Compared to the extensive timeline of human existence, data centers are fresh faced and youthful - the first facilities of this kind were built in the 1950s.
The mighty mainframes inside those fledgling data centers required a mere handful of specialized staff; the more distributed technologies which followed needed larger technical teams to keep them operational.
Our economies now rely on the complex interlocking of infallible digital systems, but these systems are so new that the human infrastructure required to support them is still evolving to catch up. There just aren’t enough data center engineers to go round.
Even now, of the millions of engineers in the world pondering ways to improve human existence, many do not know the first thing about data centers. And why should they? They have plenty of other positions to fill, building electrical, industrial or civil infrastructure, creating more efficient, aesthetically pleasing and cheaper solutions to society’s problems.
Let’s face it, data centers are a niche within a niche. Technologically-minded students and professionals are much more likely to work as software engineers than to consider spending their career in the data center industry.
Data center engineers are involved in site selection, reference design - redesigning and upgrading facilities and systems - and migration. They must know how to operate and maintain electrical, cooling, and IT equipment, all of which evolves and changes over time.
The modern data center engineer must also be knowledgeable in virtualization and software-defined systems, and understand the benefits of technologies like computational fluid dynamics, increasingly used to analyze and control airflow in data centers. data center operations engineer
And so, as the industry as a whole grows and matures, its workforce is not only too small to meet its needs - it is also aging: the positions that need to be filled bear little resemblance to what was expected of a data center engineer who entered the workforce in the mid-2000s, let alone the nineties and eighties.
The mighty mainframes inside those fledgling data centers required a mere handful of specialized staff; the more distributed technologies which followed needed larger technical teams to keep them operational.
Our economies now rely on the complex interlocking of infallible digital systems, but these systems are so new that the human infrastructure required to support them is still evolving to catch up. There just aren’t enough data center engineers to go round.
Even now, of the millions of engineers in the world pondering ways to improve human existence, many do not know the first thing about data centers. And why should they? They have plenty of other positions to fill, building electrical, industrial or civil infrastructure, creating more efficient, aesthetically pleasing and cheaper solutions to society’s problems.
Let’s face it, data centers are a niche within a niche. Technologically-minded students and professionals are much more likely to work as software engineers than to consider spending their career in the data center industry.
Data center engineers are involved in site selection, reference design - redesigning and upgrading facilities and systems - and migration. They must know how to operate and maintain electrical, cooling, and IT equipment, all of which evolves and changes over time.
The modern data center engineer must also be knowledgeable in virtualization and software-defined systems, and understand the benefits of technologies like computational fluid dynamics, increasingly used to analyze and control airflow in data centers. data center operations engineer
And so, as the industry as a whole grows and matures, its workforce is not only too small to meet its needs - it is also aging: the positions that need to be filled bear little resemblance to what was expected of a data center engineer who entered the workforce in the mid-2000s, let alone the nineties and eighties.
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