Storage Administrator

Role Summary

The L2 Storage Administrator is responsible for day-to-day operations, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization of enterprise storage and SAN fabric infrastructure, ensuring high availability, data protection, and SLA compliance across on-prem and cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

1. Operations & Monitoring

• Perform daily monitoring of storage and backup jobs, ensuring successful completion and SLA adherence
• Track storage utilization, capacity, and performance metrics
• Generate operational reports on storage service health and capacity usage

2. Incident & Problem Management

• Troubleshoot OnPrem and Azure storage, SAN/NAS, and backup failures and restore services within SLA
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring issues
• Handle Major Incident (MI) calls and escalations (common L2 ownership based on enterprise practice)

4. Storage Administration

• Manage storage arrays, volumes, LUNs, and storage pools
• Perform capacity planning and allocation
• Support SAN/NAS provisioning, upgrades and migrations
• Multi-vendor case management & coordination
• SAN Fabric Configuration, upgrade & troubleshooting

5. Configuration & Change Management

• Implement configuration changes, patching, and upgrades
• Perform impact analysis and risk assessment before changes
• Follow ITIL processes for Change & Release management

6. Automation & Optimization (Important for your org)

• Execute and maintain automation scripts (Ansible, PowerShell, etc.)
• Support optimization initiatives like deduplication, compression, encryption
• Reduce manual effort (TOIL) through automation

7. Security & Compliance

• Enforce access control, encryption, and security policies
• Ensure systems comply with audit requirements (SOC2, HIPAA-like environments)
• Participate in backup immutability and ransomware protection initiatives

8. Documentation & Process Adherence

• Maintain SOPs, knowledge articles, and environment documentation
• Update runbooks for incident resolution and operational processes

Required Skills Technical Skills

• Storage platforms: Dell EMC (PowerMax, Powerscale), NetApp, Pure.
• Good to have Backup tools: Cohesity OR IBM Spectrum Protect
• SAN technologies: Brocade, Cisco (Fibre Channel)
• OS knowledge: Windows, Linux
• Cloud: Azure storage & backup services
• Scripting: PowerShell OR Python and good to have Ansible (preferred)

Functional Skills

• Incident & Problem Management (ITIL)
• Strong troubleshooting & analytical skills
• Ability to handle on-call rotations and escalations (commonly expected for L2 roles)
• Communication skills for cross-team coordination