems of a particular manufacturer.
And most importantly - the desire and ability to continuously learn on their own, not because they were instructed, but voluntarily.
And it all starts with a confident reading of technical documentation in English. Without this, nothing will happen. :)

Answer 3

I am a storage engineer myself. I'm wondering whether to stay or go in DevOPS directions or something to be honest.
On a career path:
At the beginning, a simple Windows admin => then FreeBSD/Linux/Unix => then San/SHD.
There is nothing supernatural, it is not the gods who burn the pots.
What to study:
Well, working with the OS and Visualization is very useful, backup tools, working with FC sets (IP has already been added).
By vendors: Whatever you want - the main thing is not to repeat the mistake of many admins who hammer only one vendor. You must be deeply parallel. Since this is just a tool for a large company that achieves its goals.
Certification:
It is possible without it. There are taxis or checkers. Although the presence of certificates eliminates a bunch of stupid questions from the series, tell me about top and how to look at it i / o or what does it mean in top usage ? What does $ mean in bash?
(you run into such questions for an interview - run away from such an employer, this is a litmus test that they are not all right and not all at home).