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December 11, 2015

Data centre jobs: 5 most in-demand skills

List: Operators are desperate for people with these five types of expertise.

By Joao Lima

Finding the right people to work in a data centre is becoming increasingly hard for colos looking for technicians, engineers, operators, IT systems, applications, network and telco staff.

CBR lists five skills that job hunters need to have to enter the data centre market.

 

1. Network engineering

A data centre network engineer can earn between £30k to 40k depending on the company. However, he or she needs to have knowledge of systems like CISCO’s data centre certification (such as CCNA and CCNE) and Microsoft’s System Centre.

It is also essential to have an understanding of enterprise WLAN, security and network access control products, active directory, IP telephony and switches.

Network engineering also requires analytical and problem solving skills, data centre hosting services familiarity and certifications such as ISO27001 and ITIL.

2. Unified communications

Also within a salary range of £30k to £40K, those with unified communications expertise will have to know traditional voice call routing principles and techniques, routing, switching and QoS techniques and their impact on application performance.

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It is important to understand end-to-end UC infrastructure provisioning and management, and again, be aware of Cisco’s solutions such as Unified Communications Manager, Unity Connection, Cisco Unified

Some companies will also want employees with previous experience in workplaces where the infrastructure tops the £2 million mark.

 

3. DCIM

Data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) systems give visibility to nearly everything within a facility.

DCIM helps to control several verticals including PUE, CUE, DCeP, vendor-driven metrics such as PAR4, Server Power Usage and DCPM – all essential skills for someone working within the DCIM department.

Staff need an understanding of virtualisation and cloud computing, asset lifecycle management, uptime and availability, between many others.

 

4. Cloud computing

With a growing number of IoT services and products coming out to the market, knowledge of cloud computing is essential as the data centre is where these types of services sit.

Knowledge of languages like SQL and Java – for SaaS programming – can give a good head start to those entering this route. Other skills include knowledge of Linux OS, open-source and DevOps solutions from firms like Chef.

 

5. Cisco UCS

Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is widely used by data centre operators, both in the commercial and enterprise spaces.

The UCS is a next-generation data centre platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility.

Together with knowledge of NetApp Storage, Nexus, and VMware vCenter – DCUCI, DCUFI and VSICM -, anyone applying to work in a facility will have their changes boosted.

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